There was (and hopefully still is) a huge banyan tree right in the middle of an intersection a few meters off of S.G.Highway in Ahmedabad. Somewhat diagonally across was the first office of a small startup I worked with a few years back. It was a simple, one-room shop with a shutter more suited for a retail store than a tech office.
We wound up our work sometime between 7.00pm and 8.00pm. Just before sundown, there would be this enormous ruckus of birds’ chitter-chatter from across. For several minutes, an otherwise silent evening would turn into a massive, audacious and sometimes near-ear-splitting event. The birds, from wherever they had gone for the day, would return to their nests on the giant banyan.
Gowlidoddy, with its mega-cluster of hostels for working men and women, is pretty much like that banyan tree. Every morning, thousands of people emerge out of their dens in one of the dozens of buildings around this tiny, congested place and fly away - some in buses, some in cabs, some in autorickshaws, some by walk, some in their private vehicles - to earn their daily bread. Some of us earn more than our fair share of daily bread but that is a line of thought for later. In the evenings, these people fly back to the nests. The whole place is awash with dust as footfalls and vehicular traffic kindles the dusty roads back into action.
You can spot a lot of pairs - perhaps colleagues at work or perhaps lovers through some fortunate incident that brought them together or perhaps just strangers that happened to walk in tandem at the time someone watched them. But of course the hostels are demarcated zones so the voluntary pairs have to split at some point and go to their individual nests.
The strangest thing of all is to find myself in this tree, emerging out of it every morning and returning back to it every night. For the longest time now I’ve built nests to live alone, mostly away from this milieu of modern-day breadwinners that define our movies, our culture, our indifference and sometimes our misplaced sense of importance to non-issues and immoral practices. A lonely nest tucked far away is an abode of solitude. It allows for a void which you can then fill with what you want to - the best of it sometimes being more nothingness. A nest in the middle of a thousand others lacks that luxury.
Not that I’m complaining. A Tamilian roommate who always has a very interesting perspective to share and fortunately is not embroiled in the mundane vagaries of livelihood is a welcome relief to look forward to every evening. A nice, flat television with some great channels is another albeit not in the same vein as the former. There are these things. There are always these beautiful things to relish the todays and cherish for the tomorrows.
Yet.