Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Today, Christmas Eve, we walked about our neighborhood.

The Salarpuria Splendor apartment complex sits on the edge of a section of Bangalore called the N.R. Colony. We do not know the origin of the name of this section of town, but we do know that the N.R. Colony is a true slice of modern Indian urban life.

Bangalore is better understood not as an emerging metropolis, but rather as an urban village. Much of life as we now see it is rooted in another time; a time when people moved at a different rhythm. Urbanization has brought new apartment homes, piped gas versus delivered cylinders, water piped into the house versus public roadside spigots. Urbanization has brought to a new young generation of Indians the ability to go deeply into debt buying Honda two wheelers or a new Ford Fiesta car and mobile phones with Hindi songs for ring tones. This is a boom time. The sky is the limit.
Many, many shops fill our neighborhood. You can get your two wheeler repaired, book a trip at a travel agency, make an interstate or international call at the many STD/ISD phone stalls, buy sweets, fruits, juice, even 750 ml of Royal Stag whiskey at Rs 130 ($2.95). Helen has ventured into our neighborhood to the Provision Store to buy water, potatoes and milk. Next to the Provision Store is the live poultry market. Helen picked out a chicken squatting in a small cage. She came back in 15 minutes and the former feathery fowl was in a bag ready to be cooked for dinner.

Cows continue to roam the urban streets as they roamed village byways. Pushcarts ply the streets and alleyways, their owners selling fruits and vegetables. In the evening, we watch from our balcony as a streetlight at a small nearby intersection illuminates people who venture a few steps from their homes, meet a pushcart vendor, exchange conversation, product and cash. The pushcart vendor continues his rounds. People return to their homes to make dinner. The whole transaction appears quaint for us who are accustomed to jumping into our cars, dashing off to the local Kroger and plucking items from immaculately clean and well lit store shelves. Then the swipe of a few bar codes at the self-service check out line, another swipe of a credit card, back in the car …home …. make dinner. We are not too sure that the car-Kroger-home modus operandi of living is better.

But then village life is not idyllic. Raging dogfights occur nightly to our chagrin and loss of sleep, night after night after night. In a village, dogs roam, dogs fight. Who notices except us?

We are still new to our urban village. The sounds of the morning and evening prayer calls from the mosque are melodic and not very disturbing. The Hindi music that blares for a festival or to entertain workmen at a construction site (we are not sure which is which) is still disturbing. At least we know where to buy water, potatoes, milk and chicken. We will not starve as we become part of this urban village.