My first time in Jugarat

In 2006, when I first moved to Seattle, I met a girl at the orientation who could not say Gujarat. She would call it Jugarat. I had even written about it. However, I had never visited Jugarat myself.

Fast forward to about two years ago, I visit Jugarat for the first time, and what an introduction to the place I get! I was so excited to see what Jugarat looks and smells like. To me, it was the mystical land of Krishna and Gandhi and Amul and Garba. I had heard some odd stories related to Jugarat, about how a neighborhood family from Kolkata had moved there and when the child came back, she would only ask “Kem chho?” Not a word of Bangla. Or how that family’s daughter in Kolkata had eloped with a Jugarati guy after the tenth grade, or how an uncle whose first wedding we attended went there and found a new, Jugarati wife.

I stuck my nose to the window pane of the aircraft, trying to get my first glimpse of Jugarat in the fading sunlight that evening.

At the airport, I decided to use the restroom before picking up my bags. There were parallel stalls inside the restroom, all occupied, and I was surprised to see four parallel lines in front of those stalls instead of a single one. Back then, anomalies like this were out of my schema of understanding things; of course now, I am used to anything, even the lack of lines. So I had to choose any one line and hope that someone was not stuck inside that stall creating a bottleneck.

I waited patiently, and as the line moved forward, suddenly, I heard firing. It was the kind of fear-instilling firing that one does not easily forget. I heard loud firing from all the stalls- boom boom bam bam boom! And without realizing, thought bubbles started forming in my head. In those thought bubbles, I saw pictures of dhokla, thepla, fafda, handvo, khandvi, all under various stages of digestion. I clutched on to my chest instinctively, not knowing if I would survive the firing.

Finally, the firing stopped, almost all at once, and there was a deafening silence. The doors to each of the stalls opened. From inside, I saw four very fat women in saris emerging out victorious, slowly moving towards the wash basin.

Very wisely, I decided to turn back and run out, not looking back. I could empty my bladder later. I did not have it in me to go ahead and cross the war line after all that firing.

That was my first introduction to Jugarat.

sunshine