Laitumkhrah Main Road gave me my first taste of urban pleasure as a child. There were somnolent Chinese restaurants divided into individual cabins to conduct your business in, little ‘jalpan’ eateries with their syrupy wares on display in the windows, and hole-in-the-wall second hand bookshops. The beauty salons were cramped but always perfumed with the promise of elegance. In the small rice and tea shops, the lady owner poured the brew for you out of an always shiny aluminium kettle into a usually chipped white cup and passed around a basket of snacks – putharo, the steamed rice flour cake and the mildly sweet, deep fried pukhlen. Only one café on the road offered the fantasy food, such as burgers and shakes, that we encountered in Archie comics. The remembered taste of Kissan ketchup on a greasy hot hotdog still feels sublime to me.
Running between the city of Shillong’s Don Bosco Square at one end, from which school and college children were released into Laitumkhrah every afternoon, and the Fire Brigade grounds on the other, which featured football matches, rock concerts, political rallies and, before television, even open air film screenings, was the one and a bit kilometre pleasure-filled stretch of Laitumkhrah Main Road. This was the counterpoint to the more hectic and commercial other hub of town, Police Bazaar, and its older adjunct, the market of Iewduh. Iewduh was, and still is, a bazaar in the original sense, a feast of local produce and handicrafts sold from small, makeshift stalls spread out in a warren of sloping lanes. Bara Bazar, as Iewduh is also called, was for the astonishing bargains and the wholesale prices, Police Bazar for middle-class, elbow jostling shopping, Laitumkhrah or Laimu for indolence and hanging out.
But every time I return to my favourite road I brace myself for change. The minor establishments conducive to that indolence have, over the decades since I grew up, given way to looming high-rises featuring private universities, vocational training centres, design studios, travel agents, banks, gift and flower shops. The smoky teashops of the street have been replaced by stylish cafés on high, the confectioneries feature designer cupcakes, and the girls working in the new salons are in uniform now. The small tradeswomen and men can no longer afford the rents and now sell their fruit and vegetables or cheap shoes or readymade clothes from the pavements.
Most recently I spotted a boutique exclusively for Japanese fashions and a fancy hotel advertising its lounge bar and Sunday brunches. But Laimu can still throw up the small, unbidden pleasures. Tucked away in a side lane is a popular old style tea shop, the mandatory plate of green chillies and plastic jug of water on the low wooden table. I savour the milk-less tea which is everywhere called black but in eastern India “red tea”, sha saw in Khasi, lal cha in Assamese. Later I find a new shop selling the hard-crusted, locally-made bread of the sort I used to eat as a child which everyone seems to have abandoned in favour of pre-packaged sliced bread these days. The friendly owner gives me the standard old world Shillong winter greeting as she counts out my change. “Ni, it is so very cold!” I agree.
