Of Prayer and Underwear
At 2:30 a.m. on every night of Ramadan, Mohammed Shafiq set out to bother his neighbors.
“Those who are fasting, wake up! Nassim, wake up!” he called to one neighbor before moving on to ring, and keep ringing, doorbells and bang on doors one recent evening, before the monthlong fast ended.
He is one of a shrinking brigade of town criers in New Delhi, rousing the faithful from their beds for prayer. Despite having bad knees, he told The Times, his religious duty compels him to carry on, and to add his own personal touch.
Mr. Shafiq, who brings a stick to defend himself from stray dogs and recites the Quran to ward off demons, helps bind together his community in a world where a sense of belonging is fraying.
In his corner of New Delhi, the rise of electricity and cellphones with alarms, along with the megaphones that blare the call to prayer in the city, have rendered Mr. Shafiq’s job nearly obsolete.
Nonetheless, many of his neighbors prefer his voice to the ringing of their phones. “We’ve seen him since our childhood, so we have an attachment to him,” said Mohammed Kashif, 23. “He’s not just an alarm on our phone.”
In Colyton, England, neighbors banded together to defend another practice that seems out of date: the right to hang their laundry out to dry.
Claire Mountjoy got an anonymous letter that claimed to speak “on behalf of local businesses and the neighborhood,” asking her to stop hanging her laundry outside. She posted the missive online, and soon the streets were lined with socks and shirts blowing in the breeze, The Times reported.
“It was like some sort of military operation,” said Paul Arnott, who lives nearby. “I got up and got some of my oldest clothes and strung them up, including a pair of boxers,” he told the website Devon Live.
Other residents called for an Annual Underwear Airing Day.
“It’s a British trait to not like that kind of bullying,” Mr. Arnott said, adding that he and others took offense to the passive-aggressive nature of the letter. “And Colyton is really good at resisting that.”
Neighborly acts of rebellion are not isolated to Colyton. In Derby Line, Vermont, where a line of potted petunias on Church Street marks the border between the United States and Canada, residents have long lived under the watchful eye of the Border Patrol.
They complain of excessive surveillance, but dutifully check in at a border station not far from the pe- tunias when they cross. Canadians often make the trip to buy cheap gas and inexpensive items at the nearest Walmart, and Americans visit Quebec for the butter and ginger ale.
But problems sometimes arise. Roland Roy, a pharmacist on the American side, whom everyone calls Buzz, once crossed to get a pizza, then crossed again, and again, and then once more. He did it to prove a point, he said, but the act of rebellion resulted in his arrest. After the local paper published the news under the headline “Local Man Jailed For Crossing Street,” residents worked together to lobby for his release, donning “Free Buzzy Roy” buttons.
Now out of jail, Mr. Roy told The Times that he was worried about the heated trade rhetoric between the countries’ leaders. For him, the people on the other side of the street aren’t just his neighbors.
“We depend on each other for trade, for security, for everything,” he said. “You just don’t treat your friends that way.”