Who Moved My Town

What happens when the ‘small town’ you left behind while growing up moves on without you?

It is a strange feeling looking for your past in the town you’ve been born and lived in for the first few years of your life. Is this the road we used to go to school on? Where’s our house, for God’s sake? And what happened to the maidan with the cenotaph—the centrepiece of the town? Memories of the town, dreams in which it returned, and the fiction in which I’d recreated it, clashed; they were so enmeshed together it was hard to disentangle them. The distant muted whistle of the train, the chirping of sparrows in the morning, the gay sound of the police band from the police headquarters miles away—were these memories? Dreams? Or imagined, like much else? The one thing that remained clear was the fascinating history of the town which I had read for my latest novel. Part of a region which kept changing hands, it was finally ceded in the beginning of the 19th century by the Peshwas to the British—to Sir Thomas Munro. The man who brought peace to the area, as the chronicles say, and was commended in the House of Commons as ‘an accomplished statesman, a skilful soldier who won not just a territory but people’s hearts’. High praise, indeed. Though it’s more possible that people were tired of constant invasions and changing rulers, of paying taxes to anyone who made himself a ruler, even for a short time.

In any case, the British established themselves in the town and made it their headquarters. Soon there were schools, churches, a golf course, and a club, of course. Vestiges of this colonial past remain: a cenotaph for a British officer, ruined churches and large government bungalows, with gardens of gerberas, cannas and zinnias, the inevitable bougainvillea trailing down the portico roof.

I didn’t know the town’s history when we lived in it—who does?—but I was conscious of its importance as the district headquarters, a centre of culture and education. This smugness was shattered when I went to Bombay and realised I was looked down upon as a ‘small town person’. ‘These people’ a girl called me. I should have remembered Pride and Prejudice and Miss Bingley’s contemptuous words about the people of Longbourn and Meryton. ‘The nothingness, and yet the self-importance of all these people’. There seems to be something derogatory in the very word ‘provincial’. Though George Eliot, who calls Middlemarch a study of provincial life, uses the word in a matter-of-fact manner, the dictionary defines it as ‘unsophisticated or uncultured’, ‘restricting and narrow’. Nomenclature matters. Most small town people are dogged by a sense of inferiority, a certain lack of confidence all their lives! There’s always a sense of surprise at finding oneself in a city, at being, hopefully, a sophisticated city-dweller oneself!

But things are changing. There has been a surge of interest in small towns lately. The media picked up stories of small town successes (Dhoni, for example) and they are no longer seen as back-of-beyond places. Connectivity is the great secret. Our town, where just a train or two chugged in and out of a sleepy station, has an almost continuous line of buses now, speeding day and night on the newly made beautiful highway. Modern, architect-designed buildings have sprung up on either side of it; in the town, however, open spaces and orchards have disappeared and colonies keep growing, leaving little breathing space. Lakes have become dump heaps, beauty parlours dot new colonies, computer and coaching classes are advertised everywhere, and restaurants (with shady bars) promise you ‘Chinese and North Indian’ food!

If a small town is a state of mind, young people living in it are no longer small-towners. They are confident, they no longer wear day-before-yesterday’s fashions as we did. We listened with open mouths to anyone who’d returned from Bombay speaking about the latest fashions. ‘Sleeves are this long …’ Even the daily newspaper came to us the next day, so we were behind with the news as well. Now TV, that great leveller and educator, makes sure that everything becomes familiar, that the world outside is no longer the great unknown. It is to that outside world that the young, ambitious and restless, are raring to go. The town is only the spring board, the starting block from which they will take off for the great big world. Getting away is no longer a vague dream; they know where they want to go, and exactly what to do to get there. And they get away. Proof lies in middle class homes, bereft of the young, populated with their pictures instead. “My son—he’s in California.” “My daughter—she’s in Texas.” At one time it used to be Bombay; the world is closing in, everything is nearer.

“Oh, to go back to Moscow,” Chekov’s three sisters chant. “I’m forgetting everything,” Irina laments. To them, the small town is dull, dead stultifying; everything—intelligent conversation, music, theatre—is in Moscow. Yet, there are people who return to their home towns after retirement, driven either by nostalgia or economic necessity. They have time now, traffic is not a problem and they come together for lectures, music, plays readings. But “look,” a woman pointed out, “all grey and bald heads. Young people aren’t interested in such things.”

She was right. There was only one young woman in the meeting I attended, a lively confident girl. She, however, did not belong to the town, she was an outsider. Time was when everyone knew everyone else. Anonymity was impossible; people knew not only your family, but your family history as well, including the skeletons in the cupboard. There was a network of connections built up through generations. That network is fast unravelling.

New jobs and opportunities have brought in people from outside, migrant birds who will move out as soon as their stint there is over. “People are warm, I like the place but there are problems living here”, a woman said. I saw it when at the end of the meeting there was a sudden flutter in the crowd, and people, moving as swiftly as startled birds, quickly dispersed. It was water-day—water-night rather.

The one night in a fortnight when the taps would run. People were rushing home to fill up water. Narrow and restricted? ‘Uncared for’ is perhaps the right phrase for small towns. The winner—the capital, the metropolitan city—gets it all. Only the left-overs go to smaller places.

Strangely, there is not much spoken dissatisfaction. There is a hunger instead, a hunger to be connected to the world outside, to get on, to grab at opportunities to get out. Music, sports, academics—children and their parents leave no opportunity unexplored. Information comes from the internet, and they know as much about various opportunities as young people anywhere. I met a young girl who’d won a TV music talent contest, another who excelled in swimming. There was a sense of quiet jubilation about them; they’d got their passports for leaving.

There is, however, one great divide between cities and towns—English. Spoken English is rare. Even the English-teaching college teachers I met spoke it falteringly—if at all. “Would I have been here if I knew good English?” a man, who had been listening wistfully to the English conversation going on around him, asked. On the other hand, a writer/publisher told me, “If our languages manage to survive, it will be in and because of these places.” So, will the role of the small town be that of the saviour of our languages then? Or will the desire to learn English, that great tool for getting on, destroy this as well?

Shashi Deshpande published her first collection of short stories in 1978, and her first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors in 1980. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel That Long Silence in 1990 and the Padma Shri award in 2009. Her last novel, In the Country of Deceit, was published by Penguin in 2010.

changesmoving onShashi Deshpande