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Ghost towns. Towns completely abandoned by its inhabitants because living there was no longer possible, usually due to economic circumstances. I’ve always thought that ghost towns were an American artifact. I didn’t think this concept existed in places like India where villages have existed for centuries, when new ways of eking out an existence didn’t work, you could go back to the old ways. Usually.

Last week, my parents went to Gokarna, a holy place in Southern India, to perform a ceremony honoring my father’s dead parents. On the way, they stopped at Davanagere and visited Yellamma Mills, the textile mills where my father worked for about six years, back in the ’80s. The pictures that he took, of what once was our house, reminded me of ghost towns.

When we moved to Davanagere in 1982, it was still a big textile industry hub, called the Manchester of Karnataka. A rather dry, arid place, it was on the Bangalore-Pune highway, an important arterial road. There were about seven textile mills, the most famous being Davanagere Cotton Mills (called DCM) and the industry was one of the largest local employers. My father was the General Manager of a mill that was owned by the Government, part of the National Textile Corporation. It was located about seven kilometers outside the town, in a little village called Tolahunase, surrounded by fields cultivating dry crops, and reached by a narrow, often potholed road, off the main highway.

The mill provided quarters for many of its administrative staff. My father, as the chief, had the biggest house. The colony of houses was shaped in the form of a rectangle. Surrounded by a large garden, our house stood in the center of the top of the rectangle. It was a rather large house, as most of our houses tended to be. I had a room to myself as did my sister. My mother was fond of gardens, relying on the gardener to carry out her instructions and perform the daily chores of gardening. Not far from our house ran an irrigation canal, the water flowing swiftly as I watched it from the steep banks, wishing I could swim.

I was in high school, in the 10th standard. I hated it that my father had to move every three or so years, uprooting our lives, carrying with us the things we could such as books, clothes and furniture and leaving behind things we could not, such as my friendships and schools. This move was even more painful for me because I was moving back to Karnataka after almost five years of being out of it. I had studied in a completely different schooling system and had lost touch with Kannada, my mother tongue, and I had to pass an exam in it now. 10th standard is a big deal in India. It was the first of the forks in the road, one of which led to a life of success (as engineering and medical professions were considered back then) or the other to a life that was considered the domain of losers (anything that wasn’t one of those two professions). I hadn’t expected the place to change my life as completely as it did.

Davanagere was a rough, dusty town, unaccustomed to the fineries of larger cities. English movies arrived infrequently and the movie halls were not as grand as the ones we had left behind in Kerala. When we arrived, it had no fine restaurants to speak of, no place my father could take his business associates for a drink and a meal. “The only culture in Davanagere is agriculture”, my father used to say. It was a rich town, thanks to the merchants and mill owners. For the first time in my life, I had friends who lived in larger houses than I did.

It was in this house that I came of age. Here that I first began to question everything including who I was and where I was headed (not career-wise but as a human being). Here that I lost my faith, going gradually from praying three times a day – reciting the holy scriptures from memory as I performed the ritual called “Sandhyavandane” – to to not praying at all, openly declaring my loss of faith and finally discarding the sacred thread that I wore as a mark of being a brahmin.

It was in this house that I was introduced to science in a way that I had not before. A friend of my father’s lent me George Gamow’s classic “One, Two, Three Infinity”, changing my reading and thinking forever. Here that I encountered Ayn Rand and fell in love with her narrative, carrying it with me till I became better acquainted with life and appreciate the Gita of Shanthala’s life, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

It was in this house that I first came face to face with my limitations, with the possibility that I may not be as bright as I thought I was, that my future was more cloudy than I was willing to admit. Here that I experienced the disappointment of failing the IIT entrance exam, of barely scraping into the local engineering school.

It was in this house that I first stared at the night sky in wonder. With the help of a binoculars that my father had obtained, I spent countless hours, lying in the garden, staring at the night sky, trying to decipher the constellations and view the planets, failing miserably at both. But for the first time, I saw that the spaces between the stars were sometimes filled with clouds of what seemed like faint stars. And some single stars resolved themselves into two through the binoculars.

It was in this house that I watched a crow and a cobra fight each other. The crow seemed to be taunting the snake more than actually hunting it, letting it eventually slither away. It was here that one night, a night watchman caught thirteen scorpions and tied them all up for me to see in the morning. It was here that I encountered vipers, two of them sleeping behind rectangular pots of plant, clearly visible from inside the house, excitedly discovered by my sister and I. And here that two people died of snake bite, one a young child.

It was in this house that I first watched a movie on video. My father had purchased a used video recorder and brought home two movies with it. We watched the same two movies repeatedly till video rental stores started sprouting.

It was in this house that I first rode a motorbike, a used Ind-Suzuki that I rode to college everyday. It was here that I first owned a pet, a pair of rabbits. My father built my little sister a tree house at the back where she whiled her hours away, playing housie and holding a school where she was the strict teacher, willing to use the cane at the slightest infraction.

It was in this house that I had my sexual awakening, though as was the case with most kids of my generation in India, there was little I could do with the knowledge.

And it was in this house that that one golden fall evening, Shanthala came home, looking stunning, in that silver gray dress, and I made us a cup of tea and we sat on the parapet of the roof, and watched the sun set. It was the first time I had cooked something for her. Here that I first recognized and yearned for, that childlike delight and innocence that she possessed. It was here that we forged our relationship, talking on the phone for hours, driving our parents mad. “Why do you speak so softly to her”, my father would demand to know, “With everybody else, your voice can be heard for miles”.

To see the house in ruins now saddened me, the sadness catching me by surprise. I have never been able to see the inside of a house that I lived in as a child, not a single one. I had plans of visiting them all some time and taking Shanthala with me, but it never came to pass. The one in Gulbarga is gone, demolished completely. The one in Bangalore is still standing, but just a shell. And I don’t know the fate of the houses in Coimbatore and Kerala. This house also was the dearest to my heart, outside of my grandparents home in Bangalore, which is also gone.

With globalization, the textile industry left Davangere, leaving many thousands unemployed. When I was there the last time, a friend of my in-laws, an attorney, told me about the surge in crime thanks to the soaring unemployment. Of the seven mills, only one still remained, barely. The biggest of them all, DCM, had been completely demolished, converted into a residential development, all traces of it ever being a textile mill gone. A couple had closed doors even while we were there.

Tolahunase didn’t turn into a ghost town, even sporting a new post-graduate center for the newly formed Kuvempu University. But the colony of Yellamma mills did, save for the shrine to goddess Yellamma that my father built, god and nature reclaiming back what was once theirs.

This empty kitchen’s where
I’d while away the hours
Just next to my old chair
You’d usually have some flowers
The shelves of books
Even the picture hooks
Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on
…
Once there was a little boy
Used to wonder what he would be
Went out into the big wide world
Now he’s just a memory
There used to be a little school here
Where I learned to write my name
But time has been a little cruel here
Time has no shame

It’s just a place where
We used to live – Mark Knopfler