I just started reading Maximum city by Suketu Mehta. I am sure the “brilliant”, “lyrical” and “the best bit of journalism to come out of the country” parts will reveal themselves to me eventually. At this point, I am mulling my way through his “Country of No” and “fucking city”.
It is not that I am bristling at these epithets. I am sure if a shit-laden diaper flew into my house, I would also be forced to find succor in the four-lettered word.
The thing is, Mr. Mehta’s Mumbai seems to extend only up to the Mahim creek. However, as an “aspirational middle-class immigrant” to the city, the area that the author defines as Mumbai is well nigh inaccessible to me. I am a child of the suburbs. Hell, when I came here first, I got down at the Kurla station—not even the famed Mumbai Central or VT.
I am proud to claim that I landed in Mumbai like the millions of immigrants do—with one suitcase full of personal belongings, 2000 rupees in hand, no job, and no prospect of one either. I am also proud to claim that I was one of those Mumbai decided to seduce. I was employed (albeit for peanuts) on the 15th day of my landing; had a completely new set of friends by month two; and by month six, had moved into a dusty 1 bhk apartment in a dusty alley in dusty Sher-e-Punajb.
However, my brave new beginning in Mumbai is not what I started out to write about.
I realized that my recent homecoming to Mumbai is vaguely similar to that of Mr. Mehta’s. Like him, despite all the places I’ve lived in, I always reach out to Mumbai for my identity. Like him, I came back on the wings of my nostalgia. And like he did, I find that Mumbai-scape has altered in undeniable ways, even within the short time-span of three years.
But our point of departure is that I came back to the suburbs. Here the demographics are far more mixed; everybody is as old or as new as you are in this city; and the limits of our Mumbai is the market on the west, workplace in the north, mall to our east, and temple/gym/park/tailor/station to the south. Love, lust, hate, games, catching-up-with-the-Joneses, family, identity, eating out, ill health, bad-roads-in-monsoons, suicide everything happens within this microcosm.
Unlike the author, my easing back into this city took no time at all. I walked into a fully furnished apartment, picked up where the previous inhabitants left, and was fully settled in two hours.
I had no angst or righteous indignation, nor a moment of shivery panic. Maybe it is because I still have my famed Mumbai middle class apathy intact.
Two weeks after coming back, I met up with a friend at Versova. We went to the beach, found a nice spot, and sat down on the sand to catch up with each other. At around 9 pm, I noticed that the inhabitants of the fishermen’s shanty were making trips to the water’s edge for—erm—their ablutions. I ignored it until one person got really close to where we were sitting.
The following is a true report of our conversation at that juncture—I kid you not.
Me: “I think we should leave—this guy is shitting too close for comfort.”
Friend: “Come, let’s go and have dinner.”
We did go and have a great big seafood dinner right after this.
Flying diapers? Pshaw!
Open sewers, cockroach menace, endless traffic jams, smog, bad roads, crowd-crowd-crowd, shirtless children begging at traffic signals, ridiculous anti-single people-policies of housing societies, farcically expensive restaurants, sweltering slums that abut every high-rise, window cleaners who hang outside your office window on a must-be-punished-with-death-sentence-for-negligence harness and nothing else—all this and much more fall into Douglas Adam’s Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field for me.
My last four months in the city, I am ashamed to say, have been exceedingly pleasant.
Everybody pretty much acted as if I had never been away for a longish period. My hot hair stylist remembered the cut she gave me in 2005 and wanted to know whether I wanted the same this time. At the Hiranandani hospital, they refused to give me a new file because they expected me to have the old file from four years ago. A bunch of people I met at a party told me “Ah, we don’t need introductions”, although I desperately did—I had no recollection of having met them before!
And perfect strangers have gone out of their way to be nice.
Like the couple we met at Forjett Hill, Tardeo. I had stopped them to ask for directions after being hopelessly lost. The building they showed us was at the top of the hill. As we stood there, overwhelmed at the steep climb, the couple came back and dropped my parents up the hill in their car.
Like the workers at the Sewri jetty: the crane operator who told us at what time the flamingoes arrive in the morning; the supervisor who told us that he would let us know when one of his cranes would stop working so that we can have a closer look at the birds; the man aboard one of the barges who gave us water to drink… Easy and warm hospitality where there isn’t even a signboard to help visitors.
Like the twenty people at Matunga who gathered around us to show us the way to a particular shop.
Like my neighbor who insists on paying my telephone bill.
Even my parents, freshly off the boat from Madurai and here for just a visit, have fitted right in to the scheme of things. My mom is feeding a bunch of sparrows because she read somewhere they are going extinct in Mumbai. My dad rooted for the Mumbai IPL team. Our Marathi cook has been taught to make sambhar. The paperwallah has been instructed to supply Tamil magazines. My dad wears new T-shirts from Cotton World and uses Axe aftershave because—well—this is fashionable Mumbai!
Where I live was not technically Mumbai to start with—it was a village that was annexed to the urban sprawl sometime in the past 50 years. It doesn’t have the history, legacy, or architecture of Bombay.
But it carries the germ of the city. It seethes with possibilities. It integrates city’s triumph and despair, dreams and frustrations. It is functional. It doesn’t take me too seriously. It makes me feel safe. It is home.
Tedha hi, par mera hi.
It is not that I am bristling at these epithets. I am sure if a shit-laden diaper flew into my house, I would also be forced to find succor in the four-lettered word.
The thing is, Mr. Mehta’s Mumbai seems to extend only up to the Mahim creek. However, as an “aspirational middle-class immigrant” to the city, the area that the author defines as Mumbai is well nigh inaccessible to me. I am a child of the suburbs. Hell, when I came here first, I got down at the Kurla station—not even the famed Mumbai Central or VT.
I am proud to claim that I landed in Mumbai like the millions of immigrants do—with one suitcase full of personal belongings, 2000 rupees in hand, no job, and no prospect of one either. I am also proud to claim that I was one of those Mumbai decided to seduce. I was employed (albeit for peanuts) on the 15th day of my landing; had a completely new set of friends by month two; and by month six, had moved into a dusty 1 bhk apartment in a dusty alley in dusty Sher-e-Punajb.
However, my brave new beginning in Mumbai is not what I started out to write about.
I realized that my recent homecoming to Mumbai is vaguely similar to that of Mr. Mehta’s. Like him, despite all the places I’ve lived in, I always reach out to Mumbai for my identity. Like him, I came back on the wings of my nostalgia. And like he did, I find that Mumbai-scape has altered in undeniable ways, even within the short time-span of three years.
But our point of departure is that I came back to the suburbs. Here the demographics are far more mixed; everybody is as old or as new as you are in this city; and the limits of our Mumbai is the market on the west, workplace in the north, mall to our east, and temple/gym/park/tailor/station to the south. Love, lust, hate, games, catching-up-with-the-Joneses, family, identity, eating out, ill health, bad-roads-in-monsoons, suicide everything happens within this microcosm.
Unlike the author, my easing back into this city took no time at all. I walked into a fully furnished apartment, picked up where the previous inhabitants left, and was fully settled in two hours.
I had no angst or righteous indignation, nor a moment of shivery panic. Maybe it is because I still have my famed Mumbai middle class apathy intact.
Two weeks after coming back, I met up with a friend at Versova. We went to the beach, found a nice spot, and sat down on the sand to catch up with each other. At around 9 pm, I noticed that the inhabitants of the fishermen’s shanty were making trips to the water’s edge for—erm—their ablutions. I ignored it until one person got really close to where we were sitting.
The following is a true report of our conversation at that juncture—I kid you not.
Me: “I think we should leave—this guy is shitting too close for comfort.”
Friend: “Come, let’s go and have dinner.”
We did go and have a great big seafood dinner right after this.
Flying diapers? Pshaw!
Open sewers, cockroach menace, endless traffic jams, smog, bad roads, crowd-crowd-crowd, shirtless children begging at traffic signals, ridiculous anti-single people-policies of housing societies, farcically expensive restaurants, sweltering slums that abut every high-rise, window cleaners who hang outside your office window on a must-be-punished-with-death-sentence-for-negligence harness and nothing else—all this and much more fall into Douglas Adam’s Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field for me.
My last four months in the city, I am ashamed to say, have been exceedingly pleasant.
Everybody pretty much acted as if I had never been away for a longish period. My hot hair stylist remembered the cut she gave me in 2005 and wanted to know whether I wanted the same this time. At the Hiranandani hospital, they refused to give me a new file because they expected me to have the old file from four years ago. A bunch of people I met at a party told me “Ah, we don’t need introductions”, although I desperately did—I had no recollection of having met them before!
And perfect strangers have gone out of their way to be nice.
Like the couple we met at Forjett Hill, Tardeo. I had stopped them to ask for directions after being hopelessly lost. The building they showed us was at the top of the hill. As we stood there, overwhelmed at the steep climb, the couple came back and dropped my parents up the hill in their car.
Like the workers at the Sewri jetty: the crane operator who told us at what time the flamingoes arrive in the morning; the supervisor who told us that he would let us know when one of his cranes would stop working so that we can have a closer look at the birds; the man aboard one of the barges who gave us water to drink… Easy and warm hospitality where there isn’t even a signboard to help visitors.
Like the twenty people at Matunga who gathered around us to show us the way to a particular shop.
Like my neighbor who insists on paying my telephone bill.
Even my parents, freshly off the boat from Madurai and here for just a visit, have fitted right in to the scheme of things. My mom is feeding a bunch of sparrows because she read somewhere they are going extinct in Mumbai. My dad rooted for the Mumbai IPL team. Our Marathi cook has been taught to make sambhar. The paperwallah has been instructed to supply Tamil magazines. My dad wears new T-shirts from Cotton World and uses Axe aftershave because—well—this is fashionable Mumbai!
Where I live was not technically Mumbai to start with—it was a village that was annexed to the urban sprawl sometime in the past 50 years. It doesn’t have the history, legacy, or architecture of Bombay.
But it carries the germ of the city. It seethes with possibilities. It integrates city’s triumph and despair, dreams and frustrations. It is functional. It doesn’t take me too seriously. It makes me feel safe. It is home.
Tedha hi, par mera hi.
Comments
There is a line in Rushdie's latest short story, "In the Soth":
“Southerners are we, in the south of our city in the south of our country in the south of our continent. God be praised. We are warm, slow, and sensual guys, not like the cold fishes of the north.”
Cheers
Bix