Know Thy Neighbour
The Nice & The Nosy
The other day, I was at our local grocery store — clutching a packet of Peppy Tomato Discs I was anxious to buy and stuff inside my bag before my wife caught sight of it — when I noticed that the woman paying at the counter looked familiar. I was certain I’d seen her before, but couldn’t quite remember where. She must have sensed my sidelong glances because she turned and offered me a smile with a genial, ‘Hello, how are you?’. I mumbled a reply, more perplexed than ever. At least, I hadn’t imagined the familiarity — her conduct suggested a past crossing of our paths.1
She collected her provisions and with a final nod, left the store. When my wife and I followed suit a couple of minutes later, I spotted her a few paces ahead of us, heading in the same direction. Do we know her, I asked my wife, jutting my chin towards the woman’s back. My wife shrugged. She wouldn’t know until she saw her face, she said, and then suggested I stop gesticulating at women in public. This was sage advice and I would have loved to follow it, but the woman entered our building.
The plot thickens, I muttered, speeding up as my wife rolled her eyes. At the lobby, we found her waiting for the lift. She smiled at both of us.
‘Hi, K—. How’s it going?’, my wife piped up, ignoring my startled yelp.
‘Hi Simran! All good. How have you guys been?’, the woman replied, avoiding looking at me. (It took Simran’s elbow in my ribs for me to realise I’d been staring at them with my mouth open.)
They continued chatting till the lift arrived. It was only after we stepped inside the elevator, and the woman pressed the button for our floor, that I remembered. She was, of course, our next-door neighbour.
When I was young, our neighbours in Kolkata were deemed honorary members of the family — literally so, since they were conferred with titles of ‘Uncle’, ‘Aunty’, ‘Dadu’, ‘Dida’, depending on their age and the colour of their hair.
During festivals and on certain holidays, this presumptive clan gathered to conduct cultural programmes, with the spirited participation of its constituents. These events always promised a convivial atmosphere. Aunties were afforded a captive audience, whom they could regale with their renditions of Rabindra Sangeet; uncles could channel their inner Sivamani, thumping the tabla in time with the frenzied banging of their shiny heads, their wispy strands flailing in mute panic.
Such sociable neighbours not only offered an education in the arts, but could also help raise a child. They were the primordial babysitters, in whose charge my mother would leave me when she had to run errands or was detained at work. Many hours of my childhood were spent with these neighbours. I had the run of their houses — the freedom to rifle through their refrigerators and browse their bookshelves. On occasion, they would also assist me in my chores.
Once, when school term was about to begin and I had been left in the care of a neighbouring family, I enlisted the matriarch’s help in clothing my new notebooks with the glazed, pinewood-coloured wrapping paper that always veiled our texts. I did not know why this was an important task — I just knew it had to be done, convinced that the authorities would not let me enter the school premises with a bagful of books flagrantly displaying their nudity.
(Later, when my mother became aware of the incident, she grew upset. I should have waited for her, she explained, and not involved our neighbours in the book-wrapping enterprise. She was right, I realised. How thoughtless of me to have compromised the modesty of my books! Thereafter, all wrapping of school texts happened within the four walls of our apartment.)
Not all neighbours were as supportive, however. Indeed, some behaved much like my nutritionist does today — exhibiting the same penchant for asking uncomfortable, probing questions, and bearing a general air of disappointment regarding my choices.
After my high school exams ended and I took to walking around our neighbourhood, a local uncle accosted me one evening.
‘So, off again, are you?’, he noted, peering over his glasses. ‘You seem to be roaming about a lot nowadays. You must’ve forgotten what your textbooks look like, haha.’
I explained to uncle that I was a free bird, waiting to commence the college-student life.
‘Ah! Besh, besh. Which Engineering college will you be joining?’
I clarified that I would not be studying to be an engineer.
Uncle looked perturbed. More in hope than expectation, he asked, ‘So, medicine?’
I shook my head.
Uncle nodded with a forlorn look on his face, as if he was saddened but not surprised.
‘Your Joint Entrance Examination rank was too low?’, he asked in a whisper.
I informed uncle that I had chosen not to appear for the Joint Entrance.
The colour drained from his face. ‘You did not even sit for the Joint Exam!’, he cried, struggling to comprehend the pits of academic ineptitude that must’ve compelled this decision. ‘What will you do now!?’
I will be training in the law, I told him.
A long time has passed, and my memory is not what it used to be, but as I bid him a good evening and walked away, I think I heard him mutter, ‘Jar nei kono goti, sey kore aukaloti (The one who has no hope in other professions, chooses to become a lawyer).’
Perhaps people like that uncle were the reason I became wary of engaging with our neighbours as I grew older. We began to inhabit different worlds. In university, I had too many things going on — discovering pop-punk music and graphic novels, navigating (imagined) romances, accumulating an astonishing number of beaded bracelets — to spend much time with the proxy families, in whose company I had once completed my school homework.
When I moved to Mumbai and rented an apartment with two friends,2 socializing with the neighbours did not feature on our list of priorities. (We did suspect that the family on the eighth floor were angling to get their daughter married to Arpan, but despite many requests, he refused to play along, so we never found out.) Office and weekend plans and household work left us with little desire to take an interest in the inhabitants of the adjoining flats. And even after I got married and shifted to a new place with my wife, the apathy persisted.
I had not given this matter much thought, until the incident involving K—. It is one thing to not be friendly with your neighbours, but quite another to not even be able to recognize them. I am now the same age as when my parents settled in Kolkata, becoming a part of the locality and forging bonds that ensured I’d be looked after by people in the colony. My life looks a great deal different — and I do not have kids I need to occasionally offload — but who’s to say I’m not missing a rootedness, a sense of community, that could come from being more neighbourly? Perhaps this, too, was an aspect of adult life that I was remiss to ignore?
I was mulling over these questions last weekend — sitting in the Tata Theatre, waiting for a Mumbai Litfest session to begin — when the man next to me tapped me on the shoulder. He was a white-haired, distinguished-looking gentleman, with a trim moustache and rimless eyeglasses.
‘So, young man, are you pursuing the fine arts?’
I laughed and said no. I work in a law firm, I told him — adding, haltingly, that I also write.
‘Which law firm?’
I supplied the name of my employer and asked if he was familiar with the world of corporate law.
‘Oh yes. My daughter is also a lawyer, you see. I know all about your law firms. Which university did you go to?’
The next few minutes were spent discussing the merits and demerits of the universities his daughter and I attended.
‘How long have you been with the firm?… Fourteen years! You must be earning a lot of money. You people in law firms get paid far too much. And at such a young age. The sort of brands my daughter buys — I’ve never even heard of them. She gifted me a watch costing tens of thousands of rupees. I told her, baba, what will I do with such an expensive watch? You must also be wasting your money on clothes and gadgets, I’m sure?’
I stammered a denial, unable to meet his gimlet eye. He looked unconvinced. I don’t earn nearly as much as other lawyers, I countered, because I work part-time.
‘Part-time? …And you said you write?’
I confirmed this, as his brow furrowed.
‘Do you get paid for your writing?’
A bitter bark of laughter escaped my throat.
‘How do you make ends meet? Are your parents supporting you?’
I hastened to disabuse him of this notion.
‘Are you married? Yes? Acha. So, you’re living off your wife! Come now, young man, you must learn to pull your weight in the family. How long do you intend to go on like this? She will not pay for your expensive lifestyle forever, you know.’
I had shrunk so far into my seat by now, that I was practically smeared over the person on the other side. Fortunately, the kind souls at the Litfest chose that precise moment to dim the lights in the theatre and start the announcements, offering me an escape route out of the treacherous conversation.
Throughout that session, I could sense my neighbour-uncle looking at me, the swivel of his head accompanied by tutting sounds. When the programme ended, I shook his hand and hastened out of the theatre, wondering whether not fraternizing with one’s neighbours — especially those of a certain vintage — was such a bad thing after all.
It is a uniquely Indian trait to look through strangers, as if they do not exist. In public spaces, we acknowledge only those whom we recognize. I love this habit — never more than when I’m travelling overseas. Why should you be expected to smile and greet unknown people, often before you’ve even had your first cup of coffee? It’s criminal really.
I have previously written about them — Shaswata and Arpan — and the years we spent as a family unit, here:
P.S.: If you’ve made it this far, which I hope you’ve done, and you’ve ever been gifted soan papdi, which I know you’ve been, you should check out this fun piece by Abhishek Singh:
Gosh, everytime you write something new I realise that I'm better than you at literally everything 🤷
All valid points, just a different universe for me. We grew up not closing our front door ever with every meal, celebration and grief shared with our adjacent selfs. :)
“thumping the tabla in time with the frenzied banging of their shiny heads, their wispy strands flailing in mute panic.” The visuals had me in splits for one whole minute! 😂