Gavaskar Place, Kapil Grove

Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev didn’t exactly get along famously during their playing days, but far away in the Southern Hemisphere, in one of the plushest residential areas of Wellington, the two icons of Indian cricket stand next to each other. About a 15-minute drive from the city centre, streets named after them stand 50 meters apart and overlook the capital from a high ground on one side, and green higher hills on the other. The view is breathtaking.

The houses look luxurious, with classy wooden doors, rich gardens and big cars. Not many venture out of their houses, at least during the 15 minutes spent there. A walker-by doesn’t really know when the streets were named, or who came up with the idea. The city council is not of much help, or perhaps they have got more important things to do. But they do suggest Wellington Museum could be of some help. The Museum directs one to the Wellington City Archives, where the only thing that can be established is, the streets were named before 1992: the earliest mention of the names in the archives is in 1992, and it is not about their naming.

There is an interesting pattern to the signboards of the street names. Gavaskar Place is written only on one side of the board, and Kapil Grove on both. Could it have anything to do with Gavaskar being a just a batsman and Kapil being an allrounder? The streets of the Khandallah area, where these streets are, are winding as opposed to the straight bat of Gavaskar.

Khandallah is situated near a hill that was once called Mount Misery. Just as well that they changed the name. All the streets in Khandallah get their names from India: Andaman, Simla Crescent, Satara, Ramphal, Delhi, Madras, Poona, Amritsar, Benares, Gaya, Vasanta, Amapur, Baroda, Agra, Lucknow Terrace, Mysore, Bombay, all in a concentrated area. Unlike other names like Bombay and Coramandel in the outskirts of Auckland, which were given by British rulers who also lived in New Zealand and really liked those Indian places, these names could have been given by Indian soldiers who worked for the British Army in the pre-independence days. More fact-finding will be done during the next week in Wellington.

Khandallah apart, the most significant presence of India in Wellington is the statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside the Wellington Railway Station. There is no ambiguity to the origin of that statue being here in New Zealand.