Srinagar is my city. It is majestic in many ways. But it has much to hide while a lot to show. Amidst the scenic aura and historical architecture, Srinagar is a paradoxical mosaic of people and problems.
My city reminds me of Eliot’s The Waste Land wherein he sees the city as a place of both excitement and estrangement. As a poet, he observes a certain kind of anonymity and uniformity verging on the uncanny, depicting the crowds in the city who seemed both everyday and unreal. That’s why Eliot termed the city of London as an “Unreal City.” It’s said that he had initially used the phrase “Terrible City” before finally choosing the more upsetting term “Unreal City.” Eliot points out the resonances of a mundane phenomenon while suggesting vagaries of the place whose recent past had witnessed people trailing to their deaths on the battlegrounds of the First World War:
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet…..
Similarly, Irish writer James Joyce in his collection of short stories named Dubliners talks about his city Dublin and the stories of its desperate lives of ‘commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness.’ Joyce had left his city of birth Dublin for a life of exile and his return to ‘dear dirty Dublin’ through his fiction makes him imagine the city as a place of ‘scrupulous meanness’ and then dismiss it as a second-rate ‘centre of paralysis’ in Dubliners. The longest story of this collection ‘The Dead’ is considered the finest short story in English and it poignantly projects the petty underlying frustrations of urban life, and the interplay of its memory and the politics of nationalism.
Rollback Srinagar. My city too seems worthy of description in any piece of literature. There is so much to talk about it; from dust, din, danger to death. The maze of wounded streets and holed roads presents it as a city of deprivation and desperation. Menaced by marvel and mud, it’s literally becoming an encroaching city. It’s creeping with ambivalence and anxiety.
A city in flux, Srinagar perhaps means different things to different people. Taking the urban landscape for clues, then Srinagar is the epitome of beauty. It’s a place to be projected as a centre of happening, what they call a Smart City! Pandemic or no pandemic; roads or potholes; traffic jams or jamborees; polluted water-bodies or ornamented cesspools; stray dogs or killing canines; stinking garbage or piles of muck—Srinagar ironically emerges as the ‘least livable city’ as per the Ease of Living Index that evaluates the quality of life and the impact of different initiatives for urban development. Each sketch and each errand; each plant and each flower that “add value” to the urban edifice of Srinagar appears as an essential formula for future depictions of dystopia, of a broken place to be made perfect by flawed planning.
With over 15 lakh tulips of more than 64 varieties blooming in the backyard of Srinagar, and a ten crore project to flower further, all roads leading to them cry for mend. And the lines of peeing tourists along the dilapidated pavements of Dal Lake call for Srinagar’s Swachta, together with all proper facilities needed to promote the genuine tourism industry.
As of now, amid a surge in Covid-19, my city is bursting with infected strains and tulip stalks. By the way, the scenario is reminiscent of the book The Tulip by a British octogenarian author and gardening correspondent Anna Pavord. She traces the journey of this wildflower and explains why it has driven men mad by jotting a spectrum of human endeavor with the voyage of the tulip through history, early its origin in Central Asia down to Europe which was swept with ‘tulipomania’ in the 17th century when the cost of a single tulip bulb exceeded the price of any palatial house in Amsterdam. She sees tulip as the culmination of a 500-year history and a flower “that has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual and cultural baggage than any other on earth”.
However interestingly, vis-à-vis the popular ‘tulipomania’, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World mocks the movement and puts forward “The Greater Fool Theory” by stating how “folly it is to pay thousands for a tulip bulb as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more”. Tulip, the most ephemeral of objects, throws open the question of irrational investments and short dividends in the world. But the whole logic is quite relevant while looking at the behaviors of both the rulers and the ruled. In comparison to tulip bulbs, my city roads necessitate a better bargain. My city craves quality attention and humane treatment.
Bottomline: In one of the sections ‘The Burial of the Dead’ Eliot writes in The Waste Land—
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land….
April is here too. Tulips have driven us crazy. Coronavirus is infiltrating. And as my city drops memory, somewhere shadowless in the abyss of deaths of young, Srinagar continues to drift through uncertainty and underdevelopment. Seems collective consciousness along with the city is decaying. Does Srinagar qualify to be called ‘Unreal City’ or ‘Centre of Paralysis’? Our connection to this city, its past, our place in it, and the things we now use to describe it—all point to the reality that when amnesia begins to regulate the heartbeat of the city, the arteries may possibly lead to a valley of ashes.