View from my window — II

View from my window, February 2009, Mumbai, https://aarohini.medium.com/view-from-my-window-174ab95fa76c

July 2022, Mysore

When I gaze out of my window, I see only half the sky and a fraction of the land that I once used to. A small convention centre under construction blocks my view.

I moved to Mysore a few years ago after having lived all my life in different Indian metropolises. I found them all unliveable; they were dirty, noisy, polluted and traffucked beyond redemption. Beaten down by mental health issues that seemed to get aggravated by environmental factors, I had gone house-hunting in Mysore and found myself a place that I fell in love with at first sight. It was large and breezy with delightfully sunlit windows and balconies. The compound was lined with trees of guava, lemon, banana, coconut, jasmine, basil, periwinkle and mother-in-law’s tongue.

It was a relief after my previous home in Bengaluru, located within an untrammelled disaster of houses and buildings standing cheek-by-jowl. One could hear babies in different homes wailing at different times in the night. (“I live close to the Princes of Wails,” I’d told a friend once. The only auditory respite was an unknown someone in the adjacent building singing Kenny Rogers’ songs on some nights, and the Burmans, whose living room window opened into mine, playing Rabindra Sangeet on Sundays.)

In the past few years the city has crept into my tiny corner of the world, its ‘development’ thwarted briefly by the pandemic. A few hundred metres away from my home lies a supermarket, a pizza chain outlet, and — something unimaginable when I had moved in — a traffic light. The half-built convention centre now stands where there were trees of the flame-of-the-forest and papaya framed by my window. It obstructs my view of an unmotorable road, a lovely two-storey house in bright brick-red and blue, and cows grazing in the distance on foliage that has turned glossy green after the rains. Bonnet monkeys who ransacked fruit from our compound have almost stopped coming. My mornings are no longer filled with the dawn chorus, and evenings come with much less chirp and chatter.

The direction opposite to my window offers an unobstructed view of the Chamundi Hill. For how long, I wonder.

I sometimes contemplate moving further away, to places where I have an uncluttered view of the open skies and open land.

All the land around Mysore has been sold, from what I hear, and is fated to be urbanised. In this country with its teeming millions, the city will eventually advance to wherever I am and engulf me.

I can no longer live with changing views.