Oh, my lovely slowpoke city...

This is a book that Old Cantonment Bangaloreans would relish but there's more to it than just nostalgia.

At the Bangalore International Centre discussion about her anthology Bangalore Blues, Kirtana Kumar kept protesting: “I am not a writer”, which wasn’t exactly a rousing sales pitch from the debut author. But what she implied was that she is primarily a theatre actor and director. Rather disarmingly, she asked everyone to “please read the book till the end” to confirm the veracity of another statement that she reiterated: “This is not just nostalgia.”

It is highly unlikely that any reader of Bangalore Blues would doubt the author’s literary skills or abandon the book midway. It is not drenched in nostalgia as Stanley Carvalho’s or Peter Colaco’s essay collections are; in fact, only about half of the 33 short stories are imbued with the spirit of (mainly) 1970s ‘Bangalore Cantonment’. (For those unfamiliar with the term, it encompasses a lopsided triangle with Jayamahal, Cooke Town and Richmond Town forming the corners.) The dialogue-heavy narrative is the predictable fallout of Kirtana’s decades-long involvement in theatre.

This is a book that Old Cantonment Bangaloreans would relish. A good definition of the OCB appears in a description of a couple: “…between the two of them they were related to half the city and knew the other half from birth”. Their neighbourhoods were a virtual bisibelebath: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Tamizhans, Kannadigas and Anglo-Indians blending seamlessly, speaking an argot with a distinctive Bangalore tang. Cantonment of the 1960s, 70s and even 80s was still a small-town cocoon where, as a character says, “…if you smoked a ciggie behind the St Patrick’s Church wall near Shoolay, the news would get home to North Road before you did”.

The narrative tone is intimate and informal, sometimes elegiac and poetic, and at other times a vivacious dappankuthu dance. Kirtana captures the variations of the Bangalore lingo with consummate flair. It has to be a Kannada speaker who phones Shanbhag of Premier Book Shop: “Jamshedjee sisters, yes, yes, I know very well…. One sister is little bit off, other one is drinking, but otherwise, very exemplary family. Then why he is acting like a buffoon, this fellow?” One can distinguish between the standard “Come on, tell off what’s up…. I told you, da…” and the Anglo-Indian “…the ruddy boat is lost at ’ooghly! Just vanished, men!”It is true that non-OCB readers wouldn’t catch the literally hundreds of references to landmarks (many vanished) or personalities (some thinly disguised) that are crammed into these pages. Deccan Herald gets numerous mentions and the office’s facade adorns the cover. The only error: the former Blu Moon and Blu Diamond cinemas are misspelt as ‘Blue’. For those outside the OCB circle, the book provides a different kind of ‘heritage walk’ through some of the unique characters who populate the book — the eponymous Mac the Knife and Jaasthi Joru Janardhan, and Jeejebhoy in Dog’s Umbrella who handcuffs himself to a window grill outside Mayo Hall after thulping RR biryani.

It’s not all nostalgia, however. Piercing grief, lingering sorrow, depression and heartbreak lend sombre notes to stories like Trouble, Kaleidoscope Man, Falling Between the Cracks, Road Trip With a Free Spirit and Sceptical Spectacle. Social classes rub up against each other in Picasso Pulao and Mary Mary Quite Contrary while caste distinctions sharpen in Tabula Rasa. The autobiographical Betrayal: Bangalore Dystopia reveals the distressing context in which the stories were born. It’s not all OCB either. #ImmaGameMamma and Shivajinagar Sartorial yank the reader into today’s Bengaluru. Two of the stories have alien settings and barely refer to the city: cultures clash violently in Jungle Fever while in Zeitgeist, Baby, a whimsical portrayal of a non-binary singular ‘they’, the protagonist is surfacing from a lake of depression, echoing the ‘blues’ in the title.

‘Blues’ resonates in yet another way. Music — not merely the blues but rock, folk and pop — permeates the book. Singers are either named or their songs identified by snippets of their lyrics, so that we hear everyone from Nat King Cole to Leo Sayer, from The Carpenters to Leonard Cohen. Bangalore Blues corrals a vanishing sub-culture of (to quote An Old Timer in Dear Stranger) “my lovely slowpoke city”.