Part 3 of my life in Wadi

Wadi started slowly getting populated. Young men who had left their homes in faraway parts of India with nothing more than an SSLC degree, in search of livelihood got their places in Wadi. Many were Tamilians or Malayalis working in lowly positions like peons and drivers. Once their jobs were confirmed, they went back to their hometowns and came back with brides. Eventually the brides got pregnant and the first lot of second generation expatriate Wadiites came into existence. We will call these creatures by their authentic name “Wadi ke potte aur pottiyan” – (say WKP for convenience of future reference). I may claim to be one of them. Though for out parents and elders, Wadi was but a remote godforsaken outpost of civilization, which MUST be deserted the moment they retired for their ancestral hometowns in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for us WKPs Wadi was a powerful emotional presence. Even today when I live and work in the Capital of India (about the landmarks of which we used to learn tentatively in classes in Wadi), I wouldn’t hesitate to place Wadi on the top in many factors which make a settlement livable. It could be mistaken chauvinism, it could be jingoism but I am not ashamed of it; nor would I think any single one of the WKPs would hesitate to emulate me.

Strictly speaking, I was’nt a WKP by birth, but by domicile. I was born when my father was working for ACC at a place called Dwaraka, in Gujarat, in the Western border of India. The place where I was born is called Moovattupuzha which happens to be the hometown of my mother and which is in the Ernakulam District of Kerala. I learn that it took four changes of trains and as much as six days to reach Dwaraka from Moovattupuzha in those days. Anyway I was duly taken to Dwaraka when I was five months old, which was around the March of 1965. Soon after the Indo Pak War of 1965 started. I have heard that one could see the lights of Karachi from the seashore of Dwaraka. The outcome of it all was that the Pakistanis bombed the hell out of Dwaraka and I spent most of the nights of my first year of life in sandpits, sheltered from the bombs landing all around us. My lifelong aversion to exploding firecrackers and the festival of Diwali could have had a Freudian root in this experience. I still do not like firecrackers.

Now when Dwaraka was thus destroyed by the Pakistanis (There could be people who may disagree with me when I say that the Pakistanis destroyed Dwaraka in the 1965 war, and they may be right, but the ACC factory and colony pretty well became unhabitable and unusable thereafter), It left the management of ACC with no option but to transfer their employees to their other Plants. So like a handful of scattered grains, people went to such remote places as Madukkarai, Shahabad, Wadi, Kymore, Lakheri etc. And as had been pre ordained I with my family reached Wadi. I was little when I reached Wadi – less than a year old – so I claim my rightful position as a WKP. And like Musharraf who went on from the bylanes of Delhi to become the President of Pakistan, I slowly became more loyal than the king becoming a militant WKP and a militant Kannadiga in the later stages of my life.