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…
