City Of Plenty

AHMEDABAD is a famous city for several little known reasons. It has the largest number of female two-wheeler riders in India. Knowledgeable estimates claim these ladies constitute 25 per cent of such road users in the country. The precise reasons are not known. So one resorts to guesses. Their husbands and parents are busy making money in their shops and on the stock exchange from morning till late night. The wives feel an uncontrollable urge to be mobile in order to check out bargain prices of bhendis and tendlis, the standard fare for family meals. The daughters are the frontline uppies of Ahmedabad. They zip around town showing off their designer clothes or hang around junk food joints with names like Tomatoes, Timbuctoo and Chillis & Thrills. Resident social scientists explain the mobile show by another reputation of the city. Ahmedabad is the safest place for women in India. If the women of Delhi risk being raped in Connaught Place or pawed inside DTC buses, their sisters in Karnavati are inviolable anywhere, any time. Ahmedabad is the biggest ice-cream market in India. Again the reasons are unclear. Maybe it's the local cows which yield prodigious quantities of milk. Even the innovative Gujaratis don't know what to do with so much of the stuff. Make ice-cream, what else? It could also have something to do with the climate. There are only two seasons—a brief but intense winter from December to February and a searing summer for the rest of the year. So eating ice-cream is the city's most elaborate exercise in popular illusion. The city also has the largest number of secret millionaires. The peon in our bank, where my wife is a frequent visitor for largely non-existent financial transactions, drives an airconditioned Maruti. He offers coyly that his real income comes from his labour as a real estate broker.