In the immense, tentacular streets of this city, reality is layered. There is the overt life of a street, and then there is that invisible reality — of lives that occur parallel to the ostensible, lives that are easily disregarded, places that have lost their value. It’s been fifteen years since my family moved into our house on Prince Anwar Shah Road. Still I travel its secluded by-lanes trying to uncover the mystery that lies in its core.

Fifteen years ago, looking out of my study-room window was not as daunting as it is now. Like a pedestrian drawing in a school textbook, the façade of the Usha factory loomed large. The factory’s quarters come with their own intrigue. You go to the end of what is a middle-class urban residential block, thinking you’ve come to a dead-end, and then, suddenly, there is this whole other world — single-storey houses, rundown shanties, a school — of whose existence there was no indicator until you turned that corner. I often wondered who these people were, living on my street but so very invisible, with their dwellings so vastly different from my own. The factory, in itself, was a mystery. Its very deadness, when placed against all the lives it supported, made it an object of childhood fascination. These days, my fascination with the view from my rooms is more Wordsworthian — like the little boy in Prelude who, sailing out in his stolen boat, came upon a jagged cliff which seemed to him monstrous at the time, and which, “As if with voluntary power instinct/ Upreared its head”.

I have watched the birth of the proudest moment in this city’s real estate development roster — South City. For days we have been haunted by the skeletal remains of the Usha factory whose sedated presence had been a source of strange comfort. The kaashphool on its fields has been replaced by colossal jib cranes, over 30-storeys high and with a fearsome life of their own. A new community of people is beginning to take shape. The wall that divides us shall remain, I’m told. The inhabitants of the four residential towers of this high-end housing address will not share our lifestyle. The children who will study at the school (with a world-class soccer pitch) within the South City complex will not have known what it is to ring the bell at the neighbourhood grocer’s house in the middle of the afternoon and ask to buy a couple of lemons. In the neo-urban landscape of P.A.S. Road, they will exist in their self-contained world of hypermarts and “multi-facility”. In the sanitized environs of countertop-purchase units, they will never know the individual smells of spices and fish, and the theatre that plays itself out twice a day at the Lord’s grocery market. What care would they have for the concept of haggling, what will they know of the joyous disgust of walking through the slush of a marketplace in the monsoons?

A particular social class is being excluded from this metropolitan redevelopment. Akash, the charming young tramp who lives in a shanty that has no water, looks at South City with wonderment, but feels ill at ease inside it. The annual mela on the field beside the EEDF nursing home is more inviting. The open, carnivalesque spaces like the mela are giving way to segregated components of fun in, say, the upcoming Fame multiplex.

Outside the enclosed grounds of Usha/South City, Anwar Shah Road has continued its snaky meanderings and linked up with other roads — there is the new Lake Gardens flyover, and the newer connector from Jadavpur police station to the E.M. Bypass. At the Lord’s Bakery More, competing biriyani stalls have taken up pavement space. A number of take-away eateries have mushroomed, probably to cater to the burgeoning number of students who come to the city from the Northeast — many of them study at Jadavpur University and live as paying guests in this area. The new Mainland China at South City mall will not find an able competitor in Hong Kong, the Chinese restaurant that has stood its ground for decades, almost right across the mall. The illegal motorworks garage through which one had to pass to enter my little residential lane has vanished, but a public toilet, with colourful murals on its walls and non-stop radio music for enhanced ablutionary pleasures, has come up. The Lord’s Bazaar, the other entry point to my lane, keeps going round in circles, like an injured animal, every time the police serve the squatters eviction notices — a ritual conducted a couple of times or so in the past decade.

One wonders if the developers of this new modernity on P.A.S. Road are creating rapid changes, keeping in mind an equitable model for the redevelopment of public space. There is no one kind of ‘public’ on this street, but diverse pockets of people. While Akash visits the seedy eatery, Rayaaz, I go to the swank Princeton Club for its live music — both are indicators of the diversity of P.A.S. Road.