Utopias and Heterotopias

I am trying to think why the place of nostalgia in my head and heart is so essentially a Utopia. And by that virtue, is nostalgia good or bad..I wonder.

It is this reminiscence of growing up in a 'Muslim ghetto' in New Delhi, India.

I for one am trying to find another word for this and don't get one.

For the function of words, in the traditional sense, is to make meaning.

So how do I make meaning of a place that is a ghetto and a cosmopolitan place in the same moment?

For whom do I make this meaning?

Between the word and the utterance is a sea of different words, images and meanings.

So how do I make sure that the one you pick is the one I mean.

I know there will be an endless remembrance of that place I grew up in.

It sights, sounds, smells and the face of that lovely woman refuse to go away.

As long as I lived there, I was witness to the ways and means by which the ghetto was allowed to be a ghetto.

No school buses to pick up children, no civic amenities, no government water supply, no language by which the inhabitants of that place were anything more than 'meat eating Mohammedans', no images by which the place was anything more than chaotic, no images of women as anything more than a black robe of cloth, no images of what they call is 'normal'...not that I care.

As long as I inhabited that space, as long as that space physically enveloped me, it was a Heterotopia in the sense that it was demarcated as a space where only certain kind of people lived. There was a border at the edges where the place merged with the wider city. People from the outside would never want to come in. A gardner I met on the 'outside' refused to come in because he feared that people on the inside roam about with knives. Now, when I look back with all the nostalgia that it evokes, I cannot figure out my sense of simultaneous comfort and discomfort as I negotiated that space. There was the comfort of not being alienated but there was the discomfort of restricted mobility.

The overarching Heterotopia had micro utopias and heterotopias of its own making.

There were places I could never go to-like the mosque just two steps beyond where I lived.

but there was the Beauty Saloon right in front of the mosque where those who went to the mosque could not go.

I would meet women there who would narrate the experience of being in a Utopia as long as they were there.

I like to think of spaces as also defined by spatial practices much like the spatial organization of the ant colony that challenges the City structure as defined by notions of planning and hygiene.

Spatial practices could provide the sites at which the Utopia-Heterotopia dyad is effectively ruptured-the moment of holding the mirror.