This Street of Mine
By Jaya Srinivasan
My street is like any other with its usual assortment of characters — outwardly plain, but with potentially rich secret lives. Yet, the only thing I know about most of these people is that they stick to a routine diligently: the man who bends over his computer every night, probably on Skype with his children in America; the two women who smoke on their balcony every hour; the watchman who feeds the dog before locking up for the night.
There was a time when I used to wonder about strangers’ lives as I waited for trains, the outsider in an Edward Hopper painting, trying to create whole histories from a billowing curtain — then I’d get to work and forget them all. Now that I have only my street to look at, the fuzzy forms resolve into distinct components. But what is it that I really want to know?
Pottering about on the terrace, I find myself facing neighbours’ windows or peeping into their gardens. Our houses are set so close together that you cannot avoid looking into one another’s rooms and lives: and what you see sometimes — a fleeting smile or glance — can permanently change an opinion.
The lady next door habitually wears the weight of memories on her face. She lives alone and entertains little company, barring the cats that favour her rain-fed backyard. Like an abuela in Marquez’s ‘Macondo’, she wanders grimly between her verandah and the garden.
On this day, a pair of monkeys descend on her backyard and begin munching on papaya leaves. They arouse the interest of the boys upstairs. A shower of bananas follows while abuela looks on in disapproval, before cracking a rusty smile.
“They’ll keep returning if you feed them!” she says half-heartedly; contrary to habit, she lingers, watching the feast. A while longer and she might even crumble and laugh but for the territorial neighbourhood dog that gets wind of the monkeys’ presence and drives them away. Abuela goes inside.
In stark contrast to her silence is the volubility of the passionate gamer who fills our evenings with a rollercoaster of words punctuated by anguished howls: “Bro! No, stop, why did you do that…where is Raj, I haven’t seen him in a while…leftleftleft, no, rightright, behind you!” Fire mingling with concern, he is lost to the world. His mother appears occasionally to hand him a plate and ruffle his massive mop of lockdown hair, or to ask him a question.
“How do I make a WhatsApp call?”
He patiently steps away from his game to respond to her tech challenges, albeit with the glorious patience of teenagers for ancient adults. Tenderness battles spirit.
***
Since April, many vendors have appeared in the neighbourhood with assorted wares: vegetables, plastic buckets, potted plants, and what have you. These vendors who once depended on their operatic lung power to announce their arrival now have vehicles equipped with loudspeakers fit to wake people up in their beds half a world away.
This adds an interesting dimension to work calls. As I prepare to speak, the peanut seller clangs his bell or the vegetable vendor revs his spluttering auto, letting the loudspeaker run for a full five minutes. We can either pause the call or digress. We choose digression.
“What is this person selling?”
“What is the Tamil word for ‘banana’?”
“This reminds me of my childhood in Delhi!”
Soon we are building maps of different Indian cities and taking trips in our head; nostalgia, the great unifier.
And this is what has helped me through the last few months — memories of warm gestures, and in the present, eyes that gleam over masks at the sight of a familiar face. We might be strangers and our darkest secrets are best kept hidden, but we care, and it shows in several little ways.
And this is what I really want to know.
Jaya Srinivasan lives in Chennai and works in development. She writes a blog and her work has been published in the Punch magazine and Roads & Kingdoms, among others.
