Unexpected Connections: What My Neighbours Taught Me — Epoche B2
27 October On Tuesday a boy from the second floor put a tennis ball through my tulsi pot, and by Thursday evening I had a new pot, a card he had drawn himself, and a neighbour I had lived one floor above for four months without meeting. I am writing this down because the sequence still seems to me the wrong way round. Four months in Kothrud now, and I still cannot work out the rhythm of this building. In Nagpur I knew who lived on every floor by the second week. Here I had been passing the same faces on the stairs since June without exchanging more than a nod, and I had decided, in the smug way you decide these things, that city people simply live differently and that community is something you have to go out and construct. Then on Tuesday Rohan Sharma from the second floor put a tennis ball through my tulsi pot. A tulsi is holy basil, and in a great many Hindu households it does not live on the balcony as a plant but as a member of the household: kept in a pot by the threshold, watered daily, sometimes given a lamp in the evening. Anthropologists of everyday Hindu practice, C. J. Fuller among them, treat this kind of domestic attention as the ordinary substance of household religion rather than as a decorative habit. I mention it because otherwise the rest of this entry does not make sense, and because a person from outside would reasonably read the following paragraphs as a great deal of feeling about a plant pot. They play in the corridor because the compound below is full of parked scooters — four boys, one bat, a chalk wicket on the wall by the meter boxes. My grandmother would have approved. She used to say a child who is not outside making noise is a child who is ill. I did not approve. The pot was terracotta, from the Sunday market off Karve Road, and it had cost me two hundred and fifty rupees, and the plant in it was the only thing on my balcony that had survived the monsoon. I went downstairs with a whole speech ready about shared spaces. Mrs Sharma opened the door before I knocked. She had already heard the crash, and she looked more upset than I was — not about the pot, she said, but about the noise, about the disturbance, about the fact that we had never properly met and this was how it was happening. She made me sit down. She gave me tea I did not want. And then, somewhere in the middle of apologising, she started telling me about the village near Satara where she grew up, and about a tailor on the corner who once mended the torn sleeve of her school uniform without being asked and without saying anything to her mother, because he had seen her crying about it on the way home. I do not know why that story worked on me the way it did. Possibly because it was so specific — the sleeve, the tailor, the not telling her mother. My annoyance did not so much fade as become embarrassing to hold. It is difficult to deliver a speech about shared spaces to someone who has just handed you a cup of tea and a piece of her childhood. Yesterday evening Rohan came up with his mother, carrying a replacement pot and a card he had drawn himself, in which the tulsi plant was considerably larger and greener than it had ever been in life. Mrs Sharma had brought a trowel. We repotted the thing together on my balcony while Rohan explained, at length, that the shot had been a legitimate cover drive and that the wall was at fault. What I had wrong about the nods I have spent two evenings since then deciding that my June conclusion was not merely uncharitable but factually wrong, and it is worth setting out why, because the mistake is an easy one. I had counted the nods on the stairs as nothing — as the absence of a relationship, evidence that this building had no community in it. The sociologist Mark Granovetter argued in 1973 that this is exactly the wrong way to classify them. He distinguished strong ties, meaning the small number of relationships with high frequency, emotional intensity and mutual confiding, from weak ties, meaning acquaintanceship: recognition, low frequency, little intimacy. His point was that weak ties are not failed strong ties. They are a different category doing different work, and in one respect they do it better. Because your close friends mostly know each other and move in the same circles, what they know, you already know; an acquaintance is likelier to be connected to a part of the world you are not, and therefore to carry information and access that your intimates cannot. Granovetter's evidence was a study of how men in a Boston suburb had found their jobs: the useful lead had more often come from someone they saw occasionally than from a close friend. There is also work on what weak ties do to the texture of a day. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn asked people to record their interactions and their mood, and found that individuals reported greater happiness and a stronger sense of belonging on days when they had more interactions with acquaintances, with the effect holding within a person across days rather than only across people. So what I had been recording as four months of nothing was in fact a functioning layer of relationship, of the type that makes a building habitable. My error was to measure the building against Nagpur, where I happened to have strong ties, using a scale on which weak ties score zero. Why it took a broken pot That leaves the harder question, and it is the one the week actually answers: if the tie was already there, why did four months of it produce nothing until a tennis ball arrived? Stanley Milgram gave this configuration a name. In the early 1970s he and his students studied commuters on suburban railway platforms in New York — people who stood beside the same faces every morning for years without ever speaking. Milgram called them familiar strangers, and his surveys found that commuters recognised a good number of them, had spoken to very few, and nonetheless reported that they would expect to speak if they met the same person somewhe