"Life is Calling"—Page 4
One of the house-proud was Leo Fernandes, my old teacher at St. Aloysius. The last time I had visited him, 15 years ago, he had been staying in a house that he rented from the school; now he invited me to a bright, clean apartment he had recently purchased in one of the city's high-rises. Over candy and pink lemonade, he spoke excitedly about the transformation he had witnessed in Mangalore—how the town had become bigger, almost like Bombay in parts, and how the school had shared in this improvement. For a start, it had opened a massive new computer block. Life had changed in other ways, too, as Mangaloreans grew wealthier, more modern and more hurried. "All the other teachers have bikes. Some even have cars," said Leo. "Only I still walk."

Noticing that I wasn't wearing a watch, he suddenly recalled: "You never wore a watch even in school. I always wondered about that. You were a doctor's son, yet you never wore a watch, like other rich boys would."

"My father didn't let me buy a watch," I told him. "He thought it was an extravagance for a schoolboy."

We both smiled at the innocence of those days.

"Boys now have everything," Leo said. "Computers, bikes, everything. But they don't study as hard as your generation did. Already the old days are a distant memory. You used to talk to your neighbors—they were your family. The people who live around me now, I have no idea who they are. I went to talk to them once, and they didn't have time. After that I gave up."

Others spoke in a similar way of an older, simpler life that was disappearing. I met neighbors, relatives and classmates, and each had done well in some way we couldn't have imagined in the 1980s—one owned his own house, one had a car of his own. But each also had some sorrow we could hardly have imagined. A Catholic friend's daughter had married a Hindu and her family no longer spoke to her. One Hindu friend's daughter had been divorced by her husband. Divorce, extramarital affairs, inter-religious marriages, homosexual flings—the doors of experience had swung open in Mangalore. The small town had grown up.

It had become more complicated and conflicted in other ways, too. At the Nehru Maidan, an open space in the center of town, I watched kids playing cricket. Among the spectators was a group of drifters and homeless men, some of them carrying rolled-up mattresses. Growing up, I had not seen many beggars around Mangalore, which had largely avoided the crushing poverty and inequality of larger cities. Yet it now had a slum that had not existed back then. Most Mangaloreans I spoke with shrugged off the arrival of so many poor people; they were said to be immigrant workers, drawn by the construction boom, and they were expected to go away again in the future. Nobody, it seemed, was ready to acknowledge the possibility that the city might now have a permanent underclass that the boom has left behind.

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