My chawl and its people

I spent most of my life living in a 'Chawl' (चाळ in Marathi). We still have our home in our chawl and I visit it on my every India trip. For people who don't know what does word "chawl" means, let me explain it a little bit to the best of my ability, chawl is a type of setup where many houses are aligned side by side like a train (it can be one or two or maximum three-story building). They are not like row houses or condos but more like trailers stacked one adjacent to another.. By the description it doesn't look like a very comfortable or attractive place to live with family, it comes with minimum privacy but with maximum fun (at kids have a lot of fun as kids, I don't know about adults). Culture in chawl was also used to be very unique. All members knew each other very well, there were no secrets, it was very easy to know what was going on in each home, absolutely no privacy. So, whether you wanted it or not all your friends knew if you had a bad day in your home Houses were crowded but there used to be a lot of open space around to play.

I can't capture the essence of that life in words but life was filled with a lot of fun and unpredictable but interesting things. I still remember our cricket matches where both teams used to play as if it was a World Cup final to win 25 paise (Indian quarter, which is less than a US penny). Every chawl used to have their own cricket team and some were bitter rivals of each other. Matches between those teams used to be full of high tension and a lot of drama and many times ended without any result because of a dispute over some runout decision. Having your own cricket bat was a big luxury that very few kids could afford and whoever used to have it used to feel like a king and really used to get royal treatment as everyone needed that bat to play. We never had a lot of toys or any video games at that time but there were many games we used to play which never required any sophisticated equipment but were very enjoyable. Most of them are almost extinct now but I still remember all of them. Most of the kids from our chawl used to go to the same school. We used to go to school with our bikes or company-provided school bus (by a company called Vanaz, where most men from our Chawl used to work, that's why our chawl was called Vanaz Chawl). That school bus was not like the one which you see nowadays, fancy and tailormade to be a school bus. It was a regular bus but used to carry schoolchildren. It used to be really overcrowded, to get a seat on that bus one really had to fight a war and some kids used to try to ride on the running bus just to get the seat, this resulted in one tragedy where one student got crushed under the bus. That bus was called the school bus only because it used to carry school children but there was no other feature of the school bus associated with it. I am glad that I survived those years without facing any major accident. Our life there was full of a lot of good stuff at the same time so many risks, which were very serious by today's safety standards.

For a long time, we never had individual water connections for each house. There used to be common taps from where everyone (including kids) used to carry water with buckets or different vessels to their homes and store it for daily use. We used to receive water for a few hours each day so there used to be tough competition to fill all our vessels before they shut down the water supply for the day. This used to create a lot of fights, some really ugly but bitterness never used to last long, the next day again fresh challenge, new war, and new fights. These fights or arguments were so common that other people hardly used to interfere or get bothered by these, except for people who were involved in these arguments all others used to continue with their routine as if nothing strange was happening, no one used to freak out over some argument going around them, sounds so strange when I look back to those incidents now.

Eating dinner together with friends was also a common practice. Kids used to take their plates outside and sit together to eat dinner, all used to share the dishes with each other, and one used to get a taste of different types of food. Slowly as people got more money they built more rooms and we lost our veranda so this practice slowly stopped, but it was fun as long it lasted. Keeping an eye on kids used to be the job of any elder from the neighborhood not just the parents of that kid. If anyone from our neighborhood caught us doing something wrong they had full right to punish us and normally no parent used to object to this. I think this practice of collaborative parenting made our neighborhoods safe and allowed many parents to carry out their day-to-day activities without being bothered about the safety of their children. This doesn't mean our parents were not careless, they cared about us as much as present-day parents care about their kids but this system worked very efficiently back then and made their job easy.

Life back then was filled with many incidents and situations that one can not even imagine today. The world has moved on and many of those things vanished with time. I don't regret that they are gone, change is important and is required but I do remember most of those incidents fondly. I still visit my chawl and know each and every individual from my chawl personally. My chawl has also changed a lot, it's not the same as it was 20 years ago but this change is natural no one can avoid it. Maybe in the future, there won't be any chawls, maybe they don't fit in the image of a modern city, and all people might prefer to live in nice apartments or beautiful single-family homes, but my chawl, its people and days which I spent there will always remain in my memory.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)