The world,through a car window

This grandmother has lived all her life on the other side of river Sabarmati,in one of the ghettos of Ahmedabads walled city. Here,in the slums that came up in the eighties,when the mills of Ahmedabad were shut and the workers retrenched,people like Valiben dream of a growth that happens near them,without them. But today,Valiben has seen an escalator and a mall,sights that had conspired to keep her out for so long.

Valibens neighbour Savita Parmar has discovered something tooAhmedabads biggest college,the sprawling,tree-lined campus of the Louis Kahn-designed IIM-Ahmedabad. I am going to tell my son and husband that I went where they have never been,it is such a huge place, she says.

Valiben,Savita and 80-year-old Noor Hassan,who sleeps outside the Shah Alam dargah,are among a dozen-odd people who were being taken by an Ahmedabad-based organisation,SPRAT Society for Promoting Rationality,to a part of their city they never knew existedthe Sabarmati Ashram,the Indian Institute of Management,a mall and a newly built lake in the younger,western limits of the city.

Every Tuesday,starting from Gandhi Jayanti this year,SPRAT volunteers take a dozen-odd senior citizens from the slums on a joyride,their first in a car. They giggle,smile and bundle themselves into the carsall loaned by well-wishersthat take them out on a four-hour-long spin. They are picked up from their homes and taken around the city.

In this city choking on the fumes of its 2,87,329 cars,many had never sat in one all their lives. But today when they did,their cars gliding along the Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway that curves smoothly into the state capital,they looked out of the window most of the timeat the long blur of glass and concrete,apartments and multiplexes,malls and car showrooms. They had finally managed a ticket on a journey that had been denied to them for so long.

When Ahmedabad transformed from a one-time sultanate capital to a city of roads,flyovers,malls and cars,a few thousands were left outabout 42 per cent of the citys population of fifty lakh still live in slums spread over 792 different pockets.

It is a small gesture,they are as excited as kids. And it cost us perhaps no more than a cup of coffee at a Café Coffee Day joint, says Anurag Wakode of the Leo Club of Karnavati which hired an Esteem for todays joyride.

My husband and son work in a factory. I now take care of my children. We have never seen this side of the city, says Savita,sitting back in a pearl white Chevrolet. After her husband lost his job as a mill worker,her family moved from Ahmedabad to their village in Dehgam in Gandhinagar. A decade ago,they moved back to the city.

We see cars but how could we ever sit in one of them? Can you arrange for a trip to Vaishnodevi in a car, asked Kavita Bhavsar,looking out of a shiny black Esteem,hers for a day.