The best way to feel your age is to return to your childhood town or attend your school alumni get-together. I left India in 1982 and like most expats, my ideas of India are frozen in the India of the early 1980s – or early ’90s at the most, despite regular visits to the home base.
Till recently, the visits were cocooned by family and old retainers who knew your requirements and seamlessly stitched your holiday needs into their schedule. Now though, after 43 years, I am confronted by a changed ground reality. During a recent visit to India, I realised that so much has changed at every level. To begin with, most of my generation is no longer in the thick of the corporate world, having retired or taken on consultancies, making room for a younger generation in the boardroom. This means most of them have divested themselves of the second car and driver and streamlined their lives. Ergo, when we want to go out, we hire cars or Uber rides with drivers who are clearly in the flush of their twenties and thirties.
What happens is that the topography of the city as we remember it is nothing like what these drivers know. Despite GPS, we tend to reel out old landmarks that we were used to and it makes no sense to these young men and women who drive according to completely different road-maps. As a Chennai teenager, the Woodlands Drive-In restaurant was a ‘be seen there’ eating spot. Set in a botanical haven, you could drive your car in and a food tray would be clipped to the window as you placed the order. Such was the fame of the drive-in that nobody bothered to identify it by the much larger landmark across the road – the US Consulate! The place vanished more than a decade ago and when we cross the junction today and sigh over the memory, our young driver shoots a puzzled glance at us. To their gen, the US Consulate doling out precious visas is far more important!
Why, that happens even in Bahrain. If you tell a newcomer to take the road past where Kuwaiti Building (or even more obscure, the now-demolished Bristol Hotel) stood, you will be met with a blank stare. Or ask a thirty-something if s/he knows the open-air Pearl Cinema and these children of the multiplex age will not even understand the concept of an open-air cinema.
I’m not complaining about the way our cities change. But I do wish the change were not so diametrically opposite! As we age physically and get slower, our beloved childhood haunts grow into a newer age, sprouting shiny steel and glass towers, flyovers and underpasses, making it absolutely impossible to re-imagine the days when we jay-walked across the road, with nary a care. How I wish we could reverse the flow of change so that we could effortlessly have the energy and the flexible limbs of our twenties and our sepia stories and vintage neighbourhoods stayed painted in the bright colours of our youth!
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