A tale of two cities

Cantonment or dandu, as it was called in the 1930s, with its swishes of silence in the streets and the occasional clip clop of horse-drawn carriages, ladies hatted and frocked strolling along South Parade (MG Road, now) with its cinema houses and stores, meant to us children a foreign city, like nothing we were used to in Shankarapura in Bengaluru.

Father, who worked for a British company, was not new to the Anglo-Indian culture and had some friends who nagged him to take us kids during Christmas to the annual parade. We stood in awe on the sidewalk, waiting for the red-faced Tommies’ march past with the band playing flourishes in the air.

The gun salute and the march past kept us saucer-eyed, but all too soon the excitement and the show came to an end. Father collected us and drove us to Samy’s cake shop in Russell Market. Oh, the smell of butter and vanilla in that darkened, Dickensian shop was a perfect delight as we stood around the counter gawking at the pastry tray. The butter biscuits packed by the portly Samy himself were for Mother, who was cooking our Christmas lunch of bisibelebath and payasa at home.

The next day at school, our friends pleaded total ignorance of the parade in Cantt and, in fact, taunted me and my sister for having gone off to an alien ground and betraying our local culture. What I want to emphasise here is that there were two ‘cities’, two cultures, and never the twain did meet except for a few odd families like ours, which celebrated Christmas as well as Ganesh Chaturti with the same éclat. 

Today, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagar Palike has merged the two ‘cities’ into one, but then a new divide has cropped up between new Bengaluru and old Bangalore. Actually, Bangalore with its outlying villages and the newly created residential colonies, with an influx of pan-Indian migrant population, goes by the name Bengaluru, and indeed the claim by an old timer in a gated colony that Bengaluru is the real Bangalore begs the question. As for me, Malleswaram, Basavangudi, Shankarpura, and Chamrajpet, indeed, the heartland remains the authentic Bangalore, the true legacy of Sriman Kempe Gowda. 

The other day, in a fit of nostalgia, after a gap of many years, I went in search of Samy’s. Father had long been gone, but those treats that he gave us were unforgettable. It was a lovely morning, typical Bangalore balmy weather, and I shook my old bones and hailed an autorickshaw. It was a changed world that I was viewing from the speeding rickshaw—any number of Darshinis and fruit juice shops, but alas, no Samy’s in Russell Market Circle. The old world panache was gone, and my eyes met with dreary scenes of scurrying people and stray dogs under broken arches. Gone forever was the golden age of childhood. Indeed, I felt like an alien visiting a strange landscape.