Column

So the biggest flat in Mumbai has 10 bedrooms. But it is still a flat, I told myself with self-placatory irritation, as I tried to fix a profligate tap in my beloved two-bedroom sanctuary.

I did feel the hammering of envy when I read about the flat; and no, it was not triggered by the fantasy of fixing profligate of a 10-bedroom monster. I was envious of my younger self, the man who grew up in a house that had real trees, not bonsaied apologies for trunks.

It was a house with a real backyard and front yard. I could practice off-spin with a real cricket ball, without the slightest fear of my father being pilloried in the next society meeting for abetting the ruin of common property.

There was no society, except in the abstract form that we invoke to censure ourselves for our collective apathy, sloth, and the willing acceptance of Ekta Kapoor serials. Or is it Eeektaa Kkkkapfurr? Anyway, there were no neighbours skulking below our floorboards. And above us was a screen on which a million stars played shifting roles every day, heightening the mysteries of our origin, and as pirated copies of the National Geographic suggested, that of our eventual destruction. In short, I grew up in a zone where nature was not just activist exotica; it was admittedly rustic, compared to Hafeez Contractor’s mute-and-blare chic of today’s Mumbai.

These days, a green and luxurious apartment complex means a guarded enclosure with a fairway. While kids of my generation flexed their muscles on branches and in temple tanks, the painfully precocious lot today want to up their heart rate with suspect salsa.

“What are you cribbing about,” my wife said, as she saw this rant building up on my laptop. “Doesn’t our society have a gym, a swimming pool?” It is true that many builders add those facilities to boost the yuppie value of their offerings. But the gym and the pool are the most neglected and least frequented places in most complexes. A neighbour in my complex said he does not go to the freebie gym because it does not have the modern treadmill that he is accustomed to.

A friend in a neighbouring society has no use for its gym because the facility is instructor-less. “Hiring an instructor would mean hiking the maintenance charge, which nobody wants,” my friend told me. And I don’t swim in my society’s pool because, frankly, I don’t think the caretaker can maintain the hygiene levels like the experienced staff of a good hotel does.

So in our proudly pragmatic metro, people disregard the extra money they pay for worthless lifestyle icons that builders install, at the cost of a garden where fitness can be earned in more rewarding ways. I mourn the loss of bracing rustic add-ons that my small childhood homes gave me absolutely free. And the fitting dirge came recently from my daughter who called me while travelling to Karnala. “Daddy, I am whizzing past some fields and I remembered what you told me about your village,” she said. “It reminded me of a John Denver song.”

She began to hum: “Well, a simple kind of life never did me no harm/Raisin´ me a family & workin´ on the farm/My days are all filled with an easy country charm/Thank God I am a country boy.” She was on her way to a botanical garden where she hoped to see a real neem tree, for Rs250.
raghu@dnaindia.net