At the Global Investors’ Meet, Mohandas Pai was ready to speak but the introducer droned on about Pai’s achievements and didn’t notice his hand urging a stop to the paraak, so Pai walked over and squeezed the man’s shoulder and silenced him.

Pai threw down facts on what IT has done for India, and of what is in store, that IT and like businesses will deliver a five-trillion GDP to India in twenty years, which means an additional two-hundred million “high-quality” jobs. He had the entire hall in his thrall, and I was stirred when he tossed to the Labor Minister: “The village model is dead, sir! The only solution is urbanization!”

I didn’t like it when I heard it. I saw without feeling that urbanization would work splendidly for his IT and (on a smaller scale) for my Manufacturing. Now, after some days, I’m veering toward his drift, like on this evening when I saw the paintings on the walls flanking the street linking Mysore Road to Majestic—village girls carrying water in urns on their heads, which is all right in a painting on a Bangalore wall, whereas for the girls the deal is dirty water, low-yield labor, and opportunity denied.

But the road that drew that thought showed also grime and noise and an absence of joy. And in Majestic when we turned toward the flyovers, the misery multiplied. To arrive into this from the village!

Still, I am not intelligently tuned to Pai’s drift. I can’t objectively train my mind toward what the city, or on the merits in the “village model” that Pai might have overlooked. My emotions for the city overwhelm me when I try to imagine the village, whose reality is for me linked to my childhood.

I love the city for many things: cafes, promenades, ponds, avenues, boulevards, quiet side streets, restaurants, bookshops, unisex saloons, cineplexes, some malls, stationery stores, crowds when they are thin, and people with a lost look on the face. Also, the city makes everyone some shades more beautiful.

I have a passion for city centers like Ginza district in Tokyo, for the entire length of Orchard Road, and in the last decade I always added Chicago into a trip to USA so as to walk endlessly on North Michigan Avenue. Hong Kong is exquisite on both sides from the ferry, and from the windows of bars and restaurants, but I abhor its streets. I love walking in the Huaihai street in the former French Concession in Shanghai, in the sun and in rain, and in the streets that lead from Huaihai to the Garden Books store. When in Istanbul before the merging waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, I have felt I should be frozen there forever. Here at home I loved MG Road once—I don’t believe them who say they’ll make it better than it was.

I have enjoyed walking also in dismal Bangkok and acrid Phnom Pen. I’ve been moved most in Jerusalem, and also in Munich where I have walked so many streets so many times for so many years, just as I have in Helsinki.

My greatest nostalgia is for the scores of times I walked on the narrow road in Mysore that connected my part of town to Jayalakshmipuram, the Open Air Theater of Manasagangothri on the one side and the Kukkarahalli Tank on the other. Mostly I walked there late nights when none were out, and occasionally a car would pass, slow and furtive and amorous, and, as it seemed in those days, amoral. There was often the moon above, down close like a friend, and the air, I realize now, was clean and crisp but in those days I had no thought for it, having surrendered to the cigarette.

Indeed, it is the urban I have always loved, the bigger the better, where I delight when I pierce the genteel air of swank places, where I spend cash only rarely—mostly I drink coffee there, watch people, and have the monthly haircut.

If it is true that the expanse that brings peace and joy is not that which is outside of us, but that other which should be unraveled in the mind, then that expanse is accessed as much in the city as in the village, in condo or villa or slum. It is possible to dwell in that expanse even while experiencing the things of the city that I don’t like:

Garbage, even when it is in neat black plastic bags, or in green tubs with lids shut; crowds; processions stalling me on the way to work; the cut-outs of India; the sight before restaurants in the morning; neons revealed during the day; children going to school (which sight is lovely in the village); the debris of buildings brought down, and the raw of unfinished buildings; glimpses of unpleasantness beneath veneers, behind facades.

But it takes just a moment to turn away, only a few seconds to walk back to the liberating wombs of the city. Even the greatest urban sprawl is experienced mostly in confined spaces, but the anonymity it offers, and the opportunity to jump from confine to confine, and the ease to shed this life for that, makes city life a mind game with infinite possibilities.

So, “while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,” I feel contentment in my “deep heart’s core.” I’m beginning to be convinced that if the city is where the citizen is better served, and if the city gives the citizen varied opportunities to serve in return, and for profit, it might be that increased urbanization is the better solution for the human. Whereas Innisfree is for poets, and their number is small. I wonder if Pai has read the poem, and if it describes, at least in part, the “village model” that he mentioned.

His skin was the color of night, washed down a shade by the moon. I’d been reading, using a clip-on LED light, and I raised my head when Sujaya exclaimed in a way I’ve never heard from her before. Did he rush across the highway? Was he loitering in its middle? I saw him just when the taxi went into him, the driver cursing in his breath. The moments after that are a daze. Did the driver back up? What motion caused the multiple knocks I heard? I got off and rushed to the rear, expecting the body there, run over, and lingered a few moments looking around in the dim of the tail lights; but he was lying ahead of the car, curled up, foetal, and the volume of rich blood in the pool of light was disproportionate to his emaciated body. He was young. A soiled green piece of underwear over his privates was his entire clothing.

Vehicles began to stop, and a driver in whites called an ambulance, and some young men urged me to tie a cloth round the wound. A portion of the cloth, a cleaning cloth that my driver handed me, fell over his eyes and the crowd recoiled and asked me testily to fold it back. Except for that moment of tension, they spoke in hushed tones. But the truth is that neither they nor I knew how to handle a man who had bled like that, and I wondered as I fumbled with him whether I was getting anywhere. When a burst of fresh blood gurgled from his mouth I knew I’d lost him, even if he was still warm. I lost my mind as well, I think, because I tried to feel his pulse in the pit of his chest. There was a thick film of sweat in it.

The ambulance wasn’t coming, so we took him to the hospital in a rickshaw that has stopped to inquire. We were four men in that little thing. The ambulance passed us when we were two minutes from the hospital, its beacon and its siren both surprisingly loud.

The attendant brought out the wheelchair first, took it back upon the rickshaw driver’s advice, and brought out the stretcher. He and I fumbled with the body, and he announced as we loaded it on the stretcher that the man was dead. The doctor on night duty came from a ward somewhere and he too confirmed that the man was “no more.” I went out and sat on a plastic chair. After a few moments I called the rickshaw driver from the corner in which he hovered and paid him and asked him to go. A policeman arrived and asked me and the taxi driver to go with him to the police station. The doctor asked me to take a shot and then changed his mind and asked me if I have any cuts or bruises and said it is okay, I don’t need a shot, and so I washed and went out with the policeman who was alert but also at ease. The driver followed me. He was so struck by fear he was pooped. I noticed that his uniform whites were as spotless as when we had started the journey.

The Inspector in the police station was already reporting our accident over the phone to his boss. He asked the driver a question without cupping the phone, and, when the driver took a second longer to reply he shouted the question at him but cooled after that. He was rough when he asked him for his driver’s license but he changed his tone immediately after I interrupted and told him that the driver was a good man and that he was not driving fast, and we all saw the man too late.

The inspector’s boss sent a message asking that I should call him. He consoled me after I finished the story: “Accidents happen. You did well to bring the man into a hospital, and not run away.” I told him I had to go to Hassan right away, because I had a wedding to attend tomorrow morning. He sent a separate message asking his men to arrange another cab for me.

I hesitated to give my contact details to his staff. The hall was brightly lit, but in the lock-up cells it was dark. One of the two cells was for women and was empty. In the cell for men, the prisoners sat on the floor with their legs spread out before them, bored and lost. They had done a dacoity some days ago and had been quickly apprehended. Two children who seemed like prisoners huddled outside the lock-up in a corner, shivering in the warm night, though they didn’t seem afraid, only they were huddled too tight in the corner. They had clear faces, fair, and they looked at no one, and none of the many policemen were alert to them either.

The office-maid was talkative. “That man was a thikla,” she said of the dead man, meaning he was deranged. “And he has no relatives.” That was the assurance the men on the highway had given our driver. “Go to the police station,” they had told him. “He has no relatives, and he is loose.” He had followed my rickshaw into town in his car.

When I continued toward Hassan, in another cab, I asked someone if I shouldn’t go back and inquire about his funeral. “No need,” I was assured. “The government will take care of that.” I wondered if I’d be able to sleep, but I shouldn’t have worried because I was sleeping even when the harsh morning light had flooded my hotel room, until eight o’clock.

I didn’t tell anyone at the wedding of what happened, fearing they’d see an omen in it. I’m still arranging my emotions of that night, sifting them to see how much was a show of grief, how much was real, and what kind of a man I was in that incident.

Vivek Shanbhag went about his affairs quietly in college. He was among the best performers in his batch, and he stood out because of his reticence in a boisterous class, so I knew Vivek though I was two years his senior, though I’ve spoken not so much as ten sentences with him on the campus.

Not many of us knew that Vivek was already in touch with the literary giants in Kannada—Shanthinath Desai, Yashwanth Chitthal, Ananthamurthy—and that he was on his way to a writing career. Now, in the same calm manner of those days, he publishes Deshakaala, each issue always on time, and presented better than all the previous.

He stumped everyone with the special issue last fortnight—it was big, attractive, and it had contributions from all the great contemporary Kannada writers, and, though a good job was expected, Vivek surpassed the expectation.

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Girish Karnad had arrived early. Shabhana Azmi walked in shining like a star and took the first seat on the first row, and in seconds Karnad was before her. She had performed in a Karnad play the day before. Then came her husband Javed Akhtar, chief guest. Ananthamurthy paused before Shabhana Azmi, as happily surprised as all the others, and tapped her on the knees to draw her attention. (Was she lost in reading something? I couldn’t tell, though I was directly behind her, one row removed.) She rose bringing her hands to a namasthe; he held her arms and asked her to stay seated; “not before you, sir,” she said.

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I don’t suppose there was anyone in the audience who didn’t enjoy Akhtar’s speech. So many of us respect Urdu, and some have taken to hating it for other reasons. Akhtar theme was that language does not belong to religion, it belongs to its distinct region. And, in colonial times, in the process of dividing to rule, that lyrical language was taken from the region where it was born, from the culture it had fostered, and foisted upon the Muslim people. Urdu was thereby orphaned; a culture was orphaned also; and the result shows in the literature of the region, in Bollywood, in the noisy media.

It wasn’t a short speech, but there was complete silence until the last two minutes, when a few began to shift in their seats and look about. But he was done, and he received a standing ovation.

Two minutes before arriving in Halebid a farm came up, its house painted in pink and green fluorescent colors completely foreign to this region, but our eyes were drawn beyond the startling walls of the house to a mound shaped like the smooth top of a giant sarcophagus fifty meters behind the house. The mound, we went in and saw, is indeed a grave, a burial performed by nature, of what would once have been a temple, which you can guess from the pieces of granite sticking out of the mound: capitals, pieces of friezes, broken lintel, sections of columns. Some pieces are carved all round, some on one or two faces, and all of them are of the class of the Hoysala.

The mound is overgrown with grass, prickly and hard now in this hot, dry season. There are short trees over it and around, and in their shade you can take relief offered by an occasional whisper of a breeze. What is the right action regarding the dead thing that is buried there? Exhume it and put together the members that have been smashed by man and crushed by nature? Put back into the garbha one of the many idols that are strewn everywhere in this capital of the Hoysala, and consecrate it, and begin prayers? And have the Nikon and the Canon and the Leica arrive with their owners to cock a look at this photogenic art of nine centuries ago? Or is it best that bygones be bygones, and so leave alone the grass and the trees and the teasing breeze and let them soothe the body and revive the soul of the rare visitor in this small, private property?

The owner thought we were from “the department” and wouldn’t change his reading even when we assured him that we weren’t, wishing not to worry him. But he wanted us to be from the department, with the hope that there lurked an omen in our visit. He has arranged a daughter’s marriage for later in the month.

We went to the quieter Jain temples behind the Hoysaleswara temple, where the carvings are fewer, and the austerity of the Jain religion prevails. Before Shanthinatha, an old lady with her saree and blouse rumpled, her hair mussed up, swayed as if in a trance, and sang with the great Meera’s fervor. Her song wasn’t melodious, yet it was pleasant. But she didn’t know the thirthankara before her was Shanthinatha. Another visitor told her whose statue this was, and also that the next temple is for Adinatha, and next to that, facing the main gate, for Parshwanatha. In all the time we were there no more than ten persons visited, and two of them arrived with us, and retired to a corner and the man laid his hand on the woman’s lap, and she cut his nails.

Prayers are offered daily to the three thirthankaras by the two Jain families in the village at the feet of the temple terrace. When they were new they’d have been terribly important, with Queen Shanthala their patron, and the completion of the Parshwanatha temple coinciding with a great victory for King Vishnuvardhana against a northern enemy.

The manicure done, the couple left along with us, only a few steps ahead.

The State has no doubt regarding the benefits that it can pick from the past. To add color and shine to itself, it has installed a huge hoarding before Halebid’s Hoysaleshwara Temple with pictures on it of the principal political actors in the ruling party, and of their favored guru, all arranged with due attention to protocol. The State recently celebrated the 500th anniversary of the ascension of the great Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, whose portrait is alongside the other pictures, but quite apart from them. Krishnadeveraya’s dynasty assumed power some distance north, in Vijayanagara (Hampi), soon after the last Hoysala fell to the Turk. I tried to take a picture of the sweeping view of the Temple complex, but the hoarding hogged the foreground.

Down the street from the temple, a white lady had discovered a better opportunity. Under the noonday sun, in the summer’s heat, Halebid’s women had lined the entire embankment on the town’s side of the Dwarasamudra tank that the Hoysala built nine-hundred years ago. They were doing their daily chore of washing the clothes of all the ones at home. There were enough colors and depth and width to challenge all the cameras on the white lady’s person—she had three of them, I think. Her only problem was the harsh noon-light, but she seemed to know how to handle it, so intense was her focus. I wanted that picture, too, but I hadn’t the courage to raise my camera at women who had lifted their dress to the knee, and were quite wet. So I went a distance on the bund and took aim with my Leica X1 with its 24 mm fixed lens and got no color and no story in any of my many shots.

I turned left and a vision of the splendor of the place when it was a capital appeared to me under the blazing sun. There, across this lake, on the promontory, the thin veneer of trees dissolved to reveal the Hoysaleswara Temple and, behind it, the Jain temples, and next to the Jain temples, by the lake shore again, the Kedareshwara Temple. Behind the temples, near the Royal Bath, the Hoysala’s Grand Palace floated in rarefied air, but the man-made lake that lay before me began to glitter and I blinked and blinked and fell back to my time.

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, in a cup larger than for espresso, smaller than for cappuccino. Fine South Indian coffee, the very best cafe au lait in the world. The coffee planter is a friendly guy, and immensely hospitable. Go on, knock boldly. It is possible he’ll also treat you to some akki-rotti. The real problem is how to reciprocate on his scale in your turn.

That is how you get good coffee in Malnad, where almost all Indian coffee is grown. Of course, the planter would rather spend the evening with you, to share with you some good whisky.

But it has been a bad winter for him. It rained on consecutive days for a week in December and ruined a promising crop across the belt; weeds have sprung at the feet of coffee and the berries cannot be gleaned (on a decent scale) from the chaos on the ground; in the meantime the rain has confused the plants and they have sprouted white blossoms in odd patterns and on random patches of plants. The planters are woebegone in all the three coffee districts, Coorg and Hassan and Chikmagalur.

Last week I went to Angadi from Sakleshpur, arriving where the narrow road splits into three, at which point you know you have arrived even if you miss the unmissable large sign: there is a stone tablet at the base of a large dried tree on the edge of the cross, rooting the place to antiquity. If you have come looking for Angadi, your turn is left, and you go a hundred meters up in the shade of the line of trees that flank you, and you come upon the mounds that you’ve come for, which hold the relics from the time of the founding of the Hoysala dynasty, from ten centuries ago.

The first Hoysala with detailed records to his name was Nripakama. He ruled from Angadi. He began a mere hill chief, but he packed the audacity to attack the Chola, the Chalukya, and a powerful neighbor, all of whom defeated him. But he displayed such valor as to win respect in his region, and yet not ruffle the emperors of the north and the south. The defeats did not deter him. Soon he attacked Banavase, the capital of the Kadambas down south from him in the plains. He won. By 1047, the year of his death, he was lord of an area large enough to be called a kingdom and commanded an army of hardy people, and both fell to his son Vinayaditya to extend.

Vinayaditya ruled a long time, so his son and grandsons were martially active with him while he ruled. Vinayaditya’s son Ereyanga, together with Ereyanga’s son Vishnuvardhana, went far north and torched the city of Dhara for the Chalukya, whose feudatory the Hoysala had become. Ereyanga would scourge three more cities, all before he himself became king. By the time Vinayaditya died, father and son and grandson had established a good sized kingdom, the nucleus of the major empire that the kingdom was to become within the next one-hundred years. Vinayaditya moved the capital away from Angadi on these ghats to Dorasamudra in the plains, a short distance away.

Why did the Hoysala’s sword—and the torch—travel only so far? His nemesis would arrive from such a distance. Did our peninsula, sealed by mountains, box our heroes within it? Were they denied the big bold dreams the grand terrain of Central Asia gave the Turkic men?

In Angadi, the monuments are small, and attest that what happened here was only a beginning. There are rises all round, hemmed in by coffee plantations. On the first rise I saw a modern temple and turned back. In a short while I was before two rises on either side of me. The one on the right had three Hindu temples on it, on which men from Hampi are working to a plan to restore them in three years. The rise on the left had a Jain basdi on it, its restoration quite advanced, the thirthankaras already standing in its garbha. Perhaps there are big plans for this small temple, now in the charge of Dharmasthala: the plan for this temple also extends three years.

If you’ve come searching for Angadi, you have the story of Sala in mind. The men on this site didn’t know where Sala performed his feat. A schoolboy who now tagged along with me didn’t know either. I drove back down the street and continued further, to the school, on another rise, broad like a short wide table. They were teaching on a Saturday, and in the classroom which I passed the teacher asked what happened in a substance (I didn’t hear the name) if four electrons fused with a single electron. His class gave him a rousing answer, all in chorus. In the next room I saw a dozen computers, of HCL, new under plastic hoods, and thought, maybe now, after ten centuries, the mind of even the commoner in Malnad is no more boxed, not by sea, nor by mountain, and who among these young—with the world open and inviting—might soar to the heights of a Chandrashekar or an Amartya Sen?

The teachers didn’t know either, where Sala had performed his brave feat. But they were helpful. One went into the library and returned with the monumental Kannada Vishwakosha, and found for me the short entry on Angadi. We read it, but it didn’t tell where it happened. Where did Sala kill the tiger? They directed me back to the new temple, the one I’d first skipped.

It is new only on the outside. The deities in it are female, with round, mother’s faces. They are of mud, and are ten centuries old. Sometime in their life someone has glazed their faces into a smooth-china finish, any woman’s envy. The rakshasa’s head is at the feet of Vasanthaparameshwari in the center; next to her, Varahi is on her haunches, and she has a sow’s sweet face—the only such face on a goddess that I’ve seen.

They are vanadevate-yaru, goddesses of the forest. In their early life they sat in the open, with the jungle canopy their shelter, and this, when it was an open spot, according to the priest, was the gurukul of Sala, where his Jain guru threw him the staff, and the exhortation, Hoy! Sala!

With that staff Sala killed the tiger that had come upon them, and gave birth to a name, and a dynasty.

In my last post I told you that all the public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I am sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of Bangalore, and I see that the exhortations in Bangalore to celebrate the past of Karnataka are succeeding, and Bangalore is emptying itself this Christmas weekend, and in the process local tourism is shaking off a sluggish year. I am on my way from Hassan to Bangalore, and though it was the other lane that was full, and my lane was free, I am cross, because the cars from the other lane were spilling to ours and surging into us and drove us off the road a few times. Two fresh accidents were proof of the risk, but the sight of them was affecting no one.

This cafe is normally two tables full, but when we came in today only one table was free, with the leftovers from the last party littered on it. Brown and chocolate cake were smeared on the couches and the cushions, and fliers lay about, selling New Year celebrations at the Serai in Chikmagalur. The floor was full of crumbs and I kicked around to tidy it a little, and saw that cake crumbs are stubborn—they stay put or they stick to the shoe.

The tourists who have filled this cafe and the highway are headed to the ghats, to rest there among the quiet coffee, and to trek into the forests, there to turn inward; none may miss a visit to the monuments built by the Hoysala dynasty over four centuries, beginning tenth century, AD.

The Hoysalas began as men of the hills, of the thick jungles that matted the hills. They were virile, industrious, fired by a vitality that their environs imparted to them—qualities which they put to use to prey on traders carrying merchandise to the plains from the sea, or offer the traders protection against other forest brigands. Their other profitable occupation was to swoop down to the plains on marauding excursions, and bring home pillaged grain and stolen women.

Then, as now, these plains were irrigated by small reservoirs. Every few minutes on the road on these plains you notice a reservoir, which have provided water for centuries, to peasants under the Hoysalas, under the Turks, under the Vijayanagar kings, under British rule, and now to peasants in our socialist democratic republic. The plains were created by clearing the plateau of trees, and at the time we are discussing now, the clearing covered areas of today’s districts of Hassan, Mysore, and Tumkur.

click to enlarge…

In time, the plainsmen began to employ the hill-folk for protection of plainsmen from plainsmen in dispute, or for protection from man-eating tigers and leopards. They began to civilize a little, and came under the influence of Jain preachers. In the meantime, they began also to feel the need for protection for themselves, on account of uncertainties spawned by the wars between the northern and southern and eastern kingdoms. The fittest among the brigand chiefs emerged their leader, and the brigand-turned-ruler began to collect taxes from the plains—the brigand had become king.

It was a favorable time for the king who’d just begun his career. There appeared a period of calm when the surrounding kingdoms did not pose much trouble, and lesser kings offered their daughters in marriage. In that time of calm he consolidated a kingdom, and, shortly after, became a feudatory of the Chalukyas who ruled north of him.

Thus did the brigand chiefs from the Western Ghats rise to kingship. Just then, in the mid-East, the golden age of Islam had commenced, and the Turks had directed their ambitions eastward to India, and had begun a march that would in four centuries bring them to the Hoysala. In those four centuries, the Hoysalas would extend their kingdom to cover much of the peninsula, wrest sovereignty from the Chalukyas, change their faith from Jainism to Vaishnavite Hinduism, reach glorious heights in art and architecture and literature.

The Turks would go over treacherous mountain-passes to the northern plains of India; they would conquer Delhi and turn southward and come over the Sahyadri mountains to the Deccan plateau, and subdue the feuding southern kingdoms. The last Hoysala would fall to the Turk.

Today, we have only the temples from that time, apart from a public bath, some basic structures, and many tall stone-tablets (virgals) that are the records of the time. The virgals are in temples and also in remote places in the plains and in the jungles, across the vast stretch of the old kingdom, where they stand alone, bearing their fading stories on them. The temples are unarguably superb achievements, not so much for scale as for craftsmanship. But there is not one palace that has survived, not one house of a nobleman, or merchant, or commoner. Was there a secretariat? There isn’t a sign of it. Only the temples exist.

That is where they are headed, all these tourists.
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Here’s the blog of a young backpacker who has often been to the places of the Hoysalas.

Also, Payaniga’s Belur photo.

This December, as in every December, I approach Electronics City seeing the sun through the fog, and mistake it for a morning moon—I see it so absently. I wonder that the moon is so large, and after a while I realize there is no rabbit on it, and so it is the sun in its correct size. The fog is no more apparent when I enter my campus. The sun is out, and the leaves and the flowers and the lawn are all in a flutter, and the chill pinches just a little, a lover’s gentle pinch. How I love December.

Something has changed this time, though. On the way to Hassan the sky is blue but not so clear. There is haze before the hills, whereas last December I could check off the rocks even in distant hills. But the drive is still good, in that disorienting golden light, and the mild chill.

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A bright idea is being given shape shape from October, when from wall after public wall cinema posters were removed and slogans of various busybodies were scraped out. A base paint covered the walls and on them paintings began to appear, of ruins of ancient monuments from across the state. The spaces among the ruins are the lounge of the tiger and the elephant and the peacock; and the stage for girls dancing Indian classical; and on the wide edges are the Om Beach with a man in bermudas, and three men crouched in a boat on water. They are painting thus every wall and rampart and underpass in a rush even as I write this, and this morning I was afraid the men may soon bring their ladder and brush and can of paint to the walls of my own home. Indeed, the entire city is being transformed into a travel brochure for Karnataka.

There is a good part to this business, that it is awarded to poster artists, an absolutely splendid thing. I ask that they please offer some walls also to the Chitrakala Parishat so that we may see some imaginative art. I saw a wall on the way from Hudson Circle to Mission Road which bore simple floral murals on a terra cotta base which are designs of today, and are a reminder that the glorious culture of the past that our city-fathers are so besotted with has a shining young rival in the culture of the present, and it begs for some room.

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December is when the non-resident Indians come back to the extended family and hand down plentiful advise to the locals they encounter, whether the arrivals are minions from the foreign cubicle, or key executives, or brilliant professionals, or those from among the fired and the unemployed. I had my time yesterday with a big-corporation type who sought out financial ills that I might be afflicted with since we last met. He was frank and happy when he extracted an admission of a potential woe and today I am drained from having been on guard every moment I spent with him, from having to fend off his relentless dagger-sharp inquisition.

Also, he was dunking my head into old questions which are a dead bore: regarding our inept politicians, our terrible infrastructure, our damn corruption—as though I’ve had some role in growing these Indian warts, and as though I have insight into them, and as though I should go out and excise them forthwith. But, of course, those questions aren’t so much for answers as for reassurance that the decision to migrate was life’s best decision. In that colorless conversation he told me his most serious news, that a certain famous American golfer who maintained fourteen illicit amorous liaisons is facing a California divorce. We drank good French wine: it kept us light and saved this friendship that we have, for until next December.
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previous post, on the urban experience in Bangalore.

Want to see the pictures of the urban art mentioned above?

The ride into town

Turn right to the north on NH-48 and then at the square which comes up turn left to the west. The road (Bangalore-Mangalore Road) goes straight and curves fine to the right after a while, and then it is straight again for the few furlongs into the town center. On either side of the street are restaurants and small hotels and movie halls, all in the unimpressive style of small-town buildings in India. There is no attempt at architecture, but at a short distance north of the road a large pergola of a new building is visible which leads one to suspect that change is coming. Hassan is a small town of only 300,000 people, a town dilated in the fashion of a leaf on two sides of this road which runs like the midrib of the leaf.

I’ve been to a show in one of those movie halls. There were enough mosquitoes in the full hall for each one to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the Telugu burst forth at peak volume over the proudly advertised audio system, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya Saran, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at that heightened effect that all desired, everyone put up with every suffering with no effort at all, ignored even the smell of sweat and the moist heat and cool that blew at us from hefty noisy fans on the side walls.

Among the hotels and cinema theaters are the small shops which sell liquor legally in bottles, and illegally in glasses for drinking on the spot, there at the counter. Men throng the counters from noon, buying those spirits that cost the least and kick the senses the most, drinking liquor and dreaming mutton-chops. Mutton they get only on special days, such as when a goat is cut down during festivals. Other days they’ve to make do with yellow little balls of fried lentil-flour laced with red chilly powder and mixed with oily roasted peanuts, a mixture which assures the eye that it will finish the job on the system that the cheap liquor has begun.

The Hotel Ashhok comes up a while after the last bar is passed; it is the hotel where I always stay. If we pass the hotel and go straight on we are in seconds in the town square, at which point, last year, they sliced down the shop-fronts deeply so as to widen the road and, for some time now, they have a wide space and not yet a real road. The road runs further a wee bit and splits into three narrow streets: the turn left leads to Sakleshpur and continues to Mangalore. We may take the straight road ahead and lose ourselves in muddy market streets lined with stores that sell farm equipment and fertilizers and pesticides and tools and implements and also the harvest of the farms. They are tiny shops, but they are at the core of this agrarian district.

Hassanamba, the Smiling Goddess

From there it is a circuitous path to the Hassanamba Temple. The easiest description for me is to say that it is in the middle of that maze, in the sharp north-west corner of a wide yard that appears suddenly, unanticipated among those tight streets. The goddess Hassanamba—the smiling goddess—gives Hassan its name, and so that is what Hassan means: the divine smile! The temple has existed from around 1100 AD, and now inside its walls in the courtyard today’s plebeian painter—with the approval of his modern master, the civil servant—has struck cheap loud paint on old stone columns sanctioned by the royalty of antiquity, and he has worked on walls which are a millennium old, and on the carvings on columns, on Hanuman and other divinities, and turned powerful gods into comic characters.

The columns are round the twin to the Hassanamba Temple which is right before it, called the Siddeswara Temple. The smiling goddess is here a hutta, an anthill. Some readers may not know, but some of our anthills are often taken by snakes, sometimes by cobras, and the cobras are very important divinities to us and, because we cannot see which anthill has a cobra in it, we revere each hutta that we encounter. We have a festival for the huttas, on which day we pour milk into the hutta for the cobra to drink. The hutta which denotes Hassanamba in this temple is actually goddess Parvathi bearing another name. Parvathi is the wife of Shiva, the god of destruction, a fierce god, terrible in his wrath, but most adorable in stone. Siddeswara is one other name for Shiva, another form of him.

The Hassanamba Temple is open for but two weeks yearly at the time of Deepavali and is shut the day following Balipadyami. When they close the temple, they keep before the goddess a lit lamp, about two seers of uncooked rice, and water, and flowers. When the temple is opened the following year, the rice is cooked and good to eat, the lamp is still burning, and the flowers of last year are fresh with morning dew on them. I told you of the mess in the courtyard, but ten centuries of worship by millions of devotees have suffused even hard stone with divine tanmatras and the feeling at the time of leaving the temple is light, and the heart is full once more with hope and optimism and the resolve to do good.

All that meat and …

In Hassan they produce as much potatoes as meat. Maybe more, and maybe Louis Armstrong would’ve liked that. They are serious here about agriculture, which you can tell by the vast cultivated greens that cover the district, and also by the radio broadcast in the morning that comes through the speakers at the District Stadium, on the best methods to grow ragi or sunflower or rice. The stadium is reached walking straight north for fifteen minutes from the gate of the Hassan Ashhok, and this week when I joined the walkers and joggers the topic was about growing uddinabele. The young ones in the stadium were engrossed in themselves, and I couldn’t tell if the older ones were listening, but a good several of the men I passed (or who passed me) were speaking of gains from this crop and losses on the other, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

I’m thinking of a man who sat behind me at the lobby lounge in the hotel, who looked like a foreigner, whose voice was curdled and extra masculine in the Louis Armstrong fashion, and confident and deliberate. He had three men before him and he told them he has been in the coffee business for forty-five years. After a while he told them he is an Anglo Indian, that his relatives have all migrated to Australia and England, and his wife cannot take plantation life any more and has settled in Mangalore. He spends his evenings alone in the plantation bungalow and watches sports on television. His drink is brandy and his sport was rugby.

The following morning I asked the reception for his name. They gave me also his number. I’m going to meet him when I next go to Hassan. If his story is as exciting as I suspect, I’ll tell it to you.

See also: Why did you come here?

Every introduction to Bangalore speaks of the four towers of Kempegowda that marked the corners of the capital he founded four-hundred years ago. But these small things are not towers—not in the way the Jin Mao or the Sears or the Qutb Minar are towers. Kempegowda’s Towers are small gopuras, tiny things built on dome-shaped virgin rock, each a mere nipple on a supine breast.

The Ramana Maharshi shrine is on a tangent down from the northern gopura near Mekhri Circle. I tried to meditate there today, but couldn’t, because of two men speaking fine Tamil at the door. I don’t know the language so well, but I could tell that there was nothing spiritual in their dialog, but words of commerce in this business city of Bangalore, and their voices had an excellent timbre which was doubly distracting. I opened my eyes after a while, but without anger. (I remembered the story from school of Sage Durvasa, upon whom, when he was immersed in meditation, a sparrow released itself from a branch above. He opened his eyes and raised his head to the sparrow. It burned to ash.)

I am no sage, and my eyes opened to the Bhagawan’s: inviting eyes; riveting eyes; loving eyes; the most unusual eyes I’ve encountered. Into them I melted, and felt no desire to resume meditation. I sat a long time. I like to pray here. It is clean and dry, unlike in our temples. It is quiet. There are no rituals. I can be religious in the way I want: I prostrate myself sometimes. Some visits, I do not even do a namasthe: I merely sink into veerasana and meditate and afterward I gaze into the Bhagawan’s eyes.

I ask for nothing.

Today I wondered who took this picture of the Bhagawan. And I thought of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was in Arunachala during the last two weeks of the Bhagawan’s life. On the night the Bhagawan died a meteor died a brilliant death in the skies: thousands saw its light over the Arunachala mountain. Seeing that sight in the heavens the poet Harindranath Chattopadhyaya shouted: mark the time! Cartier-Bresson, who was with him, shouted back: thirteen to nine! That was the moment of departure of the Bhagawan: the men ran to the ashram knowing it in their hearts.

The following day Cartier-Bresson tried to capture the frenzy of the devotees at the burial. It was delayed into dusk and he was disappointed with what he achieved with his camera, and cursed his luck.

I finished up the day watching The Sting, seeing Chicago of 1932, a post-depression story in which the thief robbed the burglar, and the conman swindled the fraudster, and all the money there was, was bad money. The famed blue of Paul Newman’s eyes didn’t show so much, but when he smiled, and Robert Redford too, all the gray of the time turned to shining silver.

“Saleem’s sister’s son,” Raja said of the young man in outside room that the gate led to, which served as the office. “He’s a potential drug addict.” The nephew took no offense, his eyes and face remained blank and emotionless. He was sitting in Saleem’s chair when we entered, and rose when we went in, and left after a while. Saleem took some time to arrive.

Raja took the period of Saleem’s absence to tell us about him. The two were together in therapy thirteen years ago. Saleem wore his hair mane-style then. He apparently recovered, but Raja has stayed the typical bipolar, displaying long phases of convincing recovery which end in dramatic relapses into violence, mainly directed against his wife. Suspicion follows soon after, then paranoia and panic, all leading to the next phase of disappearance, reappearance, peripatetic nights, twenty phone calls a day each to his sister, and to his father, and mother, and daughter. After a time when his illness has seemed to be the permanent reality in the lives of his close ones, peace returns. In place of a frustrating man stands a loving father; a respectful son who runs errands for home; a caring husband making time for the wife to do her professional work (she works out of home).

Now he has slipped and beaten his wife again, suspecting that she has complained of some missing jewelry to the police, and that she has named him the suspect. He’s gone and admitted himself at NIMHANS, and gotten to access his file, and torn the transcription of the wife’s submission to the doctor. Then he has sent his attendant to fetch him a snack, and fled. After being missing for some days he has emerged on the phone and revealed that he has been living in Saleem’s home for the mentally ill. He believes he is a counselor there.

“Everyone is tolerating him,” Saleem told us, watching the gate where they were bringing in a new patient. He’d arrived from inside the building, a bigger than average house, and settled himself and his iphone and its charger. His gaze was steady, the smile was easy, but the eyes were distracted. “He is not admitted here, so we have let him loose.” If his sister accepts, and her father who was with her, he will restrain him and begin his treatment—without drugs. “Then his real self will emerge. He is a manageable chap only when you say yes to him. Refuse him something, and his bloated ego will show itself.”

Is Saleem qualified? Only informally, which means that he has become a doctor (and established this home for manic-depressives and addicts) through being a long-experienced patient. He has been a patient for sixteen years, in many homes, in India and abroad. He claims to have received his education in training sessions in those homes. Saleem’s Kannada and English are heavily accented with the pidgin-Urdu that local Muslims speak. Before he came in Raja had praised also the discipline of Saleem, and had spoken of his diet: a ragi-congee drunk in the morning, a full meal at night and not even a beverage between the two meals.

Saleem has a ring on every finger in both hands and two of them made an impression on me: a fat moonstone ring, and the ring with the navarathnas, a Hindu ring on a Muslim finger. His normal fee to admit a patient is Rupees 8000, but Raja had paid only 2000. He told us about the money only when Raja’s sister asked, and didn’t ask to be paid. When asked about Raja’s condition the language wasn’t very different from how Raja describes his own condition and that of others. But a psychiatrist visits, who practices in major hospitals. On checking later, the information was correct.

We asked to see inside. The door opens into a hall, into which four rooms open: a second hall, a bedroom, a toilet, and a kitchen. About fifteen men stood about in the first hall. The second hall had been quickly cleared of people, it seemed. The beds set up there, dorm-style. There were some more beds in the bedroom. A man cut tomatoes expertly into large pieces on the floor in the kitchen. Raja introduced the man as a recovered drug addict. The man smiled broadly.

A staircase wound tightly up to the second and a third floor. I expected it: they didn’t allow me to go up. They said they have about forty patients there. I went to the wall and craned up and saw and heard nothing. A man stood like a bouncer at the foot of the stairs but he was not built like a bouncer. I stepped out and stood on the outer edge of the road and stared at the windows on the upper two floors. They were all shut tight and the entire building was a silent sight. I went back into Saleem’s room and joined Raja’s sister and father and father-in-law.

Raja’s father pleaded with Saleem. Take charge of Raja. We’ll pay your charge. Don’t let him out. He should sleep. Don’t allow him to come home. Saleem assured that he’d take control of Raja, and the first thing would be to take away his phone. Raja had been detained in the hall when we’d stepped out. Saleem said he’d send the papers to sign, to admit Raja, in three days. Three men brought in a second new patient and we left.

I told Raja’s father that Saleem wasn’t qualified, and because Raja had to be restrained by force anyway, I suggested they find a place where the person in charge was qualified. The eighty-year-old father wouldn’t agree. “I’ve seen many homes these twenty years he’s been ill. They’re all like this. If Raja comes home he’ll beat his wife and shout at everyone.”

Silence was the prudent thing. But Raja’s sister agreed that we should call some psychiatrists and find through them a better home.

I might be getting involved a little in this story, and when I have more to tell about the way patients with mind disorders are treated in Bangalore, I’ll continue the story. The names are fictitious.

Women and children milled about the back of the truck. There were men on top handing down stuff: rice, stoves, packets of biscuits of which a child got two instead of the ration of one and she giggled to her mother. Women went in twos and threes for short conversations with the policeman by the side of the truck. He wore brown khakis, and crimson-and-yellow prayer marks above the brow. A sprinkling of trees cast circles of jagged shade. At the start of the street, where the truck stood, on the riverside, bamboo poles and palm fronds had smashed into the trees and the fronds were hugging the trees tight. The poles and palms had been huts two weeks ago. People had been living in them. I passed the debris to speak to a woman who stood in her home at a height from me, her rations at her feet. Being on the street I had no roof over me; well within her home she had no roof either. The roof and the walls were a blue-grey-red heap on the plinth and her dwelling was a small clearance on it. Where do you sleep? “Here,” she said. We turned to the truck; the men who’d been on it had climbed down and they were having the policeman ceremoniously give away a plastic orange-colored water-carrying vessel to a woman. They took a picture with a little digital camera. When I turned toward the river I saw the menfolk of the village in the distance—digging trenches, it seemed. When I folded my hands to take leave of the woman I searched her squinting eyes for bitterness, or sadness, or anger, for any feeling at all, but after two weeks emotion had dried in her. She smiled when I smiled. The other women smiled too, who were returning with their rations to their plinths.

The only sounds were when people spoke, and they spoke in such subdued tones. The trees were still. The sun was upon the entire broad back of the river, which now flowed where it belonged, and it blazed a blinding white, and radiated the quiet of innocence. From the edge of the dwellings, high stalks of paddies were bent into the water and drowned in silence, all the way to where the hazy hills blocked their run. Sweat broke through with the slightest exertion and dried at first pause, leaving salt crackling on the skin. All round me the sun was burning the landscape without noise. After I’d walked five minutes a little fellow stopped me who was so small, I could’ve held two of him in one hand. He was no more than four feet away, his thin feet clasping a tall, thinner stalk. He spoke a long time, throwing his head high, tossing it right and left, twisting his neck all round, sometimes looking direct at me with severe black eyes. He didn’t pause once, not even at the deafening firing of my camera. I wished him to go on, even though he’d spoken a long time, but, once decided, his last chirp was firm, and he rose and curved right and flew away, leaving a rough beating sound in his wake. I lingered and stared at the stalk where he’d been. It twitched and fell silent.

And I became aware again, of the heavy hum of laden trucks laboring on the highway.

It was so perfect it seemed man-made. Its slender length was a flawless green, translucent, and its head a neat geometric achievement, a fine wedge. The green-snake is a tree snake and this one had slithered in the grass and I had howled because Sujaya was going to step on it. She and the snake both froze and Sujaya set down her foot a safe distance away, and the snake stayed, unmoving, its head raised and cocked and (apparently) amused. There was no tremble in it, no sign at all of fear. It stayed thus while we walked a U about it, avoiding the head—unsure whether the green-snake is the biting, venomous kind—and even after we moved on, when we looked back before going into the bend in the track, it was there, the head raised, its aspect unchanged.

Readers of this blog would’ve noticed that the Kadamane Estate has been too much on my mind lately.

A man-made thing has my attention now, ever since they pulled down the screens that had covered the ITC Hotel while it was under construction, on Rajaram Mohun Roy Road. It is on top of the rear building, quite like a flying saucer, but moored solid. I haven’t inquired, but it seems like a helipad. I see it mornings, halfway to work, and because traffic is usually stalled before it I’m able to study the neat ribs that run down its bowl-like bottom. Some days my spirits have soared up to the saucer from my seat in the back of the car; other days the thing has dunked me into depression, being too much of the spirit of new Bangalore, challenging all citizens to do better, to do their best, to work until breathless.

I had another encounter with snakes the other day, and it haunts me, even if it was only that I watched them on Nat Geo on television. A king-cobra found himself a mate and the camera showed as much as it could of the consummation; after which the couple settled like family, awaiting childbirth. Soon, a competing male nosed in, and a time-honored tradition ensued: The settled male went out and the two fought a gracious wrestling bout that was more a fascinating dance, punctuated by non-venomous strikes at each other. A victory was signaled when the intruder landed a smart butt on the resident’s head, who, without hesitation, slithered away through a mass of dead brown leaves, his fourteen feet full of shame. The moment was as intense as in the end in Romeo and Juliet. But worse came soon, as heart wrenching as in Othello, when the victor went up to claim her and in a short while smelt her pregnant condition. She fought so bravely, he needed forty-five minutes to kill her.

On Sunday, I watched Pulp Fiction, and laughed as I watched the gore. The thought bobbed about in my mind that God created man truly in his own image.

Yesterday, at dinner, a customer from the United States had brought more details than is available here in India about Project GIFT in Gujarat, which is a grand plan to build an industrial city twice the size of Tokyo. The customer, a Fortune 500 corporation, showed computation of the number of their products that they will sell to the project: “Our Indian plants will grow five times in five years.” An upward spiral caught us and we floated up with it, and spoke of the scale of opportunities now loosed upon us, of solar energy, of other infrastructure, and decided that we should shake our mindset somewhat, and get ready for heady growth.

After the fine dinner, on the way back, an hour before midnight, a man came round from behind a metro-column opposite Mayo Hall and melted back into the shadows, looking as lonely as they are around such places at such hours in large cities everywhere. But only some hundred feet up, the junction at Brigade Road was busy and as we drove on through Cubbon Road along the Parade Grounds, watching the new rises of UB City, I sensed the surging energy of Bangalore that until now I’ve doggedly refused entry, and I felt for the first time what could be the beginning of a resonance.

Monkey mind! Can I keep clenched this monkey fist and write with it too?