Life in a metro

THE title Neti, Neti has its roots in Hinduism, and in particular Jnana Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, which refers to a chant or mantra, meaning "not this, not this", or "neither this, nor that".

Neti, Neti is perhaps the most-fitting title to a story of a 25-year-old Sophie Das, who like many others, gives into the urban pressure and migrates from Shillong to Bangalore in search of work, freedom, fun, and much more.

She is in Bangalore for a year when the novel opens, working for a US-based company that outsources subtitling of DVDs (dialogue-transcribing, background sounds for the hearing-impaired) to India.

Life in Bangalore is faster-paced than Sophie’s life in Shillong was. Her boyfriend Swami, to whom she tries to introduce one of her favourite books, R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, works in a call centre and keeps American time.

When people talk about hill towns, they imagine them as holiday destinations; they imagine them as places that offer a brief respite from reality and that’s why adorable. They imagine them as a collection of views and things to do. But, that was not the case with Sophie when she confides to herself about the things she missed most about Shillong. The Elephant Waterffalls or the green Umiam Lake were nothing to her compared to waking up early on a winter morning when in love with someone who hadn’t noticed.

Bangalore to her possessed a great zest for ‘ugliness’, too much seems to be going on at once here. She often felt that every one just wanted to obscure the view, bolt out the sky and erase the gaps. The city, according to her, not just proliferated but kept reproducing itself and thus, felt that no one could ever reach anywhere here.

Sophie has learnt to content herself with the minor things, including the smell of flowers coming from pushcarts late in the evening, the view of a palm tree from an open window, the corners of certain pubs and pleasure of seeing one’s things neatly arranged in a room. She also comes to term with why several people create islands of their homes and find it to be the life’s greatest pleasure simply because they need a place they can fashion in their own image as the city is not the place.

She now understands why everyone who lives in high-up, magical places must come down into the "real world" and mingle, but now she knows for sure how difficult it is to experience this, as there is something that is calling her back all the time.

Leaving all that was so wonderfully fixed in its place for her free-spirited friends from office, call centres, pubs, night streets, shopping malls, rock concerts, etc, and yet not feel affectionate to either of the two places was confusing her.

Neti, Neti is a journey of a grown-up girl, who wants to experience every thing in life, but life’s blind curves keep defining an outer limit of her world.