Thought of the day

           Salaam Bombay, again.

I went to see the ugly Portugese church at Dadar, after twenty years or so, maybe to drop a plumb line of my arrival in Bombay this time. In that earlier visit I had been drawn by a bunch of merry old men I had seen on many days draped over shoulder-high cement traffic railings, singing in open mouthed abandon across the road from the church. Those days I had not acquired the instinct of averting my eyes from disturbing sights. Their grizzled faces and large tilaks on some foreheads had led me to expect deep devotional songs, maybe Tukaram. When I had approached them casually and unobserved I was shocked to hear that they were singing currently popular bollywood numbers. They were retirees; LIC officials who still caught their habitual local trains with their habitual lunchboxes to gather here and pass the empty days. 

I have always found Bombay to be anti-mystical city.

Today I did not see the old men. Twenty years of Manmohanism have happened here too. There was no railing left. Just heavy traffic and the squat, inward looking church.   The only thought I came away with was that “Dadar” comes from a Portugese word. So does “Mahim”. And no wonder, the Portugese had come and settled first in Mahim Bay, the most sheltered bay in this stretch of Arabian Sea, with Dadar in the shade of their guns of the Mahim fort. “Mahim Bay” is perhaps the real historical origin of the name Bombay, or even Mumbai. It is Ganapati time. As I walked back, dodging through the overcrowded and monsoon-slicked foothpaths I felt I had arrived, with my own little enigmas of arrival.

Dadar Chowpatty, my old haunt, has changed. The sand is almost clean, all along the beach, no longer black with industrial and human slime and scum. A big vehicle self-consciously and proudly moves twice a day along the water`s edge cleaning up debris and refuse. Even the sea water looks cleaner. White clean birds sit in the low tide shallows, brood and peck. Young boys and girls some wearing Maharastra Navnirman Sena T-shirts stroll in unfurtive, middleclass ways, smooch as if on TV. Even a Coast Guard helicopter rumbles past in some post-26/11 routine.

Why doesn’t my heart pulse with joy? Born well on the wrong side of Manmohanist 1991, I miss the darkness and the derelicts, the druggies and rejects of the tough city, who used to seek refuge in this poorer chowpatty of Bombay. They were my kind of people. They are gone. Why do I miss them with a pang of dread? Why am I deeply disturbed by this squeaky (though not quite) clean ambience? I watch the stilled fishing canoes in the bay, aiming for the sub optimal segments of the day’s catch and ponder this question. A crow looks at me quizzically. Why? 

I get the answer. I have been pondering this question for some months now, in the wider context of Manmohanist transformation tornado-ing through this old India for the last twenty years. It is the same subterranean unease I feel while sitting and having coffee in a Barista or a Café Coffee Day. Everthing is good(including the high calorie coffee) and fine and bright. Including the price. The cheapest cup costs 60 rupees. This blocks out most of the old India -- about 85-90 percent of it. According to an old journalistic apocrypha, in their early youth, friends Balasaheb Thakre, Sharad Pawar and Chaggan Bhujbal used to sit in Dadar chowpatty and drink away their evenings, regretting, planning, dreaming, youthfully. Today they wouldn’t have been allowed in. Revulsion from the present must have always been a driving force for the quest of history.

But I find very little change as I move about in the city. That old film Bees Saal Baad was also about changelessness, I reflect incongruously. Colaba remains the same barracks of small trades; Fort the same frontispiece of long faded grandeur; the Fountain area carries the look of an abandoned advanced city taken over by the hinterland’s less endowed peasantry. The suburbs? The same suburbs. Only more congested and with the shop signed changed. No large scale turn-around of Bombay; no complete makeover seen elsewhere in New India like in Delhi, Bangalore or even Jammu, Hyderabad, lower down in the pecking order. What has taken away the spunkiness, as well as the cool rationality of this great city?

Provincial is the word that keeps comimg up in my mind. I see the Ganapatis being bought and taken to homes and pandals with real love and devotion – enabling marathis for once a year to reclaim their gentle culture against the alien, looming Bombay. Late monsoons this year.  Cloud-laden skies over the city are as glorious as ever, I note with reassurance.  The sea still gives out the smell of brewing freshness and unfathomable portents. I sit in some of the remaining irani restaurants, with names like Milltown, Coronation, Regal, and have tea and khari biscuits. These are mostly vacant, full of history. Bombay. A city left breathing after tainted wars and pogroms, after its soul and entrails have been ravaged by sharp, short-sighted politics. Some muscular village boy, fresh from his village and biding time for better chances, manages the show, gives me a rubberstamped bill for my tea. Does Beirut feel like this? Or Baghdad?

Why, why, why? I keep asking myself. What has happened? Or, what has not happened to this jewel of India`s cities? Then another thought occurs to me. Am I even seeing things straight? Maybe I am merely selectively seeking out only what echoes my own ageing and fatigue? But, further along in this vein, my final question has me stumped: Can one ever see a city straight – any city? Villages perhaps yes -- villages can but only live in the present, but cities? Cities are nothing but piled aggregations of the past and future.

My puzzlement is turning into astonishment. Twenty years of Manmohanism have exploded the cities of india into feverish and even mawkish civic growth while of course subverting its villages into an opposite direction of decay and degeneration. What has it done to Bombay? Why so little? Maybe resident mumbaikars have not had a suitable pause to notice and register this, but to a continual exile like me with a deep fondness this city it is astounding. I don’t have the answer.

Half my household stuff is still in packers` cartons waiting to be unpacked, not unexpectedly because these objects acquire specific gravity – like in a Higgs Boson Field – in the mind from one`s life lived and unlived. The sky is laden with swift-sailing armadas of monsoon clouds. The sea breeze crossing my uncurtained windows is cool and has an air of having travelled a long way. I take a break and have my first drink here, look out at the city from my 21^st floor windows. 

 

And perhaps I see the answer staring at me in the face. The forest of tall buildings in various stages of finish looking like Hongkong, Singapore, Dubai and such Destination Cities, are the new thing that has happened. This is what they are gushing about in newspaper supplements. The Maximum City. From my window I have the view southward, at the patch from Dadar,through Lower Parel and Elphinston Road to Byculla – what inearly20^th century was a dense cluster of over a 100 “textile and general mills” and was poetically called “girnigaum” ( literally, a village of factories ) which morphed later into today`s “girgaum”reaching up to the Marine Drive. Those girnis are gone. Upon their graves have mushroomed these skyscraping malls and condos, showcasing Bombay`s version of Manmohanism. Bombay and even much of Maharashtra, where whole political careers most often hinge on this or that plot of the city`s land, has remained centered on this chronic wretchedness. For bees saal.

The old global dialectic. The very girnis which accrue rental value to the land are precisely the ones that need to perish for rent- seekers of the next-gen. Development, it is called. Or economics. I wonder.

I have a clue, at the least, to decipher the city afresh. The moist monsoon breeze in the night is ruffling my scant hair, evoking far off rivers and forests, which must be in the hinterland somewhere, beyond this now lighting-up new hongkong in the old girnigaum. It is Ganapati time. Drums are throbbing far away in the dense night, revealing the hidden heartbeat of the city surfacing for a week. I pour another drink, in salaam.