Love thy neighbour

There was an ad about a television that described it as the ‘neighbour’s envy and the owner’s pride’. But in my experience, a good neighbour is one’s pride and the envy of all others. Getting a good neighbour is plainly a matter of luck and not always within one’s choice, unless one constructs a multi-story building along with friends who turn neighbours by default. I have had neighbours who have shared in my joys and sorrows, like near relatives or even better. 

I remember a dear elderly neighbour, Jayamani maami, at whose house my toddler daughter Prithvi would wait for my return from school along with my second toddler, Rukma. Stand-alone houses, of which we had a fair share in our journey of work transfers, seemed remote and inaccessible to neighbourly chats, except for a brief hello or smile. We have had neighbours who dropped us off at the bus stop or airport, stored milk for us, or took numerous courier parcels while we were away. But I have also had one who turned away a courier with some unkind remarks, surprising me no end with her attitude. 

We have a luscious curry leaf tree with its branches leaning onto a neighbour’s compound. That neighbour, relatively new, shocked us when he got the branches cut and sold the leaves to the worker without any scruples. The same neighbour regularly plucks the scrumptious custard apples from the tree that we water and nurture in our compound and later gets the branches ruthlessly cut. 

Residents of the same colony can be considered distant neighbours. I had a recent brush with one such being in the most unsavoury manner that shocked the immediate neighbourhood, which stood as a mute spectator during the entire episode. 

We had undertaken the pruning of trees at our compound, and the branches were stacked at a vacant site on the roadside to be picked up by the municipality van the next day. Soon after, I almost jumped from my skin to hear a thundering, harsh voice inside our compound and ventured out to see an unfamiliar muscleman using choice epithets at the worker pruning trees in the garden and threatening to use his boot on him. It was his way of asking the worker to carry back the branches along with other already existing dirty debris from the site, which had no sign post but supposedly belonged to the bully.

The garden worker, a Goliath by appearance, surprisingly chickened out and silently brought back the branches, including all other unrelated rubbish, to our roadside, spending two hours of our work time cleaning up the bully’s vacant site, despite my plea not to touch the filth. The husband’s and my brave efforts to either question the bully’s outrageousness or pacify him failed, and we concluded that neighbours came in all avatars. We had just seen the devil.