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It is early morning in Bengaluru. A squirrel calls somewhere and pigeons coo. It is blessedly quiet and I sit in our living room, sipping my filter kaapi, soothed by these myriad sounds.
But all too soon, the human world intrudes.
One of our neighbours has put the pressure cooker on. I try to be charitable, she must be one of those unimaginably busy women who are on their feet all day. But come on, it is only 6 am! The cooker’s shrill bleating is clearly audible from our tiny apartment—almost as if the faceless cook is right beside me. But no, she is in her home and I am in mine.
From our living room, I can hear the sounds of an argument - the father-and-daughter duo (the mother is mostly silent) who live nearby, are at it again. Some mornings, a young man who lives in the apartment behind ours, adds to the cacophony. He has unexplained and anguished bouts of crying, where he howls long and loud. Why he does this or what really is wrong, I do not know. Today, thankfully, he is silent.
Suddenly, high-pitched giggles fill the air: the children of the migrant labourers next door (we live in a ground floor apartment) are playing some mysterious game, with stones and cement bricks. The game involves no toys for these children have none. Their parents are from North Karnataka and work at the construction site just outside my living room window. Their distinctive, fast-flowing nasal Kannada pierces the morning air. A woman is washing clothes and scolding the children at the same time---they respond in subdued voices.
Urban sprawl, urban chawl
How do I hear all this so clearly, you may well ask. Because all of us (meaning our neighbours and us) now lead lives that are worth only the square foot we occupy. There is no privacy. We lead vicarious lives.
How close is too close? The picture shows three buildings literally touching each other. The smallest structure is a standalone house, built many years ago. The other two buildings on the right are new--constructed in the past couple of months.
When my husband and I moved here over a decade ago, we lived in one of the three or four apartment buildings in the area, on this road. Take our own building for instance, there were independent houses all around us at the time. These were not the Colonial-style bungalows, the city is famous for, but small, standalone houses on plots of 30x40 feet or less. In the past five to seven years, these houses have disappeared and become multi-storeyed buildings all stacked against each other like gigantic shoe boxes. In fact, the newest construction coming up outside our living room, is being built on space that originally had a couple of bathrooms. Since there is not enough land, the owner has decided to aim for height instead — it is already three-storeys high, and counting. Building bylaws be damned.
It is not as if other area residents have stayed mute at this flagrant violation of land /building laws or this utter disregard for both community and common sense—how close together can buildings possibly be built? A neighbour did go to court to stay construction near his home. But the builder concerned sent a car-full of toughs to have “a conversation” with him. No threats were issued but that was enough for this retired man. He has now decided protests are simply not worth it. I don’t blame him.
Because all of us (meaning our neighbours and us) now lead lives that are worth only the square foot we occupy. There is no privacy. We lead vicarious lives.
And that is why we are all now voyeurs into each others’ lives. Just as I can hear every detail of my neighbours’ lives, I am sure they can hear mine. We live surrounded by noise of each others, yet we tune each other out. Sometimes though, sudden, shocking death comes crashing into our lives.
A body by the balcony
One morning last year, my husband and I found a young man lying dead below our balcony. If the bloodstains hadn’t been so real, and the body so still, this would have been a scene straight out Agatha Christi’s The Body in The Library, or worse, a cops-and-robbers Hindi serial. The man was not from our building, so who was he and where did he come from? More important, how on earth had he ended up dead outside our balcony? We were baffled.
The picture shows three buildings literally touching each other. The smallest structure is a standalone house, built many years ago. The other two buildings on the right are new constructions
When the police came to investigate, they discovered that the young man used to be part of the housekeeping staff at the apartment behind ours. Apparently, one of the flats in that building had become a “serviced apartment”. This man worked there. According to the police, he and a colleague used to spend nights drinking on the terrace of their building, which incidentally, is barely a foot away from our building. One such drinking session apparently, had led to a fatal fall. But did the man stumble in his drunkenness or was he pushed? Why didn’t he cry out? Did he die instantaneously? Did he lie for hours outside my balcony, unable to cry out? Incredibly enough, neither my husband nor I heard any cry for help. So perhaps death was instant. But we don’t know, really.
Cruelly enough, no one (including the police, the building owner, or us) bothered to find out more. He was a migrant from the North or the North East and had no family here. How did he end up below our balcony? The building he lived in was originally a house. About six years ago, the owner demolished it and built a three-storey structure, with apartments he could then sell or let out on lease. No, we did not know that one of the flats had become a “serviced apartment” (that attracts commercial rents, and higher civic taxes, you see). The building on the whole, though, has very little setback. There is more space on our side of the wall. Space enough for a body, contorted in death.
A city collapsing unto itself
That unfortunate young man’s death is the kind that tends to shock, till we determinedly aim to forget. To carry on with our lives. But what about slow death of this city, at our hands?
Bengaluru has now “developed” so much, so fast and so haphazardly that it is in danger of implosion. As my neighbourhood so vividly demonstrates, space is running out. Yet we continue to build and dig borewells, cut off the trees, and drain the water bodies, so more land is made available. Never mind that by doing this, we are putting unimaginable stress on already strained and scarce resources--from the sewerage system to the water and power supply. Never mind that temperatures now touch 40 deg C in a city that used to be famed for its weather.
Last week a much-publicised and hotly debated report from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) declared that the city will be unlivable in five years’ time. Much discussion followed across mainstream and online media. There were heartfelt and emoji-filled laments too across social media. The city meanwhile, continues to die a little more, every day.
A slice of the old life
But it wasn’t always this way. Take my neighbourhood, for instance. We live in the old Cantonment area, a place known for leafy streets and quaint English names — Cox Town, Benson Town, Cleveland Town, Cooke Town, and still-serene streets such as McPherson Road, Lloyd Road, Viviani Road, Stephen’s Road, Spencer Road, Ware road ... I could go on. This area has always been beautiful, there is still some greenery. And there are some 100-year old bungalows that continue to be lived in, with distinctive latticed porches, tiled roofs, and monkey tops. What are monkey tops? I always thought these sloped and tiled structures were meant to keep monkeys away. But Aliyeh Rizvi, a young cultural documentarian and blogger, >writes on her blog that the “monkey-chasing” bit attributed to monkey tops may just be an urban legend.
Perhaps, the structure was just a prominent feature of that particular Colonial architectural style. But bungalows with monkey tops are indubitably the biggest attractions of this area. They lend it a particularly evocative charm. This area is also relatively quiet—no malls or large crowds, just supermarkets, small shops selling everything from ham, pork, ice-creams and fish, to many beauty parlours, darshinis and cafés.
Naturally, it is also piping hot property in the realty market. In fact, Wikipedia informs me that “Cooke Town is one of Bengaluru’s costliest suburbs, with the cost of property being in the range to INR 20,000-25,000 per sq.ft (in June 2015),” which apparently is only just a little bit less than rates for the Central Business District. Realty portal 'Magic Bricks' reports that currently, 10-15-year-old independent houses/villas in this part of town can sell for between Rs 2 crore and Rs 4.5 crore. Apartments are being priced at Rs 8,190 per sq ft on average. And 10-year-old apartments command rents of over Rs 50,000, incidentally.
Homeowners here know they are sitting on a goldmine, in realty terms. And no one can blame them for wanting to earn money from “developing” their property. Too bad this development is unregulated.
But this is why new buildings are coming up, literally on top of each other. And this is why my neighbours and I lead vicarious lives. We are in each other’s long-running reality shows, TRPs notwithstanding.
Thing is, as long as there is some construction happening, the migrant labourers here are happy. If there is work, they can eat. Their children can eat. These children do not go to school, they have nothing, in fact. And it goes without saying that these children also lead terribly unsafe lives.
Their future, just like that of this city, is precarious.
