We sit cross-legged all round – 18 of us, all male, all ages. In the other room, the women wait till we have finished. There are about 18 of them, too, and as wide an age range. sof 71 May 2005 A Day in the Life of Bhavnagar, Gujarat What do we mean by Quality of Life? When David Paterson re-visited Bhavnagar, Loughborough’s link-town, in December 2004, he sat down in the dust by the side of the road and wrote this reflection on the variety of life he was part of that day.
When I first arrived in Bhavnagar by the metregauge overnight train from Ahmedabad, it seemed like a ghost town. The road up from the station at 5 o’clock in the morning was just a featureless, dusty, pot-holed road with grey corrugated shutters lining it. But that was 15 years ago, and Bhavnagar is now almost a second home.
Today I am there in the mid-morning, and the shutters have been drawn up revealing shops which spill out almost half way across the road on each side, each displaying piles of colourful articles – dress material, shiny bowls and buckets, toothpaste, magazines and a thousand other things. The yard or two of dusty road between is seething with people on foot, on bikes or motorbikes, in auto-rickshaws, or pushing wheelbarrows. Cars honk noisily and force their way through.
Half way along this street is a very smart hotel.
Inside, everything is transformed. The hot sun and the dust are excluded. A wide marbled space leads to a staircase, which ascends up many storeys, and the air is clean and cool. The hotel belongs to Arif Khalwa, dressed in white, with red hair and beard, twinkling, roguish eyes and the belly of an 8-month pregnancy. I have been invited to lunch with his family. I meet him at the hotel, but first he goes to say prayers at the nearby Masjid (Mosque). When he returns, I get on the back of his scooter and we join the melée.
On the way, we stop at a shop in a rather less busy part of the town and Arif leaves me on the back of the scooter while he gets some sweets for the lunch party.
Two old women – in their sixties, I would guess – each dressed in an old, dusty sari and carrying a plastic cup, come up to me with outstretched, pleading hands. I fish in my pocket and find two rupee coins (a cup of tea at a roadside stall would cost 5 rupees). I give them one each, and they go to try their luck with other passers-by. Another old woman appears. I have no more small coins. I say a firm: ‘Na’. A younger woman joins her. And then a woman in her early twenties carrying a boy – about 3 years old, I guess. They keep on appealing, touching my shoulder. I keep saying: ‘Na’. It’s all very goodnatured. The little boy chuckles and we share a wordless joke. The women risk a quick grin before resuming their wistful pleading. Arif comes out of the shop with a huge bag of sweets, says sharply: ‘Javu!’ (go) and they back off while we drive away.
On the road, Arif’s mobile phone rings. He answers it, holding it to his ear with his shoulder while we weave our way through the traffic. We arrive at a large house in a still quieter street (though still busy and dusty by English standards), and enter through the gate in the railings. I am ushered into a large bare room while Arif goes on an errand (something to do with the phone call, I suppose) and gradually the house fills with people. Some young women whom I met a few days earlier come and greet me. Young men I don’t know come and join me.
There is much greeting, laughing, hand-shaking, joking; and eventually all are present. Cloths are spread on the floor and dishes of food are laid out.
Street scene in Bhavnagar And then the family go their ways, and I am taken to my next destination in a very smart car with a chauffeur. A nephew of Arif is a senior engineer in the Gujarat oil fields.
I tell this story because it’s all about life. India is teeming with life, and is one of the best places in the world to celebrate the variety, the agony and the glory of life. Quite apart from the cows, dogs, goats and chickens which mingle freely with the humans, there are such varied human lives. The Bhavnagar street, which seemed so dead in the early morning, teems with life when the sun has risen, and remains so until the shutters come down again around midnight. The shop-keepers, the milling crowd, the hotel owner, his staff and guests, the people praying in the Masjid, the women beggars and the child, Arif’s family – if we are to celebrate life, we must celebrate it in all its forms.
I probably would not like to be a beggar woman, and maybe the world would be a better place if such poverty didn’t happen; but she is alive, as I am. She is part of life’s rich pattern. I’m not for one moment denying that we humans have a task before us to bring about a steady improvement in the quality of life for all, but the experiences of that day, and many like it, in the cities and villages of India, have taught me two things. The first is that we must beware of seeking fuller lives at the expense of those who struggle simply to stay alive, and the second is that quality of life has many manifestations, and each of them has something to respect, something to admire, something to teach us. ‘Those less fortunate than ourselves’ are sometimes more justified in pitying us than we them.