Column

For the first 13 years I lived in the city of Bangalore, I couldn’t write a word about it. Now that I live outside the city limits, I find myself able to see it as a setting. Distance gives me a new perspective.

My first recognition of this came when I spent a few months doing nothing, wandering through the streets of Manhattan some 20 years ago. The cityscape came as an assault on my senses. It fed my imagination and became the setting that let loose my voice. The unfamiliarity allowed me to take liberties. Ignorance broke boundaries and all I experienced turned itself into a story. That removal from my familiar world brought objectivity. And passion.

Whether it is Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of Vanities or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate or in Dickens’s London, we see how the city paces the narrative, breathes soul into characters and, finally, how the city shapes destinies.

Nobokov once wrote: Every great novel is a fairy tale.

Magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by Mcfate. It is in this context that I see a relation between literature and cities. For more than in any other setting, it is here I see the triumph of man’s spirit. To make do, to pull himself by the boot strings and to emerge victorious, despite the toll a city can take on the soul.

There is another angle to this as well. I think of a short story someone told me once about an old couple living in Paris. Of how in their retirement years, when all ought to have been smooth and in order, they are stricken by a strange malaise in their household. Every day one of their appliances manifests a new problem and they have to call one company after another to send their technicians in. It seems as if they are eternally doomed to be troubled by domestic disorder. And then there is the moment when the truth is revealed and the city assumes a frightening face.

The same ambiguity that allows you to reinvent yourself also brings loneliness.

The violence within cities isn’t just about bombing or narco dealers. It is also the anonymity of a cityscape that makes an old couple sabotage their appliances so that they can have a technician drop in on them, simply so that they have someone to talk to apart from each other!