Home Spun. Smart city wannabe

Agar mazhab khalal-andaz hai mulki maqasid mein/

To sheikh-o-brahmin pinhan rahen dair-o-masjid mein

(If religion becomes meddlesome in the affairs of the nation/ Shaikh and Brahmin are better confined to mosque and temple)

Akbar Allahabadi (1846-1921)

Allahabad is one of the cities I call home and it fills me with sweet pride and the reason bears special mention. The above Urdu couplet by a 19th-century poet of Allahabad points to the success formula for running a government — separation of religious affairs from affairs of the nation. Given the recent hand-wringing and debates about pluralism, cultural diversity, and religious tolerance, Akbar Allahabadi’s secularism is reflected in present-day Allahabad’s pluralism, cultural diversity and religious tolerance. Tolerance and secularism are inbred values, part of Allahabad’s Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (composite culture). Ayodhya’s contagion has not infected Allahabad. Not yet. Eid, Diwali and Christmas are celebrated and weddings of Muslim, Hindu or Christian friends are attended with an unassuming everydayness.

Allahabad is not what you call a smart or happening place, as is clear from the steady exodus of its younger, educated population. Aside from its association with Hindi-Urdu literature’s luminaries (Mahadevi Varma and Firaq Gorakhpuri, to begin with) and architectural marvels like the Nehru family home, Anand Bhavan, the Mughal-era fort, the tombs of Khusro Bagh, and the beautiful but neglected Allahabad University campus, today the city is known for its laid-back lawyers and clerks. You can see them clamouring around tea and samosa stalls near the courts. Other unforgettables are Allahabad’s melons and guavas and kachori-jalebi. A sweet, pink-fleshed Allahabadi guava is worth biting into.

But it’s the citizens who make the city what it is.

Flashback 1: I am stranded on a street in the pre-mobile phone era. It’s night time. Two young men appear from nowhere and knock on my car window. I panic. But they offer to push my car to the nearest petrol station where a mechanic jump-starts it and I fumble for words to express my gratitude. But Allahabad is gearing up to become a smart city. In the smart Allahabad, I will probably call a toll-free number for assistance and not count on the kindness of good-hearted strangers.

Flashback 2: We are returning from a long vacation; the neighbours send food and milk.

Flashback 3: My older daughter is sick. It’s 4am and we don’t have a car. We knock on our neighbour’s door.

The fast-vanishing Allahabad is an oft-present character in my writing. Ghalib at Dusk is a story about a pre-Partition era labyrinthine house that had to make way for a block of flats. A dried-up well that no longer exists in the 84-pillared Chaurasi Khamba is a crucial character in the story Love: Unclassified .

Allahabad and its people cherish their habits and traditions. One such habit is wintering on rooftop terraces, which in the fast-encroaching era of multi-storied, terraceless apartments, is a dying habit. A winter morning unfolding on an old Allahabad terrace is something delicious. You could sprint from one to the other end of these lanes over the common walls of terraces. Winter is a tradition lived on terraces.

As soon as the sun climbs up, people climb up too. Women chat, plait hair, shell peas, or pick over rice. Cleaned and washed grain is spread out to dry. Children play games, shout, memorise school lessons. Grandmothers doze off on charpais . Washed saris are hung from parapets like long prayer flags. Men drink tea, read the paper and sun their oiled bodies.

This Allahabad is set to morph into a futuristic city. Something in me grieves. I am not against modern sewage plants, functioning garbage disposal, reliable electricity and organised traffic. What grieves me is the sceptre of slowness displaced by non-inclusive, uncompassionate efficiency.

As I walk to my neighbourhood park I notice a paradoxical sign erected above a newly repaved street;

Allahabad ka hai yahi kamal

Tan, mann, dhan, teenon khushaal

(Accomplishments of Allahabad are/ Protection for your body, soul and wealth)

It’s a divided street, with separate lanes for cars, bicycles and pedestrians. In typically Allahabadi form of rebellion, cows recline where pedestrians are meant to walk and pedestrians walk in car lanes. Just a few feet away are yellow, plastic-covered tents of the builders of this street. Early in the morning, men split wood and the women cook on roadside fires. Children squat in the dirt and cry or wait with vacant, sleep-laden eyes. When Allahabad achieves smart city status, will it protect those huddled at the bottom of the development pyramid?

No guesswork is needed to know whose lives and livelihoods will be protected in smart Allahabad. Cintu has been selling bread, butter and biscuits for years. He starts his day on his bicycle, calling out his wares in his sing-song voice. I notice the absence of his ‘gomti’, his little wooden cabin on stilts, from the smart street. It was smashed by the Allahabad Nagar Nigam as part of their city-wide beautification drive, he tells me. All the tea and paan gomtis from the smartened street have vanished. “They say it is about gareebi hatao (poverty alleviation) but it’s really about gareeb ko hatao (remove the poor),” Cintu reflects.

I return home to more disquieting news in the papers and I wonder what character will smart Allahabad assume in my writing?

( In this monthly column, authors chronicle the cities they call home )

Nighat Gandhiis the author of Ghalib at Dusk and Other Stories

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