Wise people have always suggested that it is more important to choose your neighbours than the neighbourhood when you rent or buy a house. Whether you decide to live in Alipore or Alipurduar, it is critical to gather intelligence regarding your potential neighbours before taking a call.
Having been a migrant all my life — first as a child across India, and later across Kolkata —I have had the fortune and misfortune of encountering the strangest neighbours.
At our Anwar Shah Road apartment, the neighbour’s son who lived upstairs would start honing his drumming skills around midnight. Being sleep-deprived parents of a sickly child, the drumming sounded like the bombing of Normandy.
When I accosted my neighbour requesting a change in the timing of the musical onslaught, he politely pointed out that midnight is when his son found inspiration. He also did not forget to mention that his wife had very influential relatives and people before me had tried unsuccessfully to stop the hullabaloo. He was in the merchant navy and was thus spared the torture. He sniggered when he said that.
Perhaps one of the most common cause of neighbourly conflict — noisy neighbours Shutterstock
There was a lady opposite our house who would get her driver to trim all the trees in the neighbourhood though none of them caused her any bother! I don’t know what joy she got out of it.
There was yet another neighbour who had seven grandchildren and she would let all of them out precisely at 2pm so that she could steal a snooze. The grandchildren would create havoc outside our window. They would pee all over our parking space and constantly ring the bell to ask for drinking water.
There was this neighbourhood aunty who would invariably turn up post lunch on a Sunday to discuss her sex life — or the lack of it — with my mother. My problem was to pretend I wasn’t listening and play possum all the while when she ranted against her dysfunctional husband.
My childhood neighbours in Dhanbad would invariably send me back when I turned up to play, instructing me to send my dad instead since he played all sports so well.
But not everyone was troublesome. Some were quite wonderful, in fact.
Sometimes the most prized gifts come from neighbours — like a Mohiner Ghoraguli LP
Right across our house on Hazra Road, the famous Bollywood film director, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, bought a large bungalow. He and his sister would occasionally come to stay and were uniformly polite. One of his daughters came to live there for a while with her two little girls, who later became famous models.
They bought the first TV set in the neighbourhood and I remember the entire mohalla turning up to watch the live telecast of a Test match (or was it a one-day?). They took their TV set to the terrace and put up a shamiana so that a large number of people could watch the match together in comfort.
Our neighbours in Naktala had two lovely daughters, Pihu and Kuhu. Not only did we become good friends, but they also taught us that it was all right not to carry gifts to birthdays. In fact, they prohibited it. On their mezzanine floor lived the now legendary Gautam Chattopadhyay of Mohiner Ghoraguli fame. He got mad at me for observing a minute’s silence when he broke his leg! Pihu and Kuhu’s father sold the first Mohiner Ghoraguli EP to my father. I remember it was month-end and my father could not afford the LP.
There are neighbours who are always the first to arrive when you need help, whether fixing a blocked drain or buying supplies Shutterstock
There was another neighbour who would arrive without fail whenever we needed help, be it an overflowing balcony or a blocked drain. And countless others who got us medicine, took mom to hospital when she had labour pain, lent us money when there was not enough at home, cooked food for us knowing there might be no provisions in our house for a meal, took us to school in the rain, organized Tinni’s birthday party when Swati was in hospital, bought me East Bengal merchandise, lent me enough books to sow the seeds of my lifelong romance with reading... I could go on.
As I said at the beginning, it is far more important to choose your neighbours well rather than the neighbourhood. In Kolkata, neighbours own your life.
Arup Ghosh is a former journalist and a communications expert
