Meri Jaan

By Jane Bhandari

Bombay, My Mumbai

I posted a parcel from England.

Where is Mumbai?

Said the clerk at the post office.

It’s my home, I said, it’s Bombay.

Mumbai is Bombay.

Sounds fatter to me, he said,

Laughing, and I thought,

Well, second marriage,

They usually are fatter,

Shapely young Bombay

Become matronly Mumbai,

Sprawling on the beach

With her feet in the sea.

Building Hung with Sky

The building grew spikes

As the scaffolding crept up:

Then jute and spidery nets

Veiled it, webs on thorns.

First the skeleton,

Then the cocoon.

Suddenly, the building

Was a chrysalis.

The wind began to rip it apart,

Exposing the scaffolding;

Plucked and ripped,

Twisted and tore,

And one day the whole skin

Hung in tatters,

Flew prayer flags

Across the sky.

Reflected in the distorting mirrors

Of the next building’s windows:

It wavered, rents magnified,

Now the building stood bare,

Contained by the bones of scaffolding,

Boarded windows staring blindly

At the sky.

A mysterious change

Was taking place.

The building reappeared,

Glass-hung, reflecting sky and flying clouds,

And the next building’s renovations.

The jute cocoon

Became a fashion statement,

Repeated all over the city.

Locking Up

The collection of keys

To my official residence

Began innocuously

With a latchkey,

And a key for the padlock

And a key for each room

And a key to the padlock

On the terrace door,

All this in duplicate.

I made a spare set

For my daughter,

And another for my son.

Put all together,

They weighed quite a bit.

Then I added a lock

And a padlock

And another, fancier lock

To my security gate;

Keys made in quadruplicate:

One for me, one for my son,

One for my daughter, one spare.

To my personal bunch

Add keys to cupboards.

Say about six for the kitchen

And six for the study,

One for the big bookcase,

The drinks cupboard,

The sideboard,

The guestroom wardrobe,

Two bedside tables…

This time, in duplicate.

…Add to this the keys

Of various trunks and suitcases,

And a box of anonymous keys

Weighing almost three kilos…

Now that I am the proud owner

Of two residences,

I have started the process

All over again,

Beginning with the latchkeys

In quadruplicate.

The keys have begun to breed,

And my handbag

Has become

A formidable weapon.

Bombay for the Dummies

The City of Bombay originally comprised seven islands: Colaba, Mazagaon, Old Womans’ Island, Wadala, Mahim, Parel and Matunga-Sion. This group of islands, formed part of the kingdom of King Ashoka, have since been joined together by a series of reclamations.

After Ashoka’s death, these islands passed into the hands of various Hindu rulers until 1343. In that year, the Mohammedans of Gujarat took possession and the kings of that province of India ruled these isles for the following two centuries. The only vestige of their dominion over these islands that remains today is the mosque at Mahim. Who tore everything down? The Portuguese-British perhaps. Post-partition anti-Muslim mobs perhaps.

In 1534 the Portuguese, who already possessed many important trading centres on the western coast such as Panjim (Goa), Daman and Diu, took Bombay by force of arms from the Mohammedans. This led to the establishment of numerous churches that were constructed in areas where the majority of people were Roman Catholics. There used to be two areas in Bombay called Portuguese Church. Nevertheless, only one church with Portuguese-style façade still remains: the St. Andrews’ Church at Bandra.

The Portuguese also fortified their possession by building forts at Sion, Mahim, Bandra and Bassien, which, although in disrepair, can still be seen. They named their new possession as ‘Bom Baia, which in Portuguese means ‘Good Bay’.

This name was later changed to ‘Bombay’ by the British and much later, challenged by the Shiv Sainiks, a renegade political party in the state, saying that the name of the city was ‘Mumbai’ from the Mumbadevi temple. Nobody really put up a fight. The fact of the matter is that the Kolis, who were and are the fishermen of that area, called a small section (Babulnath, to be precise) of the islands ‘Mumba’. This, in the mid-1990s, became a huge political issue with the Shiv Sena which was losing a grip over the city.

About 130 years later, the islands were given as dowry to the English King Charles II on his marriage to Portuguese Princess Catherine de Braganza in 1662. In 1668, the islands were acquired by the British East India Company on lease from the crown for 10 pounds in gold per year.

Perceptibly, the British did not value these islands at that time. The Company, which was operating from Surat in Gujarat, was in search for another deeper water port so that larger vessels could dock, and found the islands of Bombay suitable for development. The shifting of the East India Company’s headquarters to Bombay in 1687 led to the eclipse of Surat as a principal trading centre. The British corrupted the Portuguese name ‘Bom Baia’ to ‘Bombay’.

The first Parsi to arrive in Bombay was Dorabji Nanabhoy Patel in 1640. The Parsis, originally from Iran, migrated to India about 900 years ago. This they did to save their religion, Zoroastrianism, from invading Arabs who proselytised Islam. But, in 1689-90, when a severe plague had struck down most of the Europeans, the Siddi chief of Janjira made several attempts to repossess the islands by force, but the son of the former, a trader named Rustomji Dorabji Patel (1667-1763), successfully warded off the attacks on behalf of the British with the help of the Kolis, the original fisher-folk inhabitants of these islands. The remnants of the Koli settlements can still be seen at Backbay Reclamation, Mahim, Bandra, Khar, Bassien and Madh Island.

Bombay, then, had a succession of British governors who attracted Gujarati business people, traders, Parsi shipbuilders and Hindu and Muslim businessmen, and made the city more populous. A city court was started to uphold the law.

A fort was also built, none of which remains except a small portion of the wall. Governers like Oxenden, Aungier and Grant helped Bombay grow and set up hospitals, roads, etc.

The Zoroastrian Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill were built by Seth Modi Hirji Vachha in 1672. The first fire-temple was also built in the same year by Seth Vachha opposite his residence at Modikhana within the British fort. Both these structures can still be seen today, although they have been expanded and strengthened.

The inroads of the sea at Worli, Mahim and Mahalaxmi turned the ground between the islands into swamps making Bombay an extremely unhealthy place at that time. Reclamation work to stop the breeches at Mahalaxmi and Worli were undertaken. In 1803, Bombay was connected with Salsette by a causeway at Sion. The island of Colaba was joined to Bombay in 1838 by a causeway now called Colaba Causeway and the causeway connecting Mahim and Bandra was completed in 1845, which was done by Lady Avabai Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy.

In the mid-1800s, the cattle that people owned used to graze at the lush Camp Maidan (Azad Maidan). The British, always ready to levy taxes, started a grazing tax, which most people could not afford. Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy spent Rs 20,000 to buy some grasslands near the seafront at Thakurdwar and saw that the starving cattle grazed without a fee in that area. In time the area became to be known as ‘Charni’ meaning grazing. When a railway station on the BB&CI Railway was constructed there it was called Charni Road.

On Saturday, 16 April 1853, a 21-mile long railway line, the first in India, between Bombay’s Victoria Terminus and Thane was opened. In 1860, the railroads connected Baroda and Central India. With the Suez Canal also opening in Africa, Bombay saw a great economic boom, cotton being the main export. Many families made their fortunes during that time. Even the Americans imported cotton during the Civil War that started in 1861. The population of the city went from about 13,000 in 1770 to about 644,000 in 1870.

In 1858, after the first war for Independence, in which people like the Rani of Jhansi played a big part, Bombay was taken back by the crown and the East India Company was in dire straits. Governor Frere had a fountain made in his honour at that time, which was later called Flora Fountain, but this is a fact that is quite unknown to the general public.

Then in 1863, the Governor got piped-water from the lakes (Tulsi, Vehar and Tansa). After which they banned all open water storage systems like water tanks and wells, which were breeding grounds for mosquitoes. This was met with a lot of opposition.

The later half of the 19th century was also to see a feverish construction of buildings in Bombay, many of which such as the Victoria Terminus, the General Post Office, the Municipal Corporation, the Prince of Wales Museum, Rajabai Tower and Bombay University, St. Xavier’s College, Elphinstone College and the Cawasji Jehangir Hall, the Crawford Market, the Old Secretariat (Old Customs House) and the Public Works Department (PWD) Building, still stand today as major landmarks.

The Gateway of India was built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary for the Durbar at Delhi in 1911. The Princess Dock was built in the year 1885 and the Victoria Dock and the Meriweather Dry Docks in 1891. Alexandra Dock was completed in 1914.
Soon, Bombay saw the rise of the Parsi liquor mafia in the ‘Play House’ area, which was later changed to Pillhouse by the locals and became a red light district. At this time a terrible episode of bubonic plague wiped out a huge population of Bombay.

The Bombay Gymkhana was formed in 1875, exclusively for Europeans, who played the game of cricket there. Other communities followed this example, and various Parsi, Muslim and Hindu gymkhanas were started nearby with fierce sports competitions among them being organised on a communal basis. This was opposed by several secular-minded persons, such as the late AFSTalyarkhan and sports teams based on community, especially cricket teams, came to an end gradually after Independence from British rule in 1947.

Lord Sandhurst was the Governor after that from 1895-1900 and he was commemorated by naming a road and railway station after him. Around 1914, a train line was started from Ballard Pier to Wadala. Around the same time Tata Power Company set up overhead transmission lines. In 1927, electrical locomotives were imported from England (Vickers) and serviced the route between Pune and Igatpuri. These helped carry troops from Bombay to the rest of the country later during WW II.

In April 1944, a fire started in the holds of the ship, ‘Fort Stikine’ (7,420 tonnes), which was carrying dried fish, cotton bales, gunpowder, timber, ammunition and gold bars from London. There was about 2 million pounds sterling in gold to stabilise the Indian rupee. The explosion was so big and loud that it could be felt till Dadar, more than eight miles away.

The docks and the surrounding areas were completely destroyed. Over 120 brave men from the Bombay Fire Brigade in the second blast and hundreds of dock workers lost their lives (a monument was erected for them). The locals thought that the Japanese had attacked (like Pearl Harbour), which was not true, since they were currently fighting a losing battle. All the gold bars (which had landed all over the place) were subsequently returned over the next 30 years to the British government. All citizens who reported any damage to property or self were promptly paid compensation.

The historic session of the All India Congress Committee began on 7 August 1942. Its venue was the Gowalia Tank Maidan, where the Congress was born in 1885. It was at this session that the Quit India call was given by Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian National Congress leaders. The Indian leaders were arrested by the British soon afterwards but the momentum of the Quit India movement could not be stopped and led to the final withdrawal of the British on 15 August 1947.

The last British troops on Indian soil left for England through the archway of the Gateway of India on that day. They bade farewell from where they had entered 282 years before. The people of Bombay, in a gesture of generosity, wished them bon voyage, forgetting the bitter memories of the fight for Independence. Today, the maidan from where the call to Quit India was given is called the August Kranti Maidan.

After Independence, the Congress party led by Jawaharlal Nehru at the centre was swept to power in most Indian states, which were constituted on the basis of language spoken by the majority of its people.

The Bombay State included the city as its seat of government. In 1960 the state of Bombay was split into Maharashtra and Gujarat states, again on linguistic basis, the former retaining Bombay city as its capital. The Congress continued to administer Maharashtra until 1994 when it was replaced by the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition.

The Stock Exchange at Bombay was established in 1875 as ‘The Native Share and Stockbrokers Association’ which has evolved over the decades in to its present status as the premier Stock Exchange in India. It is one of the oldest in Asia having preceded even the Tokyo Stock Exchange which was founded in 1878. In the early days the business was conducted under the shade of a banyan tree in front of the Town Hall. The tree can still be seen in the Horniman Circle Park.

With the success of the back-bay reclamation scheme in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Nariman Point became the hub of the business activity. Several offices shifted from the Ballard Estate to Nariman Point which ultimately became one of the most expensive real estates in the world as high demand pushed prices to astronomical limits. Nariman Point is named after K F Nariman, president of the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee and former Mayor of Bombay.

‘Bollywood’ is a term used to describe the Indian film industry. It has been a long story of a century, starting in 1901, with the early shaky screen images turning into a multi-pronged and multi-winged empire of its own that has yielded about 30,000 feature films and thousands of documented short films. These are almost all musical family melodramas, which rule the roost. Cinema has raised India’s flag fly high in the world as the consistently largest film producer. But when it comes to quality the flag has to fly half-mast. The glamorous image of Bombay and the rumour that everyone is as beautiful as the movie stars attracted people from all over India to this city.

But eventually the city could not provide jobs to these teeming millions and these people had to beg for a living and slowly slums began to flourish all over the city, especially near the railway tracks. The city also has the dubious record of the second biggest slum in the world: Dharavi.

Crime is an inevitable part of Bombay: terrorists, contract killings, extortions, explosions, shootouts, naaka-bandi, encounter deaths... The slums and the poor strengthened Bombay’s immense mafia presence. There is huge evil nexus of the underworld, politicians and Bombay’s police force. Indian politics are filled with convicted felons and criminals, approximately around 700. Slumlords and smugglers like Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem and Iqbal Mirchi rose to fame. They became the feared names in India — the untouchables.

Today, Bombay is the financial and business capital of India. And the most vivacious city in the world.

Night’s Secrets

By Radhika Iyengar

And cats walk the silver street

Tails as question marks

Their paws compete

Orange with brown stripes

Black with white puddles

Brown with black masks

They walk into the night

The night breathes winter:

Veils the windows,

And seduces the leaves

While the burning red

Of pregnant lamps

Haunt the dark corners

Of the night...

And the winds mourn and wail

beckoning morning;

Forgotten letters

Fly as carpets from Aladdin’s land

Out the window of a woman betrayed

And shadows follow

The lone walkers

Whispering deceitfully where they have been —

While the mandir stands alone —

A white concrete of hopes and promises

Where rest the fat-bellied priests

(The beggars still sleep on the road)

The moonlight tip-toes

Into the night

Anxious to leave the sky

Just this once

And she pours and pours,

And does not stop,

And is caught when the morning arrives…

The Bombay Madness

By Ranjona Banerji

It is well known — at least anyone who lives in Bombay or visits it — that this city is self-obsessed. Bombay has been given this now-almost mythical character, where, as if the minute you land in this city, some mysterious force enters your body and you turn into something else.

It could well be that Bombay changes you, but it is not magic. It is more likely true that all places where you live for a period of time change you and the corollary of that is that each of us, with our various personalities, finds that one place suits us more than the other.

But with Bombay, it’s a constant examination of this Bombayness. In Calcutta, for instance, there is plenty of angst and soul and discussion with lashings of tea and swirls of cigarette smoke — adda, if you will. But in the few years I spent there, the essential Calcuttaness of jhal muri was not the subject of newspaper articles the way vada pau is discussed in Bombay.

I would even put it that food is more important to a Bengali than to anyone else in India and several towns and villages in Bengal are identified only by some typical foodstuff — but that’s as far as it goes. It’s food, not the essence of self that is under discussion.

Delhi, on the other hand, is chock-full of history and has more historical structures per square mm than most places have in their entire range of square km. Yet Delhi does not identify itself in quite the same way with its buildings and the ‘Bunty loves Pinky’ legend gets more currency than ‘restored by so-and-so corporate for so-and-so committee’. The government still controls Delhi. In Bombay, even government buildings are sought to be refurbished with private sector help — as newspapers have recently told us about a plan to add a few floors to Mantralaya and give a builder some free land in exchange for the work done.

We delight in what we are and we delight in agonising over it. This process gives us character. Town versus burbs, North versus South, once obscure satellite towns versus once obscure suburbs. Till even 15 years ago, a person who worked in Borivili would say he had to go to ‘Bombay’ to work. Now a person who lives in Khopar Khairane, in New Bombay, thinks he lives and works in Bombay. But the part of Bombay which is not Khopar Khairane takes issue with this. For that lot, Bombay has to remain within a geographical limit; it has to have common reference points. Can you claim to know Bombay if you did not grow up eating seeng-chana at the Gateway of India? Worse, if you confuse India Gate with the Gateway? If you have no idea that a school picnic means going to Borivili National Park? If you don’t know where the Goldspot factory is, even if it no longer exists and that once iconic orange bottle is lost to liberalisation?

These are very real problems for some and hence the mad scramble to keep the quaintness of Bombay alive. Some of these attempts are simply bogus, to use the modern terminology, artificial constructs to try and create a sense of nostalgia where possibly none exists. The people of Kalbadevi are apparently very happy that their ward has been taken up as a pilot redevelopment project and it is only people who never lived there and never visit except once a year who see beauty in the chaos. The bridge between heritage and contemporary has to be crossed intelligently and harking back to some vague golden age is to ignore the ground realities. The Crawford Market redevelopment is in danger of falling into this trap.

For someone who has lived most of their life in this city— including the formative years, but who has also lived elsewhere — some of the newfound hand-wringing manufactured nostalgia can be amusing. There is some little brouhaha going on over the beautification of the zoo. It cannot be denied that Bombay’s zoo is one of the worst in the country. Animals live pathetically in cages, there is no sense of openness or the wild and its only redeeming features may well be the government nursery and the newly-recreated Bhau Daji Ladd Museum. But yet, our saviours of Bombay find something in this ghastly travesty of a zoo to be preserved. I am surprised that animal activists are not supporting a move to improve the living conditions of the animals. No, apparently it is to be kept as it is — no arguments.

Many of these preservers have not grown up in Bombay so probably did not have to endure the plight of the creatures locked up in zoos in their childhoods. For anyone who has seen the Delhi, Calcutta or Hyderabad zoos, Bombay is a joke. The Central Zoo Authority thinks so too and regularly denies it certification. But the zoo is heritage, and the current flavour is heritage at all costs. Not the condition of the animals, not objections to zoos in general as an ideological stand, but just that whatever was must be preserved.

Perhaps not so strangely, since these ‘new’ saviours have not spent a lot of time on the top of Malabar Hill — Cafe Naaz closed down almost a decade ago — the quite cute uglification of Kamala Nehru Park with its ‘amphitheatre’ done up in what look like bathroom tiles has not bothered anyone much. Malabar Hill has become too remote and so has slipped out of our consciousness.

So we will shop in the malls on the New Link Roads in Andheri and Malad, though 15 years ago that part of Andheri had vast tracts of marshland and Malad was a quiet sleepy suburb, leading on to quiet fishing villages. If you arrive in Bombay circa 2000 AD, you accept the development as an established part of the landscape and fight for the preservation of what is obviously old — the zoo, for instance.

The older inhabitants also want to preserve those parts which they live in and you still meet that endearing tribe for whom Bombay means the island city. Once you cross Mahim Causeway you have entered the badlands, wild territory, where the others live. It is true, if you are old enough. Tigers were spotted there last century. Why go there at all, except to go to the airport?

Then there are those politicians who run this city. Sharad Pawar wants to encourage people to drink more wine. His party member, R R Patil, who is also the state’s deputy chief minister, is a late arrival in this city, so he found dance bars deeply offensive. They were not common in his hometown. They have no magic for him, only an upsurge of morality. The chief minister finds no resonance in Bombay either, so he keeps commissioning flyovers perhaps hoping to escape it easily that way. It’s been years since anyone who runs Bombay loved Bombay. Chhagan Bhujbal was mayor once and wanted to clean it and green it; now he sulks.

But it ought not to be forgotten — even by those regulars at the city’s ‘pubs’ that the pubs themselves are new: 1992 onwards. Up to the 1970s, there was prohibition in Bombay and it is the Bombay Prohibition Act that controls Gujarat even today. Bombay’s answer to prohibition was typical — and so grew the great Bombay underworld of smugglers and bootleggers. Dawood Ibrahim was a new entrant himself, and he has been made willy-nilly into Bombay’s only don, with scant respect for his ‘illustrious’ predecessors — by filmmakers who have recently come to the city and by television channels which are not headquartered here at all. Yet, didn’t Bombay come to a standstill when Vardarajan Mudaliar died?

When you round it all up, what it amounts to is very little and yet very large. You come to Bombay because it is the city of gold. You hope. Almost 20 years ago, a magazine I worked for did an article on how you could still pan for gold in Pydhonie. Streets paved with gold — get it? But it was a stretch even then and it’s completely lost now. Besides, everything old is not necessarily good. The picking and choosing of what we save has to be judicious and a little higgledy-piggledy is good mental exercise.

Yes, there will also be some of us who know more about Bombay and some who have to prove that they also care by picking up campaigns and some who don’t care at all. But to truly belong, you mustn’t get caught up in stuff; you have to be cool about it. On the trains, on the buses, in your cars and taxies and aeroplanes. Tension kaiko lene ka, magaj kaiko khaneka, aakhadin khalipili boom kaiko marne ka? Ekdum masth rehne ka. The vada pavs and zoos and floods will come and go, but we’ll go on. That’s why we’re all here isn’t it, to be bindaas?

(Ranjona Banerji is a deputy editor with DNA in Bombay.)

Magical Memories

By Vimla Patil

I was born, brought up, educated and married in South Bombay. I have lived in the verdant bylanes of this area all my life. I think I have been very fortunate to see its many avatars — as a hub of the colonial government’s activities, as the karmabhoomi of passionate freedom fighters and as an elite residential area where the rich, khandaani families have striven hard to conserve India’s culture and heritage.

Memories are like bricks —they often help to build the life-graph of a person. As far as I am concerned, I think my memories — indeed a whole life lived in south Mumbai — have shaped my character and more important, my search for that moment of truth that gives direction to my life.

I was born in a nursing home in Opera House, which I am told, was a vast, spacious area around the heritage Opera House Theatre where dance and music shows would take place every weekend. The road further led to the busy Girgaum area where the rich community of Pathare Prabhus owned wadis, where khandaani jewellers created diamond items for the rich of the city, and Goan communities lived in their picturesque village-style cottages.

Further down, along the railway line, was Queen’s Road — running parallel to the dignified Marine Drive — which eventually led to the Fort area with its famous Revival Renaissance-style cluster of 26 utility buildings. There was the University with its landmark Rajabai Tower, the Convocation Hall, the High Court, the Elphinstone College, Kala Ghoda and the art deco theatres called Regal and Strand. The one-major-road then led to the Colaba Cantonment where British officers and army personnel lived in quiet houses with red roofs of Mangalore tiles.

The area where I spent my childhood was not much different. There were tile-roof houses spread all over the Chowpatty sea face and the beach in front was the official playground for all children going to local school and colleges like Queen Mary’s, St. Columba’s, Robert Money, Gokhale Education, Fellowship School and, of course, the Wilson College. In those years, Chowpatty was a real beach — not a muck-topped dirt area as it is today. The sand was pristine, and building castles near the lashing waters was great fun. Our mothers and aunts would sit around talking while we children — from the family and their friends — would run around into the waves and cover ourselves with the clean sand.

Reaching our schools in the area around Chowpatty was easy with a tram or bus ride. The BEST trams jangled from Grant Road Station to the Gowalia Tank Maidan and also had a service from the Tardeo Tram Terminus into the stomach of Bombay to Thakurdwar. But we still avoided the cheap ride to walk along the quiet roads to school so that we could enjoy the familiar sights on the roads. The old temples around the area were our favourite haunts — especially in the rains when they would become pools of water. The Nana Sunkerset Shiva Temple on Tardeo Road fascinated us because of its stone courtyard and the nearby cottage where Lata Mangeshkar and her family lived in the early years of her career. The Gamdevi, Taddevi and Mumbadevi temples gave us a glimpse of the seven islands which formed the city of Mumbai a few hundred years ago.

Around this area, too, grew many music schools — the Maharashtra Sangeet Vidyalaya (where I learnt the nuances of Hindustani classical music from masters like D V Paluskar and Prof Datar), the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the Deodhar School of Music, the Marwari Hall, the Lakshmi Hall and many others held regular music programmes with the young and painfully handsome Ravi Shankar, Mogubai Kurdikar, Bismillah Khan, Kishen Maharaj, Sitara Devi, Vilayat Khan and the stalwarts of the Agra Gharana like Vilayat Hussain sang or played all night concerts to present the glory of Indian music to huge number of devotees. As a schoolgirl, I tagged along with my father or his friends and thus have great memories of listening to these great masters well into the wee hours of the morning — in fact, until the milk train forced listeners to return home.

As a young girl in South Mumbai, I shared two worlds — my father’s and my mother’s. With my father, who was a book publisher, I worked on history, language and culture. I read many books, learnt music, art and met hordes of people who made news at that time. I travelled a lot with him to get to know Indian culture and history. Watching him, I learnt that the truly rich person is not the one who earns a lot of money but a person who spends it wisely to enrich his or her life. His way of life taught me to enjoy every shade of green that came to the local markets in the monsoon and winter season and every nuance of gold and bronze that came to the trees in the autumn and summer.

The other world that I shared with my mother included my extended family with aunts and their children — and all of us had innocent fun with movies, chaat and vadas in Chowpatty and walks along Malabar Hill and Breach Candy or the deserted Worli Sea Face. My mother, afraid to leave a daughter alone at home, also took me to innumerable kirtans in the nearby temples in the bylanes of Gamdevi and thanks to her efforts, I am well versed in the Bhakti literature of India today.

Looking at these areas today, you would never imagine what they looked like in the fifties. Breach Candy was a rocky beach where pools of water would offer great opportunities for gentle fishing after the tide had receded. Sparsely populated, the roads were clear and well lit. A quiet stroll or a game among the rocks was delightful. The climb to the Hanging Gardens from Kemp’s Corner, where there was a real Kemp’s shop, was verdant with all kinds of birds warbling in the late evenings. So these were familiar areas for me and my friends. The Gowalia Tank Maidan and Chowpatty were celebrated venues for the political rallies where I was fortunate to hear leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and, later, Indira Gandhi. Gowalia Tank Maidan was also the playground where I had my first cycling lessons from my unwilling brother.

Nevertheless, the most wonderful part of my childhood in South Mumbai was the expeditions which I shared with my mother to find medicinal herbs in the wild patches in out localities. My mother believed strongly in herbal medicines — having come to Bombay from her village in the Kanara districts after marriage. Understandably, Malabar Hill and Breach Candy interested her because of the forests of herbs and plants that grew there. My family was as quaint as the city of Bombay in those days. My mother was one of four sisters. The four women, whom marriage had brought to Bombay, were thick as thieves and took all decisions jointly. One of the decisions my mother and aunts took was to use their rich knowledge of simple, wild-growing medicinal plants for curing most ailments, which we children were prone to suffer from. Thus, for colds and coughs we had a kashayam made from lemon grass and ginger or a brew made from aniseed, onion slices and a seed called alsi.

Soon after the four sisters settled down to life in Bombay, they made a wonderful discovery. They found that many parts of South Bombay had patches of greenery where the same wild medicinal plants grew as did in their native village in coastal Karnataka. With their sense of wonder, they often took us children on a voyage of discovery to Breach Candy or Worli to sit among bushes and to look for the plants and leaves which gave them a sense of belonging to their village world and enabled them to cure not only their children’s maladies but also those of their grateful neighbours and friends.

Breach Candy, Worli, the Gowalia Tank Maidan or even the bylanes of Tardeo and Girgaum in those days were not heavily populated as they are today. By evening, silence would reign supreme along these roads and there was little fear of roadside Romeos or pickpockets. We wandered in the far-stretching green patches, learning about herbs and plants, which we would collect with an air of glee which only children could understand. Many of the leaves we collected were used in making gentle coconut curries for health. Other plants were plucked, dried and preserved for medicinal use as and when needed. I remember plucking the tender leaves of tendli creepers in Worli for a curry, which worked as an excellent digestive. I recall squatting down in the grassy undergrowth in Scandal Point to collect bhui awale plants for those who had jaundice. Doodh panki leaves, with their attractive shades of mauve and green, were taken home for making a cooling brew during heat strokes. Ek paani or brahmi leaves were used for making hair oil. The saw-edged leaves of ningri boiled in water made a soothing bath for swollen hands and feet. A neem leaf brew cured all infections. The tubes of the eranda (castor seed) leaves made an excellent brew to cure fevers and the cool leaves were used to cover the head to bring down high temperatures. The jelly-like pulp of cacti, called lolsar, was also used as a cooling agent during fevers. Poultices were wrapped in turmeric leaves to cure cuts and infected wounds.

Somewhere in those years, we also learnt to recognise trees, which offered us rare, unusual food. The tender leaves of the shevga tree (drumsticks) made a wonderful bhaji. So did the young flowers of the same tree make dainty bhajias for teatime. In the monsoon, we went collecting leaves of the taikila plant for making bhajias or a green upkari with shredded coconut.

Today, those halcyon days of my childhood seem to belong to another world. Bombay has become a city of stress, daily challenges and incredible opportunities for millions of dreamers. The plant patches have vanished and rubbish heaps or slums have taken their place.

One of my greatest regrets is that I did not write down the recipes of the brews and delicacies made from wild plants while my mother and aunts lived. Still, even after living a hectic life in Mumbai, I cannot pass by Breach Candy without glancing at the weeds by the roadside to experience those moments of excitement, which were scattered so generously in my childhood years. Even now, I can recognise some of the plants and know how to use them to cure minor maladies. I am happy that I have passed on some of this knowledge to my children, who use it in dealing with their children’s health problems.

Had my mother and aunts been alive today, they might have sagely nodded their heads in approval because their prediction, that these plants would one day make researchers sit up and wonder at their magic, has come true. With new international research on the plants which my mother so lovingly collected, I think my life has come a full circle. I am still a South Bombay addict and I still believe that many magical plants still wait to be discovered in my part of this wonderful, fairyland-like city.

Three Reminders

By Abhinav Maurya

The Oldest Bombay Bitch

‘The very oldest?’

‘Yeah miyan, the very oldest…’

‘How old?’

‘Old enough to be your grandma’s grandma. How do I know how old? She is the oldest. Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘Truly?’

‘Period.’

‘An old crone,’ Reddy whispered in awe.

‘An old crone, but her haunches are as sturdy as steel. I tell you Reddy, she does not as much as flinch when I pant atop her.’

‘But Mirza, it’s pathetic. She must smell like a garbage van in bed.’

‘She smells worse. But can’t help it. She’s the cheapest in town — unless you manage to corner one of the younger ones who’re new to the trade, and have reputations befitting neither the day nor night.’

‘Must have one helluva pimp.’

‘No, no… No pimps she has… She is too popular without any pimps…’

‘But doesn’t her old, wrinkled face put you off?’

‘Who cares? As long as she makes you go dhak-dhak with the effort, gasping and sucking air out of her lungs and cursing her for it,’ Mirza chuckled.

‘What the heck!’

‘She’s so hot and feverish and all that people are known to die of extreme concupiscence, hanging on for dear life till their very last breath.’

‘The goddamn bitch!’ Reddy cried out in frenzy, and his excitement made him wring his hands in despair.

‘And she has absolutely no qualms about taking in as many men as she can at a time. Even women Reddy, can you believe that!’

‘Saali, besharam!’

‘All for a few coins… All for the sake of a few measly coins…’ Mirza waved his hands in the air at the inequity of fate.

‘How can you even bear to visit her?’

‘What do you mean? Even the holier-than-thou Mayor Saab from London felt obliged to call upon her when he paid a visit to Bombay.’

Reddy’s eyes, which had until now been growing wide with puzzlement, narrowed in suspicion.

‘Who is this Grand Dame of whores?’

‘You know her well… She is the oldest Bombay bitch ever — the promiscuous Bombay Rail!’

A Lost World

It is dusk in this city Imtiyaz calls his own. He looks at the rouge horizon for a long time as if searching for something, a lost jewel perhaps. The sun that had lent the sea its gentle, liquid refulgence is no more; the Necklace is lit up along its length by a string of pale, sickly streetlights beyond which is the growing blanket of a dark, inky night. His gaze ventures below, onto the thoroughfare that races along the seaface. People are walking ways that lead nowhere, occasionally shooing away shouters-o'-wares who accost them. Abba once told him — the secret of a successful city is that it can stoke desires in the minds of men which it can never satisfy.

Abba… shores apart… in another city… Venice… It holds Imtiyaz’s childhood in the twittering of its birds and the rocking of its gondolas. Nafasat has come with news that abba is ill, but in his mind’s eye, Imtiyaz can still see abbu happy, singing a Khamaj in the dead of the night besides the lapping waters of the lagoons… ni ni sa pa ni sa ga ma ga ma pa ni dha…

‘Brother, brother…say something.’

‘Nafasat, Bombay is as much my city as Venice is abbu’s. Why does abbu not come here once in a while? Or maybe for the rest of his days? This is after all the city of his childhood.’

‘You know very well that he won’t leave Venice. He has been worrying sick for you the last one year, neither able to keep away from, nor able to reconcile himself to the horror of the riots. He has been crying like a baby, seeing Bombay sundered apart thus. This city is not safe for Muslims the way it used to be. Besides do you not have any affection for the place that you grew up in?’

‘Venice was my childhood, but Bombay is the place I have grown up in, the place that peoples my living memory. If Venice is my hazy subconsciousness, then Bombay is the consciousness that shaped it. You know I will not be able to establish myself in Venice the way I am rooted in Bombay. The logjam of rains, the cool breeze of winters, and the sweltering summer sun. Quiet walks on noisy beaches. Boisterous Gujarati theatre. Somnolent Irani cafes. Shaam-e-Gazals. The roaring sea and the verdant arbors. And most important of all, the students’ daily riyaz. Many have kept their children under my tutelage only on my assurances. What will these tiny tots do without me? What will I do without them? You are asking me to give up too much, little sister of mine!’

‘But you are only twenty-five! Look at you… At this age, you banter as if you are the only one who can tutor them. Surely there are other ustads who can do that.’

‘What will abbu think if I leave my disciples like this?’

‘You are bothered about what abbu will think, but do not care for abbu himself or for his health. How are you to know that you will gladden his heart by returning to him!’

‘Who sent me away in the first place? It was abbu who sent me away from him to Bombay. Perhaps he sensed a loss by sending me away, so he didn’t send you here. You were lucky but I was the one who suffered.’

‘It’s not true, brother. We both know that. It was Nadira Aunt — may peace be upon her soul — who dragged you away from abbu to live with her in this wretched city.’

‘But she couldn’t have done that if abbu had willed it otherwise.’

‘How could have abbu willed otherwise? Poor Aunt Nadira (for Nafasat still thought of her stepmother as her aunt), living alone in this city all by herself. Abbu told me he feared for her sanity or he would have never sent you away. Today he needs you more than ever.’

‘But if I leave, I’ll be called a coward who ran for his life.’

‘Staying in the shackles of expectations is bigger cowardice, my brother. Are you not a coward running away from your father when he needs you the most?’

‘Cowardice is of the color of fate, different for each person. We all are running away from something or the other.’

‘Running away doesn’t help things, brother.’

‘Let’s run away from this talk of comings and goings. Tell me more about Venice. Is it the same as when I left it?’

‘Very much. The baker on our canal died and now we have to row farther to get bread. I usually send abbu to fetch bread; along with bread, he brings back some of the good humour of his old times.’ Nafasat was relieved when the memory of abbu’s wittiness brought a smile to Imtiyaz’s face.

‘And you remember the concert hall a few lanes off; it has been converted into a local museum. The details might have changed, but the fabric of the city is the same.’

‘Can’t say the same about Bombay though. It is a scarred city. Before the riots, parents of many of my Muslim students would be attired traditionally when they would come to pick up their children after the classes. Now, nobody wears even a skullcap. All shave their long beards of which they were so proud until yesterday. They are even frightened of being called abbu or ammi in public. When I asked one of my students why he had remained absent for a long time after the riots, he told me that that his father had promised to cane him ten times if he dared utter abbu or ammi in public. The punishment went up — from twenty to fifty, then a hundred canings, can you believe that – until the poor boy finally acquired the faculty to forget the word when he ventured outside home. After the riots, Bombay never seemed to go back to her same old self again. It seemed as if she were in a perpetual mourning for the loss of her hauteur.’

A wry smile crept across Nafasat’s lips.

‘What are you smiling at? I’m talking about Bombay burning in the riots. What’s so funny about that?’

‘No, nothing… It was just that you said she… as if the city were a living person.’

At this, Imtiyaz said nothing but waved his hand about in the air as if it were an inconsequential flourish of the tongue.

‘Why don’t you come with me to Venice, Imtiyaz?’ He notices the use of his name by his little half-sister, for she rarely does so.

‘Abbu wrote in his letter that you are engaged to be married.’

‘Yes.’ She shows him her ring, an answer cast in pale Welsh gold. Small answers for big questions, as if the answers were not important at all, at least nowhere as important as the questions.

‘Rich groom for my darling sister. Who is he?’

‘You remember the young cellist who came to dine the last time you visited us.’

‘Musician! You had said you will never marry a musician.’

‘His name is Frederi Modigliani. He would often come by in a gondola to listen to abbu solmizing in the night. Abbu tried teaching him some pieces, but he sings real bad. Now he just carries an Indian violin which abbu gifted and taught him, and accompanies abbu in his riyaz.’

‘Is he abbu’s choice or yours? Nafa, don’t lose out on yourself.’

‘Abbu considers him like a son. After losing you, he does not want to lose another.’

‘What are you saying? He has not lost me!’

‘Yes, we have lost you. We are losing you to this wretched city which has a way of justifying itself and its rights and wrongs. We are losing you to the murky depths which made abbu leave this city thirty years ago. And we don’t know what to do.’

‘It was not Bombay that drove abbu crazy. It was having two wives in the same city that did him in.’ Imtiyaz smiles a wry smile, a smile without reason or joy, indeed without any feeling — the way a Bombayite may smile when confronted with the grim reality of truth.

Nafasat looks at Imtiyaz with incredulity — it pains her to hear her brother make such a sardonic comment, her brother who has always been so gentle and kind and soft-spoken. Imtiyaz realizes that he has trespassed the unspoken limits to their conversation, and he makes a swift detour.

‘You don’t have to do anything. I’ll not shift to Venice.’

It is late in the evening and the breeze blows wildly, like the harmless anger of an old crone. The raucous call of the brainfever bird cuts through the cold air like knives through ice.

It occurs to Imtiyaz that time has been a cruel fiend. Bound by their singular love of music amidst a sea of differences; hadn’t he and Nafa lived through the arduous journey of impressions, losses and realization together, no questions asked? How many times had they looked for meaning and found it in the turbulence of each other’s hearts? How many times had one’s mind been troubled only to find succor in the silence of the other? How many times had they searched for solace only to find it in the loss that their eyes held? Now it seems to Imtiyaz that they no more understand each other the way they used to when they were small.

He looks unperturbed, fatalistic, dangerously teetering on the brink of indifference. Nafasat gets up, and takes his face in her hands, holding his gaze in an ultimate act of defiance. He thinks her eyes will bore into him like an auger, but they are filled with stern compassion, the way ammi’s eyes used to be when she silently mourned the loss of her husband by talking of him for hours on end and vainly singing the thumries that spoke with greater leisure of her parting and longing than speech would have permitted. Sometimes when Imtiyaz saw his ammi singing in a poorly attended concert at one of the seedy crumbling concert halls of old Bombay, it occurred to him that her face was contorted with a grief much beyond the ecstasy of the music that she was singing. He of course never found out what it was, never had a way of finding out… But he knew it had something to do with abbu, and he never forgave abbu for that.

‘Listen Nafa, I have stayed too long here to think of moving anyplace else.’

‘I understand. But think about abbu. He is dying, Imtiyaz.’

Startled, Imtiyaz turns around to face his sister. ‘What do you mean? You told me he was just ill.’

‘He is ailing, Imtiyaz. He did not want me to tell you this, but I have no other way. Come away Imtiyaz. Don’t hold such a long grudge against your own father. He has not been able to live in peace. Let him die in peace by forgiving him.’

‘If this is what you want, I will come.’

‘I’ll call abbu and tell him. He will be very happy… very very happy.’ Before he can begin protesting, Nafasat goes away to make the call.

Imtiyaz is surprised at his quick assent, at the weakness of his resolve to never leave the city that gave him his first guru after abbu and his first small recognitions as a Sitar exponent before he was even known outside India. He understands his despondency and the cause of it, but fails to comprehend the agility with which it takes hold of everything inside him, even his memories of living by the sea in a city called Bombay. He just watches the bleak horizon for a long time. That is all he can do right now.

Perched on the high bough of a nearby acacia, the brainfever bird looks down upon Imtiyaz with haughty smugness and a beady eye and flies to another bough, another abode, and another story.

An Elegy For Bombay

There is no other place quite like Bombay, the city of poised extremes — of comic hatreds and tragic love, of sad lives and joyous deaths, of shallow delights and imagined sorrows — and everything en route.

A city of unending chaos that fills your ears like a thousand bees droning at once; of wide, impassable roads which grow ever so convoluted that playing chess a hundred moves ahead is easier than finding your way out of the labyrinth; and of the unending quagmire that ensues when one thinks of making home of a city where even the rooftops of the trains get squatted upon. A city that holds alcohol scarcer than bread and bread scarcer than goodwill and goodwill the scarcest of all. And in the end, simply India’s only truly cosmopolitan city.

That’s Bombay for the uninitiated. Because it’s victims need no introductions of the city to which their fates are as inextricably and irredeemably tied as flame to the wick of a lamp.