Dadar in December

                                    

What passes for winter in Bombay is here and having read a good book, rested and watched UEFA championship football matches all day I got out for a walk in the evening. In days of good mood, I like to walk irregular routes. Today is one such day.

From the edge of the sea of Mahim Bay at Prabhadevi, I walk briskly through the dense evening crowds of Dadar towards the seething Local trains` stations, past the awkward-looking  Portuguese Church on the way, reminding me as always that the sound “Dad” in Dadar comes from Portugese, like in Trinidad. It is the old textiles mills` area, planned and built around World War-I, now awash and choking with today`s globalised people and goods mostly from China. I note, again, that globalization is an old thing indeed; it preceded and maybe caused the famous european Renaissance.                                 

My spirits lift, as always, as I near the Tilak bridge’s Plaza cinema, still functioning but now looking like a ruin. It is an old stone bridge, later suitably reinforced from time to time of course, across the Local train tracks, both of the Western and the Central lines -- the major artery of the city. The bridge and the buildings on both sides, blackened and beaten down by ageing and irrelevance, have a charm for me as if I have grown up here, which I haven’t-- I grew up in an altogether different Delhi. Pathways of nostalgia are mysterious, global-- even without remembering Carl Jung.

A bit short of breath as I walk up the sloping road to the bridge itself I see the old, courteous stone-flagged stairways that lead down from the bridge, in short flights easy on the legs and bones, to the different thronged streets below, changed and unchanged by the city’s history. The old Seth Chhabildas School which was once the free and open-to-all evening workshop area for experimental Marathi theatre, the Ideal Book Depot, the Khsatriya Sangha, the nameless colonial two-storey buildings, all aged and still ageing wordlessly -- as if in a Tarkovsky film. The whole heartening and sad history of Bombay. I see the skyscrapers in the evening sky and think of the book on it I will not quite write one day.   

I stop as always in the middle of the bridge and look at the city due north and south. The sky is clear in the sea breeze, blue colour on the ascendant. Local trains are passing beneath the unshuddering bridge, looking dusty, exhausted and unpainted for a long time, their overhead electric cables looking ragged and near their snapping-modulus. People, cars, buses, head to toe, along both sides of the road. I listen to snatches of conversation of people to people walking alongside or on mobile phones. Life itself.  I nod, move on, cross the bridge.

Across the bridge although I know it is useless I don’t fail to look inside the Parsi Dairy. It has a retro charm, and a miserable collection of sweets. Compared to the Baroque Hindu splendours of sweet shops of Delhi, not to even mention those of Lucknow or Kanpur, the Parsi stuff in glass cases looks Neanderthal. But the side lanes and streets are wide, the trees lining them are tall, old, and august. Against the tide, but holding on. Even pavements are wide and decent. The space, the ease, of Dadar East – the older Dadar.

This survival is of course made possible by the new flyovers.  They look utilitarian and just that. I look at the fat Marathi policewoman under the TT flyover directing the dense evening traffic with cool aplomb. Flyovers. The undersung sinews of the future, rescuing terminal cities across the world, overcoming the inevitably foreshortened visions available to the past. Science. The truest godhead.

I cross over – under, actually- the highway due east towards the Parsi Colony. By now I have had a longish walk for me and I am winded. I avoid going inside the Colony. It is persevering with its old people, old buildings, old dress, old language, although here and there succumbing to the intolerable pressures of the present-- rebuilding in bold, garish, neo-Persian, pre-Islamic styles; awful, and sad. But the old culture is still predominant, defiant against the siege of the times, even assertive-- some of the better clubs and gyms of the city are here. And why not? More strength to their elbows, their celebration of particularity! The twentieth century has after all shown up the unheeded undersides of mass scale things-- of both the Right and the Left. And culture? Like religion it is after all seldom deeper than dress, deportment, food, language and such like-- if there can be things deeper.

I walk away from the old, settled shops along the pavement of the main road lined by decrepit old buildings , crumbling and even locked up, some showing dates like 1929, 1936 … in old proud fonts. At the curving corner away from the main road there is a small, polished granite slab resting on some carefully stacked bricks, probably used by a roadside cobbler during the day. I sit down on it for rest. The sky now is deep blue and clear, stars are out, the roads are lit by streaming golden headlights. The suburbia of an ex-colonial city hunkering down in the oncoming night. But some plastic-draped buildings have atop them those tall steel thingummies -- what are they called, derricks? – with a horizontal, levered steel arm assisting some modern speedy construction. Scenes out of Bunuel, Gavras. I sit and watch and listen.

A gaggle of schoolgirls walks past after their private tuition class, halt and say their loud, cheerful byes at the corner and move off in different directions. Two taxies stop and park on the road and eye me speculatively. A schoolboy with backpack slouches past morosely, his face brightening up seeing his mother waiting for him at the corner on her scooter, climbs up on the backseat, and she drives back carefully with her son, nodding to his excited chatter. Two very old Parsi women walking very slowly, halt for a moment, one of them puts her arm around the others` shoulder, and their heads touch with deep feeling. A plump Marathi woman in a shiny synthetic sari, a tired domestic worker on her way home, watches with soft eyes the two old women with a timeless understanding, women to women. A tall old man with a tall dog too old for a leash walks past, both eyeing me as an oddity sitting there.

This is what I have always loved. This is what I came here for. Standing in some street of some city, rested and exercised, seeing it, hearing its voices. Alone, but happy, even exultant. The evening turning into night proper, I sit there on the cobbler`s slab for quite some time.

With the night almost descended I get up to go home-- in a taxi. In no hurry, replete, I stroll slowly along the pavement, both hands in pant pockets, gazing around with fondness. At one spot I see what I had not seen earlier – a crude square arch over the flyover, its only reluctant stab at ornamentation. Sense of beauty surviving in a PWD heart.

I see more. Above the blunt arch, high up in the inked-up sky, I see the shining Evening Star, Venus. Transfixed at the magical sight, as always since my schooldays, I stand rooted gazing up at it. I said schooldays! Yes, this sight has been with me seemingly forever and always with this magic. A common thing, but it has never failed to fill up my heart with unnameable joy. The closest description of this magic that I have found is, so help me god, in the later, Meccan Suras of the Quran. I stand still, seeing this ageless sight, hearing the traffic on the flyover. Till I see a hand waving at me. I look down to see a middleaged Parsi man in salt-pepper beard staring at me with alarmed, wide open eyes. Are you okay? He gestures with his hands again in concern. Yes, I smile at him, wave back in reassurance; couldn`t be better.

I walk away amused. What sight did I present, in my besottedness with Venus? An old man gazing not at pavement-level things, but raptly at nothing in the sky. Did I look like someone about to give up the ghost? Give up the ghost; I mull at the old phrase. In this maximum city where millions are always on the edge of several kinds of precipices, thousands are also aware of it. So much so that strangers see its signs in the passing multitude. It has come to that.

But I am not on a precipice. If I am at some edge it is an edge of something else altogether. I find myself grinning and try to stop it. But I have been seen by that tall old man with his tall old dog, now returning from their errand. The old man stares at me long and hard. The dog does not bother.

I find a taxi, and surprisingly it easily agrees to going my way.