A slice of heaven on earth

Gauri Parasher Joshi

The room where the interview was held was small. The chair had a genial and intelligent appearance. The rest would have passed in a whirl of words rebounding off rather flimsy-looking walls, but for one of those moments that tend to make or break a test. “So, you’re from Chandigarh,” said the chair peering into my curriculum vitae.

Before I could say the sprightly ‘yes’ of a 25-year-old, he broke in musingly, “It’s a boring city. No character to it; all the buildings look the same.” He had meant to provoke me and I took the bait alright. “THAT is its character. The buildings look the same, so you know this has to be Chandigarh,” I spluttered excitedly. The room was suddenly full of laughter. I found myself smiling a wide, toothy smile too.

I had worked in a business newspaper in Delhi as a trainee sub-editor for a mere six months, but I shall remember always the grounding in the play and scrutiny of words that I received there. Then I came back home, to the city that welcomed you with its dividers overflowing with a muddle of magenta, pink and white bougainvillea. To wide roads that would remain always tarred and clean so that when your folks would come home in the evening, you would think of just driving around with the greens of the Leisure Valley rolling by your side, the lulling yet tingling lap of the serene waters of the Sukhna beckoning you and the Shivalik hills rearing up against an oh-so-blue sky.

As a child, you only had to wait for the school exams to get over so that you could pull out your bicycle for a ride around the sectors, marvelling at a city that had burst into its spring bloom. It was as if spring would swoosh through the city, strewing its magic of lilac and purple petunias and yellow and white pansies in every corner. Homes would bring out the colours of ice-flowers and phlox, of chrysanthemum and dahlia. Creepers would spray orange, red and violet onto the exteriors of homes. Rows of golden showers and purple jacaranda brighten the aspect of roads. The fountain in the Rose Garden would lift itself higher and higher until every drop glistened with drops of sun. And the quiet!

You could sit on a patch of lush green, soft, wild grass, the kind that sprouts those tiny sun-yellow flowers and close your eyes. With the warm sun in its azure home, you could slip into the nicest of slumbers... It is debatable, but hanging on to patches of memory that give you peace and happiness may actually be a spur to sorting out the difficulties one sees around in the present.

As the nineties first drifted, then raced to hug the new century, more school-goers left the city for the duller skies of big cities and more families came in to work and set up their home here. Traffic jams, unheard of in the city, managed to creep onto the roads. Some roundabouts had to be done away with, sadly, but perhaps as a necessity. Still, the ones that remain continue to preserve the identity of Chandigarh.

Today, we can criticise the minds that planned this city. It cannot accommodate a growing population, its architecture is all but depressing and we often crib. But we do know it has behind it the untiring work of many minds and hands, often little known.

They gave us this City Beautiful, a city for retired persons, a city that engages you with its compactness, its proximity to the green hills, its own right-angle based symmetry, play of numbers of the northern sectors that makes the sum of sectors opposite each other a multiple of 13. Can one justly gloss over the fact that the mango orchard on the way to Tribune Chowk grows green to this day because an officer himself ensured that the trees were tended to properly? Or the competitions for roundabouts in the nineties, again by an officer that ensured that each entity that adopted a roundabout would do its utmost to convert it into the darling of every season. Or still, the cycle track that came up first at the same time and was re-done in bright colours recently, inviting people to live healthy and keep the city’s blue skies from greying. Rules that prevent ugly hoardings from defacing the city’s orderly scapes and keep ghastly additions to homes from sprouting out… All of this and more makes up what we know to be Chandigarh today.

The challenges of the present are different, but more later. For now, suffice it to say that those that work hard need little stimulus and continue to give their best to the city. It is the rest of us, that want to dwell in the sunny past rather than let that be a charming and encouraging memory that needs to safeguard what there is and work to make the logic of all battered “keep your city green and clean” boards meaningful.

So, here’s to the sentinels of the city that continue to wrap Chandigarh in the character that makes it mean so many things to so many people, and a slice of heaven to the writer.