The traumatic experience of living at Tin Factory, Bengaluru, for about a year (originally published on my WordPress blog).

30 November, 2016

“Nobody said it was easy … no one ever said it would be so hard.” - Scientists, etc.

A few weeks into the month of August 2016, as I packed my bags along with my former flat-mate Ardra, little did I know what I really meant when I said to her, “My new place is at Tin Factory. It’s about five kilometres from the new office.” Ardra, who was then preparing to spend the next two years of her life at Carnegie Mellon University, all the way in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America, simply nodded.

“Apparently, the traffic there is really bad,” I continued. She nodded again, this time looking at me. We lived in BTM Layout at the time, which, despite being an abbreviation of the fearsome ‘Byrasandra, Thavarekere and Madiwala’, was really quite perfect. I can’t recall a happier time: birds flying high, sun in the sky, reeds driftin’ on, you name it. At three kilometres from my office in JP Nagar, and four from Koramangala, the epicentre of Bangalore’s culture and nightlife, BTM was central and convenient. The rent was cheap, the traffic tolerable, and the houses often astonishingly beautiful, arranged in neat rows in small, green lanes, interspersed with general stores that sold everything from milk and eggs to moisturising cream, near libraries run out of the second floor of some homes and parks. In these parks was more greenery, pitifully disguised by the smiles of colourful, earnest children and suitably placed benches for the elderly. Everything got along splendidly.

Now, the trouble with Tin Factory is that none of this holds true – it isn’t even within five kilometres of being true. When I moved into the new apartment I’d found at Aisshwarya Excellency, Tin Factory, along with two girls I’d spoken to less than five times combined, I found myself unprepared for, and unaware of, the hollow reality surrounding the area. It took me months to realise what was happening to me.

It started on one of my first few days back from work at the new office. Although I’d used Google Maps before moving in to check the average travel time from my potential apartment to my workplace and back, I’d never before encountered what the map showed: forty-two minutes, indicated in small yet definite font, beside a dire, serpentine, crimson-red line, as thick and inevitable as a vein, covering the five-kilometre distance from my office to my house. I shuddered, but told myself it was probably a one-off thing. ‘Can’t be like this every day,’ I thought, casually dismissing my suspicions like every victim at the beginning of a horror film.

I set out from work at 7:00 pm, in anticipation of getting home at 7:42 pm, and while Maps was only three minutes off in its estimation of my travel time, I can recall with sincere clarity the terrors that befell me that first night: It was as if I’d side-stepped into an alternate universe, where law, order and decency had no known precedents. Things I’d never believed possible were happening right before my eyes, unbeknownst to my disbelief, mounting as it was at the predicament of being alongside a hundred other pairs of oblivious eyes, behind steering wheels, behind helmets, behind people, behind carts, behind vegetables, behind policemen, behind animals.

I considered, at some point in those forty-two minutes, getting off my vehicle and walking forward to examine the source of this traffic – the root cause, as it were – ‘But,’ I thought, ‘it could be miles and days away!’ I imagined my stalwart figure wading through congenitally intertwined cars and lorries, in a headscarf and khaki pants, while a dust storm brew around me, for weeks and weeks, only to meet, at the mythical head of this infinite traffic, a wizened sage in mournful white. ‘There is no head of the traffic, gudiya,’ he’d tell me; I’d be flown home in a helicopter and presented to my family, decorated by the nation’s tricolour flag.

Several strange sights and occurrences since then have reaffirmed my deep-rooted awe for this phantom area.