A Conference of Street Creatures - The Domestic Version, originally uploaded by TalBright.

When I saw this photo a couple of days ago, I immediately thought, "is this from India?" Turns out it wasn't - this picture was taken in Istanbul. When I showed this to a Spanish and a Brazilian friend, each immediately declaimed that the scene could be anywhere in São Paolo or Galicia. Part of this is, of course, the effect of globalisation and common materials and technologies spreading all over the world. Which led me to thinking about why it felt like an Indian/Brazilian/Galician scene. Some features stood out:

1. the puppy in the corner, completely at ease with the surroundings
2. the random assortment of discarded (?) objects, just outside the home, scattered as if it were inside the home
3. the grill over the window, providing both protection and extending the home onto the street (by supporting the two potted plants)
4. the clothesline, with its clips, indicating that it is a publicly recognised and stable space for hanging clothes out to dry
5. the random assortment of home-related things (wire, bags, cloth) hanging from various supports on the wall
6. the cables trailing into the home without any routing or layout
7. the asbestos roofing
8. and the amazingly intense colour of the wall

Contrast this with a typical American neighbourhood street (not high-density old-construction city areas), leaving out the peculiarities of Indian (and Turkish, and ) construction materials:

1. any otherwise unaccounted for animals are thought of as strays that should be in a pound (i.e., everything has an owner)
2. the clothesline would be in the backyard
3. the "trash" would be near a trash-can ('trash' and 'waste' being cultural categories)
4. all cabling would be organised
5. all construction would be standardised

What comes to mind with the contrast is that when I, as an Indian, see this picture, I not only place it as possibly being in India, I also place it in a particular urban, social & economic context: the shanty town on its way to being a municipality. The scene shares features with both slums, chawls and shanty towns and 'proper' neighbourhoods: a porousness of borders between the public and the private. Each thing in the scene tells me something: of the state of the urban infrastructure, the constant negotiation of space, the incremental construction, and - if I had sufficient local or cultural knowledge - perhaps even something about the people living in that house, or how much shantyness the neighbourhood possessed.

That, for me, is one of the most peculiar features of - for lack of a better word - 'Eastern' streets: that they can be read, and that the reading is enabled by the fact that part of the home is actually outside the walls ('boundaries'?) of the home. This practice - of doing outside the home as one would do inside it - lends to the streets aspects of the home, a certain pervasive homeliness everywhere, and an ability to gauge what people in a locality are like based on what is visible on the street. Contrast this with American neighbourhoods - apart from gross distinctions between project housing, Beverly Hills, and suburbia, much less can be said about the occupants of the home from the outside, except perhaps wealth (large, fancy houses), fastidiousness (lawn grass condition), and the presence of kids (surely a gross and inaccurate list - won't someone correct me?). The street is the street, and the home the home, and rarely do the two intersect, and even then only temporarily (yard sales, trash pick-up days). The home is such a private space that little of it is allowed to escape into view of the world.

The American street then, is a cultural construction that is distinctly different from the cultural construction of the Turkish, Indian, Galician or Brazilian streets. It is also for me one of the ways in which diaspora is experienced: in a street like the one in the photo, I would feel at home, even if it is actually in another country. Did I feel a little homesick on seeing this picture? I did.

This is how I was seated at a restaurant recently. To my back is the door that connects the kitchen and cash register area, the primary entry and exit point for waitresses. Anyone trying to catch their attention would have an easier job if seated facing the opposite way. When questioned, my waitress claimed it was an unconscious decision to place me there, but I wonder now whether waitresses use the topology of a space to constrain their interactions with customers - what if I was a known troublemaker?