Life / 9 November 2022

India and its jugaad

You know India is a country of many many things, it’s a crazy, heaving, pulsating leviathan of a land with its swathes of browns and its few glimmers of 24 carat gold.

The bus never stops at the designated bus stop, people run to catch it – they jostle and shove and elbow, and if you’ve ever lived in a Bombay with its density of 17000 people per square mile in Dharavi Or A kurla, or if you’ve taken the least pernicious harbour line to chembur – you will have developed the good sense to move out of everyone’s way when the train stopped at Kurla, and if you had to get off at Kurla – nobody would even look at you ludicrously if you wore a helmet. If a Hollywood movie – the one that either stars Daniel Craig or Cruise, were to suddenly cut across from the sweeping mountains of a Matera or the sky scrapers of a Dubai, to this country – this brown, earthen land with its brown earthern people, they would first show – the traffic. The traffic, the snarls of vehicles, people hanging out of buses, the auto rickshaw nosing its way into intricate corners with a someone-that’s-usually-late saying “idhar se le lo na”. People people everywhere, people selling umbrellas on the road, people selling maps – of Europe, of Tamilnadu, Russia even, people selling fresh Jasmine neatly arranged into coiled clouds, measured in elbow lengths and priced. Some of those beautiful women – they always exuded a divine smell, I thought – would say “rendu mozham vaangiko ma”- “take two elbow lengths of jasmine?”- so she wouldn’t have to tender change for your 100 rupees. Or if you gave her a 500, she would coax you to buy some more for your mother, or the goddess at home – “Amman-ukku vaangiko ma”, and give you change.

Change – small notes, coins, everything worked. Diligently – very very diligently.

The autodrivers in Chennai would always indulge in light hearted banter with you – because what else could you do when they demanded a preposterous 300 rupees to take you two streets away? So you would first laugh, and then he would laugh too, and then you’d both agree on a price, and you’d jump in, and once you were in, he’d start his canvassing – “it’s tooo hot ma, in chennai, 40 degrees, and I have to come back empty”. You’d roll your eyes and say – “Seringa!!! 20 rupees extra vaangikonga”

20 rupees.
Extra.

And then when you started living in a Bombay for the first time – your meter would read 95, and the autobhaiyya would give you back 5 rupees. You’d stand there staring at the change in your hands, and then gaping at his face. Really??? You’re giving me back 5 bucks???

It’s funny what you remember about movies – I don’t watch too many hindi movies, but this one i did – Aamir Khan’s Dangal.

I remember many things about the movie, but the one scene that represented India and its soul, and its sprawling intestines – was this. Aamir decides he wants to train his daughters and arranges with the local butcher to give him chicken legs every other day for a nominal price. He tells the butcher – “I can’t pay you now. Hisaab rakh lena. Baad mein de doonga”
The butcher says,” Haan, theek hai. Chalega Bhai”.

“Hisaab rakh lena”
“Haan bhai, chalega”.

This is India – our beautiful, beautiful, living, pulsating, shambolic, scattered, heaving and sweating, leviathan of a country that redefined credit, and running tab, and accounts and tally – into a simple word called “Hisaab” – kanakku, in tamil.

And its people – its beautiful, brown, pulsating, breathing sweating gasping clamoring swathes of people – learnt to respond to Hisaab with – “haan chalega.”

And many children would thus be able to go to school, pay for tuition, afford that second hand bicycle, – because the grocery bill and even the rent, could be put off and paid the next month.

Because even when people had little – they had agency. In a chawl – cell phone would be shared, online order would be bulked, people would team up for the “buy 3 get one free” and everyone would get a discount. Lower middle classes were clusters of small lending banks, they all put money into a kitty and called it “Seet-u panam”. If you were to chat with your domestic staff she will tell you that she has gotten this month’s college fee for her daughter, covered. Because it was her turn to pull out the fund money.

My French friend loves India. When her mom asked her – what do you want to do for your 21st birthday, she said, “I want to go to India”. And India – she went. To Delhi, to Pondicherry, to Bhundi in Rajasthan. And years later when I asked her – weren’t you scared? She said, “no. The people were so nice. I went to a wedding too.”

Years later I would come across this beautiful paragraph from Gloria Steinem – from her book “My life on the Road”-

…she writes, //”It would take two months as a rare foreigner living in Miranda House, the women’s college at the Delhi University, and kind hearted students teaching me how to wear saris and take buses, for me to realize that in a car by myself, I wouldn’t really be in India.

I wouldn’t see women leaning out of bus windows to buy strings of jasmine for their hair, or men and women endlessly patient with their crying babies, or male friends unselfconsciously linking fingers as they talked, or skinny kids in patched and starched school uniforms memorizing by chanting out loud from copybooks. I wouldn’t hear political arguments in indian english that bridges fourteen languages, or witness the staggering variety of newspapers that India reads. Nor would I have known how hard it is for the average Indian just to get to work, or that “eve teasing” was why my college friends traveled in groups to avoid. Certainly, I would have never come to share the calm of people in crowds that would have signaled an emergency anywhere else.” //

I remember smiling at this paragraph, and smiling fondly at all the disparate tiny vignettes of memory, this descriptive writing had evoked. And I thought -oh my beautiful, complicated, mess of a country! What an inheritance!
What a living, pulsating, albatross of an inheritance – you beautiful, messy India.

And I remembered my French friend again, who told me ” My favorite word in India is Jugaad. India has a jugaad for everything. Is that why you’re always saying Yes? And never No? Does growing up in India make you nod your head like that and say yes and figure out the jugaad?”

As we were locked out of my friend’s apartment in Kurla, and when we found a duplicate key maker at 11 in the night, and I was looking at how much this frail guy, in his crumpled shirt, having skipped dinner, crouching over the key hole, earnestly working his way through a near impossible assignment – it rearranged my faith once more, in the inherent, inherent goodness of people.

And to do something like this – something like what was done on…

November 8, 2016.

To obliterate, annihilate…