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.
