Tremor of change

Bhavnagar is among those few towns of Saurashtra where you can still wake up to the sound of peacocks and prabhatias. After being weaned on the dust, noise and squalor of cities like Delhi and Ahmedabad, I found Bhavnagar quite quaint when I moved in a decade and a half ago. Here life moved on at a most leisurely pace. People still travel in tongas. The town and its people still retain an old-world charm — aging bungalows with their tiled roofs and wooden arches, nestling among groves of neem and copperpod, in whose foliage painted strokes and spoonbills breed every winter.

One of my favourite haunts in Bhavnagar was, and still is, the old Gandhi Smriti Library. This is not like the slick British Council library at Ahmedabad or the posh American Centre facility in Delhi with their computerised catalogues, whirring air-conditioners and the air thick with silence. Here, instead, you will find old books with yellowing pages and tattered margins giving off that aroma of nostalgia that only old books possess, creating an ambience of a bygone era when Saurashtra was more proudly called ‘Kathiawar’, the land of Kathi Rajputs, shepherds and bards.

On languid summer afternoons you may find yourself almost alone in the library with only the cooing of the pigeons on the wooden rooftop for company. Occasionally you might find an old Gandhian, clad in khadi, peering into the bookshelves; he may even come and sit beside you to inquire about your reading interests. As afternoon slips into evening, the old librarian comes ambling down to switch on the lights for you and to ask you whether you need anything!

My friends living in metros often mock me for living in such a ‘not happening’ place, and I tell them that they don’t know what they are missing. But like the rest of the country, Bhavnagar too is on the path of ‘development’. The old bungalows are being demolished to make way for multi-storeyed buildings and malls. The builder’s lobby has now discovered the open fields and skies of Bhavnagar, while traffic has proliferated. With the trees vanishing, the strokes and spoonbills now visit us in smaller numbers. I wonder how long it will take for Bhavnagar to go the way of all those monstrosities that are termed cities?