Ahmedabad

Dear Diary,

I don’t know how to begin, but here I am, coming crawling back to you. I can understand that you don’t even want to hear from me, I would have reacted the same way, but I’m a different person now, really. I think I was just too afraid of commitment then, and I didn’t know how to explain to you. Now I feel more settled, you have to believe me, we do all grow up, don’t we? Will you have me back, dear D? Okay, I won’t press you, I’ll give you time, after all you’ve waited this long. Please try and forgive, dear Diary, I won’t let something like this happen again.
Well dear Diary, you’re silent, I guess I have to make all the running this time. It’s only fair, I guess. So let me tell you about something that happened way back in 2004, that I never got around to talking about the last time. That was a couple of months before I took a two-year break from Baroda - oh, I hadn’t told you about that either? Well, this is what I’d written at the time:

Ahmedabad

Of late my claim to the status of an urban limpet, firmly attached to the ebb and flow of life in one city, is being undermined. In the past couple of weeks I’ve had to make repeated trips to Ahmedabad. All this for a passport which will enable me to travel even farther.

My first trip disabuses me of the notion that the larger a city, the fewer camels per square mile it will harbour. With a population of six million, Ahmedabad has more than its share of camels. They’re all in the cart-pulling trade, but when I get there early in the morning a goodly number of them are not yet in harness. Next to the tea stall outside the passport office, a camel is lounging beside its cart. At the same time that - seated on an empty paint tin doubling as a stool - I get my ginger tea, the camel's owner plunks down a bucket-sized pot on its cart. The camel lumbers to its feet to eat its breakfast of chick peas. With each mouthful, it raises its head towards the sky, and I’m not quite sure whether it closes its eyes in ecstasy.

A couple of hours later I’m through at the passport office. My job only partly done ("You must make an affidavit before a First Class magistrate in your city”), I hit the road a little despondently. But there are the camels to cheer me up. With their supercilious air they wait at traffic lights, hold their own against trucks and buses, and look down on the puny cars. Even more slowly than the camel carts, I drift with the traffic till I reach the bridge over the Sabarmati. The river which, nearly a century ago, lent its name to Gandhi's ashram. The river which two years ago divided the old part of the city, wracked by violence and death, from the newer part of the city going about its business as if nothing unusual had happened.

Today the Sabarmati's sluggish water sparkles in the sun. As I look across the river at the dead smokestacks of extinct textile mills, a bell tinkles behind me. It’s an elephant with a load of banyan leaves.

I walk across the bridge beside the elephant.

slow river
a bus rumbles
across the bridge