Coding of a City

With a philosopher's insight and an anthropologist's curiosity, Sundar Sarukkai records Bangalore's stories

- Vineetha Mokkil

SUNDAR Sarukkai’s second novel, Water Days, is set in a frenetically transforming Bangalore—in the wake of the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991.

With a philosopher's insight and an anthropologist’s curiosity, Sarukkai observes the goings-on in his city. Change is in the air, not just in Bangalore but all across India. Stories lurk everywhere. But what language does the metamorphosising city speak, the novelist wonders. Not Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Konkani, Telugu. Not English or Hindi. “The city has its own language. It is not the language that the majority of the people in a city speak. A city is not produced by a majority, it is not a measure of numbers,” Sarukkai says at the start of his novel. This preoccupation with language and words and the intricacies of communication pulsed through his first novel Following a Prayer as well.

The city speaks to the writer in its own language. This is how the story of its existential crisis reaches him. This language is sensory. It lives in the clamour of the rain bombarding city streets, the hazy whispers wafting under street lamps, the howls of stray dogs, the clatter of vegetable carts. This story drips from the taps that women in some parts of the city line up in front of at dawn to fetch water for their families. Water in the growing city is a scarce resource, and access to it, unequal. Water is a recurring motif in the novel, sometimes appearing as rain, sometimes as a metaphor for the deprivation that is heaped on less privileged residents of a city that is run by a callous administrative machinery.

At the centre of