Doors My Grandmother Didn’t Knock: A Photo Essay
Pune is a city that could only be personified by a grumpy old lady who used to write books in Marathi in her younger years and now complains about the language fading from teenagers’ tongues. She knows independence and likes to stay quiet (unless the society kids are playing cricket between 2 pm and 4 pm). She likes relatives informing her that they’re going to visit beforehand so that she can clean the house, make a rangoli by the side of the door frame, and change the flowers too.
Doors in India are more than just entrances to one’s houses, they are a gateway into one’s lives. They are frequently decorated. They create a personality for the space, having the power to make a stranger feel welcome in the most mundane scenarios. They set a mood — a white glossy door for a family just starting out, a dark brown wooden one to signify the effort to remain a family, the one with chipped paint and dust to welcomes newness.
My grandparents keep the door to their home (light blue, chipped wood, brittle) open all through the day, only closing it at 9 pm. When I was younger, I used to think it’s because they’re bored and they want to know what’s going outside — keep an eye on the activities surrounding them that they cannot be a part of due to old age. As I grew up, my grandmother told me stories, as they all do. I got to know then that keeping the door open was an invitation to the gods to grace our homes with their presence. I was young. That is to say, I did not understand how important and real this was to them.
In spite of the door open all day long, my grandmother did not go out of the house. It seemed that the privilege of staring at strangers for no reason being acceptable was reserved only for men. So she gazed at the world through windows. She also had a medical issue due to which she preferred not walking out of the old bungalow into the verandah.
The disadvantage of looking through windows (that have a grid of rods) is that it causes one’s perception of the world to be fragmented. So was her’s. In several discussions with the family, her opinions were just not smart enough, her introspections filled with gaps and faults. She was easily dismissed then.
She spoke to the vegetable sellers from the window. I used to think if she doesn’t move, the patterns of the window will match her tan but she wouldn’t mind because the funny flower tan patterns would ensure that she stays inside without anyone pestering her to go out.
In many ways, she was an indoor flâneur (the oxymoron not just an attempt at poetic gratification). Flâneur is a French noun referring to a person, literally meaning ‘stroller’, ‘lounger’, ‘saunterer’, or ‘loafer’. It aims to depict the people who indulge in the act of strolling. My grandmother, in its conventional sense, cannot be categorised as one.
But she saw the family living opposite our house change their personalities over the years by the colour of their gates — a blue and white, the maroon and yellow, the rusted maroon for a couple of years when they were going through a rough patch and now an orange and pink (a combination that she doesn’t like very much).
With her eyes behind the window, her feet right behind the doorframe, she saw the world transform — from an obsession with Maruti 800’s to Maruti Suzuki Swift, M80s to the redesigned Vespas, and the elevation of the road in front of our house rising seemingly every year.
She, an indoor flâneur, became an amalgamation of the extremes — a duality of personality in flux. Do all old women become grumpy this way?
Pune is strange — welcoming through colours but snappy with people. She is a contradiction of characteristics. She somehow manages to give space to the tranquillity of Aundh and the chaos of Lakshmi Road. She nurtures the extremities, perpetually broadening her spectrum.
Doors are also shields — that became higher, sturdier and a manifestation of our paranoia during the pandemic. They stopped the air that carried a virus we still don’t understand properly. We are not acquaintances with it, its stay is not welcome, and we’re not subtle about it. Pune has taught us that meaningless politeness is pointless.
Thus, houses became impregnable forts — they’ve learnt defence from their history.
She is angry that her chaos has been tamed so ruthlessly, without prior intimation. So the fragile doors close and the locks almost rust during the monsoon. No one visits Pune when it’s raining during a pandemic. She doesn’t hold a grudge. However, it does remind one of the words, “कागज़ के परदें है, तालें है दरवाज़ों पे|”
Without being a metropolis, Pune hosts a variety of tempers: from the bus conductor waiting for you to fetch 2 rupees from deep inside your bags to the security in the museum losing his cool seeing a smartphone in your hands. While she doesn’t tolerate tardiness and would probably be a strict teacher if she could, she allows these faults to coexist.
The above photo essay tries to build a narrative of Pune personified as a grandmother to depict her introspections, reflections and characteristics. It could be perceived as a portrait of the city through her doors and gates that are a window to her eccentric personality. While she could be interpreted as independent, some part of her is paralysed due to societal conditioning. A city with a rich history and culture, it could be said that her “health” degrades as consumerism increases year by year.
The old parts of the city, with houses built in close vicinity without allotting space for the future, are primarily static. These areas are romanticised in their descriptions over the years without communicating the rot they pile on with the passage of time. The gender of the city is a deliberate choice, trying to highlight the role (and lives) of women while history celebrates their husbands.
The material of the past is ephemeral and this is seen in the fragility of the wooden doors that were once sturdy. She is an oxymoron in the sense that she lives the present in a constant state of nostalgia. While some of the photographs are colourful, the others are black and white. This aims to convey the heterogeneous people that live in it, the different parts of the city that have completely opposite personalities and the lack of a congruent personality of the city that has now become as opposed to its homogenous perception a decade ago.