28thJune 2015- I land in Delhi to start a new phase as an ophthalmologist.
Fast forward
29thJune 2018- My last OPD at Dr. R.P.Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, an M.D., done and dusted.
And here I sit in my ‘apartment’ at Gautam Nagar, reflecting…a lot has happened over these three years, I have gone from almost becoming a ‘bacchon ki doctor’ to a microsurgeon, from a ‘never stayed away from home single girl child’ to a ‘can manage alone woman’ (Wow, that sounds so cool even as I type!), grown from an overtly sensitive idealist to a more practical and wary individual and have played some part in the ‘motiyabind mukti abhiyaan’ as well as the ‘Stop violence against Doctors campaign’…haha…
But don’t worry, this post is not going to be about all that…too hackneyed, New Girl in City, or my Journey from Darkness to Light…today I shall write about a place called Gautam Nagar and my life there.
To familiarize the people outside Delhi, who have all heard about CP, Def Col, Hauz Khas, VK or even Saket and C.R.Park, Gautam Nagar is situated near Green Park and yes, the ever so happening Hauz Khas, next to A.I.I.M.S. It is a township that basically thrives on rentals from resident doctors of A.I.I.M.S., local libraries and coaching centres for medical aspirants and P.G. Hostels. Most of us do not get a hostel room when we join initially and end up renting rooms as we wait for our hostel allocation. The same happened in my case. I initially rented a three room flat with two other girls whom I had met during counselling. Here began my journey in this strange land…
Rewind
Making a Mountain out of an Ant Hill
The rooms in my first house were nice and spacious. It had an attached balcony. This, however, is not really a boon in such a place where the houses are so close together that you can not only see and hear the people on the other side of the narrow lane but can probably jump across the balcony, if you are agile enough! Still, it helped to put clothes out for drying and getting some sunshine during the chilly winter months. Our parents settled us in quite comfortably with fridge, microwave, A/C and would visit us often in the initial few months. Considering that we just came home to fall flat on our beds in our first semester, we were quite happy with our ‘own little house’. One day, we noticed a foul stench. We cleared the dustbins, old newspapers, old food in the fridge but somehow the odour seemed to just grow stronger. The landlord was a specimen whom we never had a chance to meet and who never answered his phone. We were left to deal with an even better specimen, the caretaker. He would grace us with his presence after requesting him at least four to five times, always wanted the rent to be paid in cash and had some excuse or the other for not bringing the receipt each month. But let us not forget…It is only the doctors who cheat and want to make money! So, coming back to the problem at hand, he never managed to find the cause…but we did. It was the wood, the decaying and rotten wood…infested with tiny, crawling, multitude of white ants. The house, doors, drawers, cupboards were steeped with termites. One night I opened a drawer where I had kept my stationery and craft stuff and I was aghast to find these creatures crawling out. I can still feel the goosebumps and shiver as I think about it. When repeated requests to get a pest control treatment done, failed, we knew it was time to move out.
The Matrix
Gautam Nagar is an array of lanes and by lanes and even after living here for three years, I cannot claim to know half of them. By the look of them, you feel even a two-wheeler cannot enter…but oh boy! You have Mercedes and BMWs parked, driving schools give lessons in maneuvering through them and even trucks have squeezed their way in.
You basically get almost everything in the gullies of Gautam Nagar, from stationery shops to grocery stores, ‘Photostates’ selling Xerox copies of every medical book known to doctors to a juice centre in every alternate gully. There are parathe ki dukaan which are open whole night for students burning the midnight oil and multiple shops making fresh morning and evening snacks and delivering tiffin. These cater mainly to the young lot, easily spotted at all times of the day (and night), carrying a bunch of notes or an MCQ book, sipping tea, bespectacled, slipper clad with unkempt hair or carrying a stetho and wearing an apron. There are stalls selling Maggi, bhutta, boiled eggs and a few decent eating joints where the food is cheap and clean. There are multiple libraries, DAMS and AAKASH centres and To-let boards hanging from every other house. You can discover a fully equipped gym on entering through an easy-to-miss door and multiple one-hour laundry services. Mandir, Masjid, Gurudwara, parks, blanket shop, bucket shop, beer shop and even Cuban cigar is available!
The lanes come alive every Thursday when the weekly market is set up. The shops and restaurants in the whole of Delhi may be shut on occasions like Diwali but Gautam Nagar is always running except during the 1-4pm slot when siesta takes precedence. Hold it right there, come Jagarata and nobody decides to sleep, blaring the loudspeaker till 3 am in the night. I am pretty sure the Gods must be plugging cotton into their ears for who can survive the ruckus of God-praising lines tuned to the music of popular Bollywood songs sung in a blend of shrill and hoarse voices till the wee hours of dawn.
The gullies get waterlogged even if it so much as drizzles like the dog population of Gautam Nagar deciding to take a leak together!!! Particularly frustrating for a Mumbai chi mulgi experiencing Delhi monsoon. Even an afternoon of Holi celebration is sufficient to transform the lanes into canals. Of course, you can just happen to be drenched on an un-holi occasion by someone just deciding to pour a bucket from the third floor to water a plant kept on their sill on the ground floor.
The matrix is as much in the lanes as it is in the skies of Gautam Nagar. You have a network of wires entwined together, creating a canopy as they run from one pole to another hanging precariously as if testing the limits of your reach! A single wire here and there may be dangling loose, like a creeper allowed to grow wild. Finding people even drying their clothes on them is not uncommon here. For a five-footer like me, it hardly made a difference, but I have always wondered how dangerous it is for anybody with an average height or somebody driving a bike at night.
And these lanes do get dark. At night when you return, at 1-2 o clock, with a dog howling in the shadow and houses, black, looming over you, with your apron fluttering in the light wind, you feel nothing short of the Caped Crusader in Gotham City.
Tara, the Typhoon
Tara was the lady who used to work in my house. She came with me when I shifted from my first house to my current one. She would work for 10 to maximum 20 minutes and within that short span of time, would turn the house upside down like a fury of nature. The chairs would be tossed from one side to the other, the utensils would clang and her favourite pastime was putting my shoes on top of each other. Occasionally, she would suddenly decide to do something extra like vigorously dusting the rug in my room irrespective of the fact that the dust was settling down right there or wiping my desk pushing everything aside…that is when I had to tell her “Bas ho gaya, ab rehne do”. But I really could not do without her. After all, she was the only one who agreed to come at 6.30 in the morning, would come every day except for leaves off and on and was a good, honest person at heart. I remember one day she came, visibly worried. A girl had accused her of stealing from her room and the police had called her for questioning. I was worried for her as well, but really did not doubt her for a minute. How could I? She would work while I slept off after opening the door for her every morning. She would wake me up before leaving to close the door. My bags, wallet, keys would be lying around but not even a coin had ever gone missing from my house. She was vindicated when the police nabbed the koodawala with the jewellery that had gone missing and a duplicate of the house keys which he had slyly flicked while it was kept atop the fridge and the door was ajar. I think she was genuinely sad when I told her I will be leaving at the end of the month.
The Menagerie
Birds, beasts and humans of all sorts conglomerate here. Before I begin this segment, I must show you the staircase of my building that is the location of some of these stories- it is narrow, dark and allows one healthy person at a time.
You find all sorts of dogs in GN. The pets, the strays, the pregnant, the cross-breeds, the hybrids, the no breeds, the malnourished, the overtly nourished, the docile and the ‘mad’ ones. I am generally neutral towards the doggos and they towards me. We live in mutual harmony and truly minding our own business in this Race. Then one night as I climbed the staircase to my room on the second floor, I was followed by a four-legged stray. This one had no intention of leaving even as I shooed him away in the landing to my door. Great! As I started unlocking my door, he started sniffing at my ankle. A little too close for my comfort. So, I shooed again, a little firmly this time…but in vain. Now what? I stamped my leg once, but that was equally ineffective. I couldn’t open the outer door because I could not move back as he stood right behind me. At a fix, I shooed a little louder this time.
“Aye, Hatt!!”
And the doggo climbed down and out of the building.
A guy from the house across the lane had just managed to shoo him away.
“Main soch raha tha yeh ‘shoo shoo’ kaun kar raha hai? Yeh aise ‘shoo’ bolne se nahi jaate hain!” he explained.
Lesson learnt, Dilli ke kutte thoda ooncha sunte hain!
I was studying in my room one evening when I heard loud cries outside my door. It was like that of a baby, only it was not sweet to the ears. It soon turned to howling and then wailing. I knew that sound only too well. I had already frozen in my position and had gone blank for a period of time. For an ailurophobe from the time she was a kid, the sound is enough. A Bengali, I have not visited a fish market for obvious reasons, even though my father has tried to tell me how irrational the fear is. But isn’t that what phobia is? On a holiday in Kerala, my parents had to move and eat in a car because I would not sit still in a fishing village there. Strangely, it was also one reason I picked A.I.I.M.S. over K.E.M…the paediatric ward there had resident cats! ‘What am I supposed to do when the guy comes to deliver food, how will I open the door, how will I step out tomorrow to go to work?’ these thoughts flashed through my head as I tiptoed towards the door (And I find them so stupid as I type)!
“Breathe”, I told myself, as I turned on the light in the landing and gently opened one of the double doors. There, the thickest tail of a ginger cat, was just visible. I made some noises and knocked hard against the door till the meowing stopped. I had managed to get the cat away!!! Phew!!! Lesson learnt, you can start conquering your fears, even small steps help you overcome slowly.
Apart from the relatives of the patients, in A.I.I.M.S., we also have monkeys chasing after us!!! Yes, you read that right. One of our senior residents was actually bitten and my colleague’s apron was snatched by a group of them. My mother had come to visit me once. I was in the hospital and she was going out to get some veggies. She locked the door and was heading down the stairs when she saw a monkey come up. She quickly turned and climbed back to my floor, but it followed. She decided to go up further instead of opening the lock but there was a second monkey on the floor above. She was trapped. As she screamed for help the two ambushed her from either side. Fortunately, another doctor staying in the same building, hearing the commotion, opened the door to let her in! Since then, I have spotted our ancestors on several occasions atop water tanks, climbing the rails and sitting on the fences, sunbathing. I once asked my regular grocer, there is such a monkey menace here, how do people tolerate this? He replied in a very, very nonchalant way, “arre yeh toh yahan aate hi rehte hain. Ek din kisi ne fridge khola aur andar bandar baitha tha! Hahaha!!!” On the first day of my M.D. Practical exam, as I walked to the hospital with all my equipments, I caught sight of a monkey in the gully that I have to cross. I turned around and took a longer route to the hospital. When I reached there I told one of my friends that I saw a monkey that morning. He laughed and replied that his mother had also seen one in the balcony and had exclaimed “Hanuman ji ne darshan diya, exam accha hoga!!!” Lesson learnt, when you hear the dogs of GN barking a lot, keep your ears open and look towards the skies, the monkeys are around…and if they are, don’t make eye contact, drop any food item you have in your hand and move away without any attempt to run, if you can.
Every morning as I make my way to the hospital, I am greeted by the fragrance of cow dung on the lanes of GN, as I hop skip and jump across them, playing a game of hurdles to reach my destination! The holy animal can be seen early morning, as it occupies half the width of the narrow gully and strangely, the only thing I can think about is how so many patients come to the eye hospital with corneal perforation, ulcers and I had even found a retinal detachment because of trauma to the eye with ‘Gai ki poonch’…and I hurriedly go past the cow, with my face turned to the other side, steering clear of the tail swinging away! Lesson learnt, the Gods also have weapons of destruction.
The Garbage Collector
Once I moved out of my first house, I rented an apartment on my own. It was a two- room kitchen flat, cozy with a balcony and the landlords were good people. I did ultimately get a hostel room, but I continued to stay here because I had got used to it and I could not bear to stay away from my parents when they would come to visit. However, there was a catch. My neighbour would not allow me to keep the dustbin outside in the morning and the garbage collector did not come before midday while I left at 7-7.30 in the morning. So I paid Tara extra to take my garbage bag and throw it either in the kooda walas’ cart as they are there in the morning in the other gullies or in the dumping site in GN. I told her specifically not to throw randomly or litter anywhere. She would do so and told me that she had a deal with one of the kooda walas and things were going smoothly. One day I was examining patients in the OPD when I got a call from an unknown number on my mobile. I answered to find a woman shrieking at the top of her voice.
“Aap kooda gully ke saamne daal kar jaate hain!”
“Hello, aap kaun bol rahin hai”
“My jamadarni bol rahi hoon”, she screamed at the other end.
“Nahi, meri maid, kooda wale ke gaadi mein hi dalti hai, hum usko pay bhi karte hain. Aapko kuch galat fehmi hui hogi.”
“Nahi! Aapka kooda roz gully ke saamne rehta hai. Main saaf karti hun. Appka naam Dr. MS hai? Aapka address yeh hai? Aapka phone number yeh hai?”
Everything was correct!!! How?
“Aapke kachre se Yummy Mummy ka slip mila hai mujhe kai baar!!!”
I used to order food from there.
“Main aapka complain kar rahi hun MCD mein! Warrant niklega aapke naam. 30000 rupaye ka jurmana!”
I somehow apologized and pacified her while assuring her that I had absolutely no idea that this was happening and that it would never happen again.
1. I was being accused of littering, something that I oppose vehemently even with friends, by a jamadarni- Shit
2. She was going to take out a warrant against me-Double shit
3. She knew my name, address and phone number from a food bill- bloody hell! Crime writers alert! Take notes!
After giving Tara, a piece of my mind and after sitting in the morning for three days with my door open, I caught hold of the kooda wala who came to my building and told him to start taking the garbage from the dustbin I kept outside when I left. Fortunately, my unreasonable neighbour had moved out by then and this system has worked smoothly except for the times that the felines and doggos decide to pay a visit and I have to clean up the mess after coming back!
Second Floor, Right side door
When I moved to this flat, my landlord told me that the motor pump had an alarm and would ring once the water tank was full each morning so that I could turn it off. First morning there, I turned on the pump and went back to bed. Suddenly I was woken up by a lady, “Paani ki tanki bhar gayi hai, kripya motor band kar dijiye!” Move over Siri, my motor alarm was wayyy cooler!
As I got ready to go to work, I could hear the pressure cooker letting off steam in the flat opposite mine and kids getting ready for school. Then came the tune of the beginning of an old hindi song…Isn’t that ‘Laila, main Laila’? Why would anyone play that song at 7 am? I wondered. But the music was instead followed by “Kripya darwaza kholein”! That was the doorbell of my neighbour!!! What a Qurbani of a simple doorbell!!!
The main door had a double door, the outer one having grills and net for safety. Post an attempted burglary in my building, the lady living on the first floor insisted that a lock should be put in the main gate of the building, with a key for each resident, which would be locked each night at 10pm and opened at 6 in the morning. Basically, it was a hole drilled into the metallic gate with a lock which could be turned probably 10 times! The first morning that Tara rang the bell from downstairs, it was a cold winter morning when my numb fingers somehow managed to find the key hole in the dark! Like other things, I got used to this as well. But each time I had to enter my home, I felt like a Gringotts goblin carrying a set of big old keys to a safe vault!
Well this room was also like a vault in another sense. Once you enter, Vodafone signal was like a coy maiden, shying away, hiding but hoping to be found.
“The Vodafone number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable!” This was the answer most people trying to contact me would get. To talk, I would have to stand in the balcony and once I found the correct spot, I had to be still…one false move and the signal would be lost! It was toughest for the Zomato guys coming with delivery. If they somehow managed to connect, I had to explain the way standing in the balcony till they finally found my door. I could have very well recorded a message and kept if only I knew when their calls would get through. “U.P. Dairy ke side mein, Supreme dry cleaners wali gully se pehla right.” Strangely, my number was never unavailable for the Eye Bank fellow trying to contact me for an eye donation call!
My sole means of contact with the outside world was the WiFi. But alas, it too was a fickle friend. Since I needed this signal to function or do any work or stay sane, Mr. Vinod, my WiFi operator came to be on the top of my recent list of contacts on my phone right after my mother!!! A stout fellow who looked very much like a toad, Vinod honestly did nothing to fix the connection which was lost quite often. His solutions, I learnt quickly, included, “Ek baar switch off switch on kijiye.” Done. “Ek baar router ka wire nikal ke phir connect kijiye.” Done. “Nahi aaya? Accha main dekhta hun.” After this I have a feeling he would just remove someone else’ wire and connect with mine and vice versa!!!
It was some time in the last month. For a change I actually fell asleep at 11pm instead of the daily 2-2.30 am. At around 2 am, I was woken up by somebody knocking against a steel door, like the safety door of my flat. Was it my neighbour’s? Was it my door? I was still dazed. But as it continued, becoming more frantic with time, I was wide awake. Should I open the first door and see? No, I should just let the person believe I’m asleep. I tried peeping through the small window in my kitchen but couldn’t make out anything in the dark. I half expected to see a silhouette! What if I opened the door in the morning and found a body? Sometimes I just wish I could put my imagination in a leash!! Stop it! I should just try to sleep. I guess I did fall asleep and never found anything outside my door the next morning…but the idea of a ghost or a criminal on the run seeking shelter does cross my mind even as I write!
And hence, I write…
Well, Gautam Nagar is a strange place to say the least. As a friend had once protested when we were planning a camping trip to Triund, “I have been camping for three years in Gautam Nagar, let’s stay in a hotel in Dharamshala.” But as I get ready to leave, I am suddenly pretty sure I am going to miss this unique and queer place. So, until my next visit, Adios GN!
MS
