The Evergreen Bar and Restaurant
Among the memorable
books that emerged from the flower children of the 60s is "Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig, where he ruminated on life and philosophy and at one
point narrates a tale of some people who complained to a priest about a church
building being converted to a pub. The sagely priest smiled and reminded them
that the real church was never in the brick and mortar but in each believer in
Christ who constituted the body of the church, a living organism; it was not a
building but a body that is invisible. Of course Pirsig then proceeds to
examine the idea of a University as a church of Reason. I am intrigued by the
inversion of this metaphor of a pub or bar converted into a residence.
I was persuaded to buy
six years ago a flat in a building that stood on a site which once was “The
Evergreen Bar and Restaurant”, a thriving and
colourful bar and restaurant at the edge of a teeming slum called Shastri Nagar
and belonged neither to the slum nor to the haggardly buildings that it rested
against. There was barely even a footpath but a huddle of bricks next to the
gutters of the slum that led nowhere wherein ambled sewer rats and bandicoots
and then suddenly you chanced upon this bar and possibly was the cause of joy
to some, an unburdening to others and the ruin of yet others, all who have
vanished in the mists of history. I cannot say that I have been its patron
though I cannot deny that there have been a couple of occasions where I freshly
graduated in the early 1980s walked in with a friend; into its dark and eerily lit
smoky recesses to down a pint or two or use a large rum and coke to kindle a
conversation that exhausted itself in the smoke and din of friends jeering,
shouting, and the tinkling and crashing of glass. With bearers running down the
aisles and mingled odours of freshly spiced dishes and stale sweat and alcohol
of assorted strength its ambiance assailed the senses into numbness. Once you
stepped inside the bar you would forget the squalor that skirted the slum and
the din of the concourse of life in huddled spaces was matched within the bar
by din of a different order. This was not the species called “Family Bar and
Restaurant” where families discreetly indulged a drink or two in a well lit
genteel way with entrees covering up unnumbered drinks unobserved by prying
eyes at ‘Gharonda’ or even ‘Chinar’ which were close by. It was worse than the ‘Ujala
Bar and Restaurant’ which had a similar clientele but was cleaner. Yet it was a
proud establishment that never failed to satiate the thirst of the thousands who
met there.
“Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that
youth will give you.
This place was loud and raucous and at times was drowned by awful music of the eighties and you entered a different world where you did not
know where you were, dark, dingy even menacing lit in red bulbs with cigarette
smoke curling up. It was a place where your status, position, title, wealth or
rank held no place and was a strange equalizer. All you knew after a pint or
two was what you were animatedly talking about, your friend and his glass and
the remnants of uneaten snacks and cigarette ash. Strangely I believe that was
true of every bar in those days of youth and if one were taken out of one and
put into another you could not tell the difference. Those were also days of
scarcity and thrift was imposed by the necessity of a light purse. Mostly they
were just a pretext to catch up, talking animatedly with friends on every topic
under the sun including books, films, music, philosophy, poetry and indeed love,
late until we were reminded to place the last orders. Life was the tint of red
wine and there was just the future, a great unknown.
I would never have believed then that someday I might inhabit and share
the same space that was once a bar with my mother in tow and even call it home
and herald each dawn with Vedic chants of Rudram
Chamkam or the Taittiriya or the shahasranama. Indeed I might have even
thought it unaesthetic or simply sacrilegious. Yet such is the strange turn of
the screw of fate that I find myself in this place that upon reflection seems
crazy, exasperating and strangely home though amusingly it was once a pub! Over
the last five years the place transformed to an extent that can be only
described as profound as that when a frog kissed by a princess turned into a
prince. The slum beneath the building’s toes vanished and the building emerged
like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Of course I am exaggerating and resorting to
hyperbole but nevertheless the transformation was great. I simply dismissed the
place history as irrelevant to my intent and purpose of establishing a new home
for my mother and me, though to many others it was a troubling idea. I was in a
hurry and the others were not. It was mom’s 75th birthday and
impulsively took the decision to gift her a new place without bargaining much
“Alhamdulillah” as the sales staff gushed. Many were unnerved at the slum just
beneath our toes and others added that the developer belonged to another faith.
The sales staff at the Dudhwala building chimed that the choice of a home is
not made in one’s head but by the will of the good Lord “Insha Allah”. I am not
saying that dismissing this history was a rational or good judgment. I am
merely stating that there are more ways that people examine this, all of which
are valid and legitimate though I might disagree with some or more.
“The moving finger writes; and, having writ moves on:
nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it”
Can a space that was
once a temple or pub, have any bearing on its trajectory over time on the
quality of the space? Simply put, it throws into relief the question whether
space and time have any quality or are simply quality less and perfectly
substitutable. Can a church that became a pub retain its sacred quality despite
operating as a pub or can a pub changed into a residential building haunt its
denizens of merits and errors/sins committed on its soil in the recent past.
Can a site be made holy upon consecration or does it bear the burden of its
history and remain lingeringly on the edges of its dual quality. I do not wish
to get into the New Age wooliness of every place having vibrations and that one
can sense positive or negative vibrations. I am tonally deaf to vibrations and
cannot understand it and I find it exasperating when people declare that they
can feel these vibrations and dismiss it to a fault of my sensibilities if not
theirs. Is space neutral or is the scared and the profane inextricably
commingled such as to render its quality as neutral? Literature laments the
march of modernity and the loss of life’s certainties and the secularization of
all public life and the loss of all symbolic life to the margins especially
that of religion. But be that as it may does it really change the way people
think or fear?
In most traditional
societies like India where several layers of time sit uneasily upon each other
simultaneously, the complexity of response is marked by even more uncertainty. Notions
of space and time are not quality free and are not perfectly substitutable,
they vary in quality like sacred/profane spaces like temple/crematoria sites or
(in) auspicious time like rahu kaal, abhijit
muhurta etc. In other words we fragment space and time and treat these
fragments differently, their contradictions notwithstanding. When called upon
to make a stark choice like buying property on the site of a pub, a
crematorium, or a place of worship of a minority group (or even developed by
someone of a different religion) we would be seized of non rational concerns
and fears. We make rational economic choices and then rationalize these choices
and appoint priests to negotiate with the Gods their placating, appeasement, or
even silencing the voices of the past, be they spirits, residual karma or bad
“vibrations”.
“Why ponder thus the future to foresee, and jade thy
brain to vain perplexity? Cast off thy care, leave Allah’s plans to him – He
formed them all without consulting thee.” Three Cups of Tea”
Some of my neighbours brought in priests from a distant pilgrim
place, some performed rites over three full days, and some like my mother urged
the priest to get on with the job quickly enough to attend to other cares. My
own ritual advisor an elderly Malayali took over personally the task of Shuddhi
and Shanti (purification and placation) more seriously than we imagined and
brought a Malayali priest from Panvel notably three hours late on Akshaya
Tritiya 2017 who then went on to draw diagrams of the Vastu Purusha for worship
and over the next three hours ignored my mother’s urging to conclude soon. I
remember that at one stage I was advised to place silver images of the heads of
five animals within the walls and plaster it up, which I refused, reminded as I
was of the nature of violence whether performed in the head as thought or
physically as the body in the symbolic sacrifice of animals. I do not state
this with any intent to denigrate these beliefs or show them in a poor light.
On the contrary I enjoy observing these rites as a participant observer
reflecting upon these things at leisure. We cope with uncertainty and allay our
fears by practicing rites that would sacralise the secular and secularize the
sacred. This is a perfectly valid and legitimate way to deal with our (un)conscious
fears and concerns or even of making conscious statements for political or even
commercial purposes. I am not sure I am a liberal though I tend more towards
that, I think of myself as conservative and do cherish traditions and
institutions and religious practice in private and read antiquated texts and
for all appearances seem a yokel of the rural hinterland (not that I care).
About four years ago when there was an unfortunate and untimely
death among the newly resident members in the building there was a palpable
whisper that we ought to do some religious rites for Shanti (make peace or
appease any lurking evil spirits that were yet possibly hung over from the
erstwhile Evergreen bar) by doing a Satyanarayana Puja. I had then very
unwisely remarked that prior to the death there was the birth of a baby boy in
the building which had heralded auspicious tidings and that death alternating
birth was the natural order and refused to take initiative. I must however
confess that it also troubled me that the CHS is a secular institution and
liberty of faith and its practice must be equally and not perfunctorily
rendered, though it never troubled the majority. What I had not understood then
was that fear more than joy grips our imagination and prompts us a course of
action, regardless of the faith we followed. That error is now probably being
remedied by the planned worship this weekend, notwithstanding the fact that
life is a march of strife punctuated occasionally with vanishing rays of joy.
It is strife that prompts our worship more than events of joy or those of
thanksgiving.
A cooperative society is not an organization but an organism,
"a fragile ecosystem, a combustible mixture of impossible people, ideas,
and intentions" to borrow the words of a wise black pastor at Harvard in
describing a school. It is founded on the collocation of its residents “are
endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It is made up of strange factions that
constantly shift boundaries in redefining the “Us” as distinct if not against
“Them” based on shared tongue, culture, region, dietary habits, social and
economic standing, or any other basis sometimes bordering on the pretentious.
Every institution has a dual nature one of ‘Form’ and the other “Spirit’. The
Bengali tradition holds the sacred feminine, the Devi (or any institution, even
nation) in her dual aspect as mrunmayee as “form” or image
and chinmayee as an “idea” or spirit. So also at the heart of
the CHS is the physical building and its custody and the idea of co-operation
and a commitment to share the travail of having to live together responsibly
regardless of our prejudice and preference. The rest is merely noise in the pub.
My mother given her advanced age is
often asked her blessings and one of her pronouncements in Telugu is “challaga, pachhaga undali” may you be at
peace and evergreen!
A Srinivas Rao
701 Fifty One East
