Woman, 28, clambers out of auto in front of double-storey house on Saunders Road, Frazer Town, Bangalore, circa 1985. Each hand clutches a synthetic bag crammed with her worldly possessions. She is about to live on her own for the first time.
That woman was me, of course. After three years of living three-to-a-room in a working women’s hostel, I was going to occupy a converted garage on Saunders Road. The rolling shutter had been rolled up and a shaky door built into a wooden framework that turned the garage entrance into a façade. A horizontal panel of chicken wire mesh served as the front ‘window’ (my features editor would later donate her old silk sari for a curtain). Inside was a smooth cement floor, on which were placed a wooden cot with mattress (my sleeping quarters), an iron cot with busted springs (storage space), a large wooden table (for dining and writing), and a smaller wooden table atop which was a beat-up gas stove. Two half-walls enclosed the bathroom-toilet and the room’s one and only tap.
Heaven. It was as if Richie Havens had started thrumming his guitar inside my chest, rasping “Freedom-ah, Free-e-e-dom”. You never grasp the full meaning of the word (your pay check only gets you half the way there) until you’ve taken sole charge of your life.
Back then, Saunders Road was a road you could saunter down. Every morning, cradling the milk cooker in my hands, I would cut across Coles Park to the milk booth to buy a token for half-a-litre of milk and collect it from the vending machine. The booth manager and I struck up a relationship and I got him halwa from Calicut on one of my visits to see my parents. I would buy the Sunday paper from a little shop at the junction of Saunders and St John’s. For vegetables, I had to head in the opposite direction, down Coles Road, from where I could also pick up kalmi kebabs sizzling on skewers on the pavement every evening. If I fell ill, why, the polyclinic in a cul de sac off Saunders Road was within hailing distance of my room. I remember one morning, cooking plain upma , my radio tuned into Wham! playing on some station with George Michael belting out, “Wake me up before you go go” , and my heart being seized by a fleeting moment of perfect happiness.
BANGALORE, 18/05/2012: Author C.K. Meena speaking during the launch of her book 'Seven Days To Somewhere' in Bangalore on May 18, 2012. Photo: G.P. Sampath Kumar
Half my monthly salary in rent was the price I paid for a landlord who didn’t interfere in his tenants’ business — and there were many of them on the premises, tucked away in rooms at the back, up to all kinds of shady business I can tell you. Saunders Road was where my ‘other’ writing avatar, my fictional self, crawled out feebly into the world. And 10 years later, when I started writing my first novel, a thinly disguised version of my room on Saunders Road was where one of my three heroines lived.
The growl of traffic makes it impossible for anyone to saunter calmly down Saunders Road today. New buildings have mushroomed, but the old house still exists. On the occasions that I pass that way, I always look out for the garage. It is fancier now, with a proper wall, door and window. But I can see the ghost of a 28-year-old turning the key in the flimsy padlock and opening the fragile door to an undiscovered world.
CK Meena is a Bengaluru-based journalist and author, currently completing her fourth book, a travelogue
