I wrote about a soulful city yesterday. So I thought I will follow it with a city that is not so soulful - Indianapolis. I spent five years of my life in Indianapolis, traversing its main and side streets and patronizing many of its restaurants. When I think of midsize American cities like Indiapolis, I am quite struck by the scale of development in the last one hundred years that made the country what it is: a wealthy new land that buys and builds its history. Indy (as it is affectionately called by the locals) also is a solidly republican city in a republican state, no matter which democrat gets elected. There were only two sides of the politics in Indy, conservative and fundamentalist. They were friendly simple folk who prayed, went to work very early, came home and prayed some more. I don’t know what sins they were accumulating in their private lives that required so much praying.
I find it difficult to write about Indianapolis because all my memories are antiseptic. There are no contrasts, no uneven patches, no hazy yet powerful knots of memory that drags you by your shoulders and make you confront your ghosts. I lived an even keel life that included a boring commute through back roads, frequent visits to the museum or the downtown and Broad Ripple restaurants, sterile shopping and drinking coffee at the Abbey. Abbey was a large coffee house in Castleton, which was entirely furnished out of pew furniture from an old church. The only interesting place I used to go to was Slippery Noodle, which was the oldest blues bar south of Chicago with a long and storied history including historic tours as a way house, a brothel and a hotel. It is a non-descript building on a non-descript street but the place rocked with great and new bands coming through. We fell in love with an electrifying Cajun blues band from Bloomington called Mojo Hand. The lead singer was fantastic; it is a pity they never made it big.
Considering that Indianapolis is about twice the size of a lot of happening towns, you will begin to understand how life was so simple there. There are very few restaurants, bars and outside venues. Indy is a sports-crazy town and basketball is the primary religion (and Larry Bird is the main patron saint.) But since I was never into American professional sports, I was not quite comfortable in the life around me as it revolved around minor league games and NBA. I don't necessarily think I was bored; there were things to do, but does an Elton John concert count as something to do? Once out of boredom, I remember driving (without any plans) one morning from Indianapolis all the way to Toronto, Canada in the Mid 90's. It snowed quite a bit and I was driving very fast and made it to Windsor in record time. But it was already dark and the rest of the journey was miserable with wind and hale.
Indy was also the only town I have ever lived in North America where the Indian association(s) actually built a secular civic building and not a temple. It was a non-descript building on the west side of town that hosted everything from obscure Punjabi festivals (Phoolkari, anyone? The ABCD woman who was married to a white colleague of mine who hosted the festival was so offended when I told her I had never heard of it before) to religious celebrations. The only bizarre thing I remember about the whole pecking order of things is when Janmashtami fell on Independence Day (I hope I got them right, or was it Republic day?) Independence day celebrations got the boot. Having said that, the city did have a fairly sizable Indian population that occasionally had high profile Indian concerts or exhibitions in prominent venues. The governor sometimes showed up and clapped religiously as some prominent-looking Indian community leader expounded on the virtue of the event.
How can I end this without golf, after all we are talking about the Mid-west here? I have played in many courses around town, but my favorite (for comedic value) was this little 9-hole course in Greenfield. It was reconverted from farmland and the owners didn't even made an attempt to make it look otherwise. The water hazard was a real stream running by the course that was the original irrigation channel. I developed a bee allergy there after being stung twice by two different bees on 2 consecutive visits. I don't think anyone ever played there except the foursome that I was part of, but it was good to go during a long lunch break and hit some balls even if the potential price was a horrible death from a bee stingJ
Outside Indy, there is a University called Ball State University (They don't try too hard. What were the rejected alternative names, I wonder.) Closer still, Kokomo is famous for the world's largest steer and tree stump. Need I say more? On the way to Muncie, just as you cross the Indianapolis city line, there is a creek called Nameless creek.
If it were Bombay, they would have first called it Hornby Creek. Then after Independence, they would have renamed it A. K. Jaiswal Creek. Then Shiv Sena would have called it something like Mahatma Shri Jytoiba Thunde Visarjan Creek (what is the Marathi word for Creek, anyone?) There might have at least three fights over the name, at least one of which would have included a protracted legal battle between the relatives of Messers Jaiswal and Thunde. Mid-day would have posted pictures of political leaders visiting the creek to support “local residents” in their fight for the right “historical” name.
What more can I say about a city that doesn't even bother to name a creek?
