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A Lucknow bigger than India
When we left India for Singapore, I was eight years old and we had lived all this time in the university campus off the main city of Lucknow. It seemed to me at that time that I had sprung from the Lucknow soil, like the neem tree in front of our house or the peacocks that would announce the twilight. It was as if I was rooted there.
I remember having this conversation with my sister several times as a child:
“Where’s Delhi?” my sister would ask.
“In India”, I would launch with ease. In school I had learnt that Delhi was the capital of India.
“And where’s India?”
“In Lucknow.”
“And where’s Lucknow?”
“… in the world.”
That Lucknow could be any smaller, that it could have any lower a status in the universe than that, was unimaginable to me. Here it was, all around, Lucknow!
When Hemant, my father and I played cricket in the garage, and I wondered how anybody could ever be as good as my father, we were in Lucknow. When we drove back from school, having hoisted wet curtains across the open windows of our Maruti 800 — a primordial AC for the torrid afternoon that blew into our car — we were still traversing an artery of Lucknow. And when we were in the noisy city, and I gripped my mother’s hand as we crossed the road to JJ Bakery, even when I settled down in the bakery with a blackforest pastry in my lap, we were still, at home, in Lucknow.
It was only when our cab pulled out of Changi airport, Singapore, whizzed past curated ferns and grass lawns shaped to form words, and deposited us in what was now our condominium in Jalan Lempeng, Clementi, that I became certain we were no longer in Lucknow. The neem had come unstuck. The peacock had flown away.
This is not to say that the move to Singapore shattered my young psyche — far from it. I was soon quite at home in Singapore with my family. Yet, I cannot shake the feeling that I might somehow have left behind a young man in a park somewhere in Lucknow — cricket ball in hand, wading off mosquitoes in the twilight. A version of myself who still…
