Tomorrow I will vote. I’ll probably walk to the same mid-20th century bungalow that I walked to five years ago – it was once a primary school my daughter went to – where you vote in a room on the margins of the open space that was a playground. It is a site in which the ballot is cast (or the button pressed) in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Ballygunge in Kolkata. It has a historic serenity – even an optimism, given its immediate pedagogical past – that may not be typical at all of the circumstances of voting in India.
The general elections are, however, always largely orderly (“largely” being a crucial qualifier). This one hasn’t been very different in that regard. After I vote, I expect to receive an indelible ink mark that will stretch vertically on my forefinger from the cuticle to the skin below it; somehow, like a memory that was once all-important, it will fade after a few days. There have been stories about people who have managed to get the mark off; one of them, who voted eight times for the Bharatiya Janata party, was arrested.
