They Live There

     As we stood facing a wooden artefact bearing words in an Arabic-like font, the man told us that it said you don’t bow before to anyone but before Allah; you don’t go begging to anyone but to Allah.

     And as I stood there, I also stood in one of the many shops at the marketplace at Mahabaleshwar, a hill-station in Maharashtra. Mahabaleshwar, I was always told, is famous for strawberries and cool climate. It is not that I had not visited Mahabaleshwar before, just that I was too young (I was about 2) to have concrete memories about anything then. What this recent trip to Mahabaleshwar taught me is something different. What I seemed to have been harbouring happened to be a 2-dimensional image of a township having a thousand dimensions to it. It started with mulberries, and it just almost never got less complex.

     By fortune or misfortune, you decide, we got to stay at a hotel in downtown Mahabaleshwar. And although the service provided wasn’t good enough (and I contradictorily also wonder if it ever is), I got to see the people of Mahabaleshwar—not just people who claimed to represent it, but who truly did. I realised, not because of any particular incident, but because of some instinct in me, that the peoples, diverse as they are, are bound by a caring love for one another. You cannot get one to scheme against another and you would not have people gossiping there (not that I tried to get them to). People of commerce may now disregard what I sensed as professional courtesy and that by safeguarding one another, they were preventing their own downfall, but I still will say it is amazing—it is something we city-dwellers haven’t yet perfected.

     It is also very interesting to note that the population in Mahabaleshwar is a mixture of people belonging to different faiths. The first day, I wondered if the people who existed there, merely survived or lived in harmony.

     I was at the shop I spoke of in the beginning—as we exited the shop an old Hindu woman selling combs came to a man cleaning that part of the shop where wares were colourfully placed. She extended her palm, clasped his palm, and said, “Kaisa hai, Farookh,” and smiled. I turned towards the road and smiled; they lived.