What is a banlieue? It took me some time to understand it. At first I didn’t understand it at all. I lived in Paris but if I walked 200 metres, I was no longer in Paris and found myself in Gentilly instead, where I’d once visited a Hawaiian restaurant that served Korean food. However, within the periphery of Paris, 200 metres in another direction, was the café named Le Gentilly, which technically was in Paris, where I’d had my first bonafide Parisian espresso last year. The whole thing was a bit disorienting. Then there was the question of the metro. The closest metro in either direction was about 1.5 kms away and the closest train station was served by the RER instead, the suburban train service connecting Paris to the banlieues. And so, when someone asked which was the closest metro to me, I had to tell them that they would either have to take the tram or the RER and they automatically assumed that I didn’t live in Paris. But when I visited a friend in Ivry-sur-Seine, which is not Paris, I had to take a metro. Finally, after a few months, I understood that the only real way to differentiate Paris from the not-Paris was the pin code with Paris pin codes starting exclusively with 75 but it wasn’t possible to show my address proof with a pin code starting with 75 to everyone who asked me where I lived, so in the end, it didn’t really make any difference. All my administrative procedures were to be handled by the Paris prefecture, even though another prefecture in the pin code starting with 94 was actually closer to me.
It reminded me of Manto’s story Toba Tek Singh where a lunatic finds himself perplexed by the shifting borders of India and Pakistan, unable to locate the village of Toba Tek Singh with no one sure of whether this village was in India or Pakistan. I had no idea where the village of Paris began and ended.
The other night, I saw a man kiss a woman from my balcony, unable to ascertain whether the kiss happened in Paris or in the banlieues … banlieues chéries.
