Prema Jayakumar

If you are old enough, you will remember localities, neighbourhoods. That is, you will remember a time when places were named by localities and houses were recalled by the name of the owners, or more likely, by the name of the family. Roads did have names but they were not really important. A time when name boards were a rarity. When neighbours were of all classes and castes and types, not necessarily friends, but people you knew, people who made up the fabric of ordinary life. It was not always convenient especially when one was young and up to mischief, but one knew everyone and everyone knew one. I remember coming to Ernakulam by train and having to mention just the name of the family to be taken straight home by the rickshaw man. Now of course, even with name boards, one is dependant on some nearby place of note, whether you are directing the vehicle you are in or ordering something or calling for a taxi.

Our house, being in a locality that was settled long before the town expanded to become a near-metro, still has a fairly varied list of occupants. But none of the newer settlements, be the townships, gated communities or apartment blocks have variety in the occupants. Everyone is more or less from the same pattern and background. One needs name boards and addresses to differentiate each from the other.

This has affected even gods, I think. Once again, one knew one’s neighbouring gods and saints intimately, went to them with small problems like marks in examinations, finding lost things and even help in balancing the books at the workplace. These requests were made in a very catholic fashion, offerings being varied–coconuts, lemons etc. to minor gods and candles before saints being indiscriminately offered, with the certainty that our requests would be heard, caste and religion being immaterial to the deities. The deities too, each had a specific personality and had favourite offerings. I remember one who had to be offered a loud burst of laughter as an offering if one’s request was heeded. They too were of various characters, those who were easily offended, those who were very tolerant and so on. They all had personalities and prejudices, unlike the main deities in big temples and churches. They were very comforting.

These thoughts came to me when I saw that all the minor gods had name boards in one of the temples I visited recently. Further observation showed me that saints in churches too were named for the benefit of those who did not know them. Of course, human beings are all now properly named and categorised. But I had not realised that deities needed to be named. They no longer belonged to the neighbourhood where everyone knew everyone else. Visitors could be from anywhere and in the absence of people one could ask, obviously such identification was necessary. But you see, these are visitors, not people who live with these saints and gods and talk to them daily.

People have lost their neighbourhoods, in spite of the good work being done by residents’ associations and so on, because that kind of togetherness, once again, is among people of similar backgrounds, something artificial and not the organic neighbourhood feeling that used to exist. Yes, it is better than not knowing your neighbours at all, to know who lives where, but it does not replace the variety and differences that old neighbourhoods used to have.

I sometimes wonder how the children now will face the variety that life will place before them without knowing anything other than their own kind of life. From playschool onwards, right up to the time they finish their education, children are exposed to other children from backgrounds like their own, especially financially, and never get to know that there are other lives and other ways of living. Even playing together is now a matter of class and money, the kind of coaching classes the parents can afford, the kind of clubs that they belong to. Isn’t there a loss in all this?

I have never thought nostalgia as a good thing to cultivate, but sometimes, gods in need of introduction do make you look backwards with a sigh, a wish for a time when everything had a local habitation and a name.