The Rink - Sammy Loren
The worker jams the crude contraptions beneath my sneakers. With a pair of nappy shoelaces, he ropes the rickety metal foot beds to me like they are death traps or torture devices, which, in fact, they are, if like me, you happen to hail from the West. However, in this corner of northern India, sandwiched between the chaotic capital of New Delhi to the South and the rugged Himalayan Mountains to the North, the rusty roller skates are standard at the Rink.
“It’s not too tight?” asks 75-year-old Bridal Singh Bendari while tying the final knot. After clocking in over 48 years on the job, the ancient attendant holds court as the Rink’s oldest employee. Satisfied with his work, Bendari oils back his black hair and lights a beedi, the hand-rolled cigarettes of choice for old-timer Indians. Slim like a matchstick with a penciled mustache, Bendari straightens out his sweater vest before flipping on the overhead lights.
“Music?”
But before I can answer, classically outdated Bollywood tunes, songs as estranged from modern India as the room in which I stand, begin drumming forth from the speakers.
India currently has the world’s second fastest growing economy and with economic and nuclear blessings from the United States, could emerge as Asia’s next superpower. However, the economic liberalization that started in the early 1990s has challenged India’s traditional values, infusing them with a ballooning consumer culture. Now a younger generation has disposable income to burn and more venues in which to burn it. Arcades, multiplex theaters, and mega-malls are just a number of the spots competing for the rupees of Indians. This new competition makes an attraction like the Rink look like a dinosaur next to an India ravenous for nothing but the new, the sleek, and the chic.
Tucked alongside the winding mountain roads of Mussoorie, a hill station built in the nineteenth century for vacationing British families, the Rink is purported to be not only the “largest roller skating rink in India,” but also, “one of Mussoorie’s oldest and grandest buildings” according to its promotional pamphlet.
Yet, inching onto the worn wooden floor reveals a different tale. The crumbling building looks as if it will cave in at any moment and the skates feel like a pair of slippery cinder blocks. They lack any ankle support and the front wheels, rather than resting comfortably under the control of my toes, only stretch as far as my arch. These predate the soft rubber wheels and break normally found on skates in the West by at least 40 years. Top speed isn’t more than a wobbly crawl.
The Rink’s arcane elegance provides some insights into the changing face of Indian society. One of the landmark’s most prominent features is its emptiness. Though a Saturday night, I share the cavernous, Greco-colonnaded floor with only a pocketful of enthusiasts: a pudgy Indian kid whose parents film him teetering about, and a twenty-something local who, compared to the rest of us, pirouettes like an Olympic figure skater. In India, a country where millions upon millions of people crowd every possible corner, a vacant attraction raises eyebrows.
After a maladroit skate and practically dislocating a shoulder, I scramble to a bench with a view of the misty Himalayan foothills. Bendari, puffing on his beedi, pinches up his slacks before taking a seat.
“Back in the sixties, seventies and eighties, The Rink was packed,” he explains between drags of his smoke. “The glory year was 1976. We hosted the All Indian National Roller Skating competition and after that, the sport just exploded.”
Since independence from Great Britain in 1948 until about 1990, India’s economy operated under the License Raj, which gave the central government authority to plan all aspects of their financial system. Along with lethargic economic development, this style of government seemed to create a culture of patience: four hours long films, marathon classical dance recitals, and skating rinks where people would sacrifice a week and bruise themselves into pulp in order to actually learn the sport.
That all seems to be changing. Bollywood, while still hawking the same saccharine story lines, has trimmed many of their blockbusters to a slim ninety minutes. Sparkling MTV-style videos dominate the Indian scene. And instead of investing a few weeks practicing a past time, people cram into the local Lacoste or Levi’s outlet.
Around the corner from the Rink, Mussoorie’s main bazaar buzzes with vacationers. They are just gorging themselves on chain restaurants, chain clothing stores, and seizure-inducing arcades.
“The types of tourists traveling to Mussoorie have changed,” explains the Rink’s owner, Mr. R.K. Agarwal from his mansion in New Delhi. “During the British period and for sometime thereafter, people would visit Mussoorie for six months at a time.”
Agarwal, an older portly chap, is bald with a bemused look permanently stamped onto his face. We meet over tea at his estate in Chanakyapuri, a posh neighborhood in central New Delhi.
“Now you have the weekender, who only comes for a few days at the most, and they are not going to spend their vacation acquiring a new activity.”
Agarwal’s grandfather bought the Rink in 1936. At the time, even though he owned the property, he could not technically enter it due to the inequities of British rule. Agarwal delightfully boasts that the Rink originally served as a multipurpose space. Built in 1880, it premiered as one of India’s first Shakespearian theatres. During the crisp Mussoorie evenings, the British and later wealthy Indians, would screen silent films and waltz to live orchestras. It’s even rumored that on a state visit in 1916, Queen Mary was treated to a royal ball amid its balconies and snooker tables.
“Before Independence, Mussoorie was almost all British and was quite a swinging place,” he remarks nostalgically after a sip of his milky tea. “Mussoorie catered to the elite of India, those that were interested in theatre, art, and culture. Now anyone can visit.”
India’s nascent middle class creates a paradox: places and activities once reserved exclusively for the elite are now open to a larger swab of society, yet the more middle class India becomes, the less interested it seems to be in any of the elite’s former haunts. In every sprawling Indian city, mega-malls are rising that appear plucked right from the parking lots American suburbia. Ruby Tuesday, Bennigan’s, TGI Friday, McDonalds, Subway, and Pizza Hut seem to have emerged as the haute cuisine of urban India.
Agarwal, who did his undergrad at Haverford College and holds masters degree in economics from Boston University, confesses that there is a relationship between India’s economic policy and its sinking support of dusty gems like the Rink.
“In the U.S. they say ‘Time is Money.’ Since the 1990s, that attitude has been adopted by most of India,” he states flatly. “People would rather make money than support culture.”
Like many countries that suddenly find themselves on the verge of a shimmering future, the tendency is to break with the past. However, for a nation like India, where the past and present struggle through the same clogged streets, to allow a landmark like the Rink to rot into irrelevance would be out of character for a people who often define themselves by an all-embracing diversity of culture, religion, and even of time.
Agarwal admits the Rink is a dying business, one out of touch with most of India, but says he keeps it running for purposes of cultural preservation and nostalgia. “In lesser hands they’d have ruined it,” he huffs. To an extent, Agarwal might be correct: from observing the trends, another owner may have simply ripped down the Rink and erected yet another architectural and cultural monstrosity. But does not Agarwal shoulder some of the blame for the Rink’s demise?
Back at the Rink, the wooden floor is tattooed with sloppy swashes of paint and cants in awkward angles. The faded woodwork splinters onto the rows of plastic benches and tables. Honestly, the Rink could use a stiff shot of that virility tonic the charlatan around the corner hawks.
Rather than broken from overuse, Agarwal and the general public have permitted the Rink to molder into a modern day ruins. Maintaining a cultural venue seems to be as much the responsibility of the proprietor as the public.
Bendari, the Rink’s antique employee, strolls about, brandishing another beedi. He’s stored away the skates and now has but to pass the time before the Saturday evening rush ends. Before departing (concluding the ‘rush’), I ask him if he ever lashes on a pair of skates and goes for a spin.
“Oh no,” he hacks through a chuckle of phlegm. “I haven’t skated here in at least a few decades.”
