a slice of mumbai

A SLICE OF MUMBAI



Mumbai reveals itself in as many ways as its varied facets. Walk along a holidaying Marine Drive on a Sunday evening, squeeze into a peak hour suburban train, zip on the sexy JJ flyover in a Lancer, snake your way through the teeming Bora Bazar, take in with a deep breath the cityspread from the Kamala Nehru Park, take a random BEST bus ride-first to last stop. Like its rains, now pouring, now gone, Mumbai vibrates with colours and monotony. With movement and immobility. With quick buck and grinding poverty. With opportunities and despair. With heritage and modernity.

Hey but where do I begin? From the beauty of a serene sunrise over a boat-laden Gateway of India? Or from the stories of resilience the blackened huts on Raey Road tell? No, I just have to look around from the balconies of my 13th floor flat to experience a microcosm of Mumbai… its sights, sounds and smells… from the pristine silence of 4 am to the rising cacophony of its mid morning traffic, its sudden whiffs of sea breeze, its pockets of still humidity… from my North balcony, in one sweep I see Mumbai’s main features: dilapidated blackened buildings, clothes eternally drying on their balconies, an oasis of green of the Oval with palm trees fringing it, the architectural beauty of the Rajabai Tower and there in the distance, the gothic majesty of the Western Railway headquarters, and opposite to it Churchgate, the nerve-centre of hope of Mumbai’s commuting community, I glimpse the Bombay Stock Exchange- the economic pulse of the country, then, further away, the shipmasts of the dockyards, stretches of grey sea, silhouettes of distant mountains, impersonal high rises, towers, people, more people, throngs of them,….
Below the solemnity of the national flag fluttering atop Mantralaya, is a typical Mumbai chowk- road junction. Its colourful and orderly traffic fascinates me no end. There…… while vehicles wait for the green signal like good children before the school recess, a lone cyclist pedals his way across the square- rules? For him ?you must be kidding. The bright Zebra crossing bustles with officer-goers but a young man merrily skips his way across the other road where impatient cars and buses are already rushing. An accident at this hour will result in a disruptive chain reaction and the skipper knows it-even a BEST bus would prefer to pander to his whim rather than hit him and ground everyone else. Whether on its roads or in its railways, Mumbai is forever doing a fine balancing act; for a city stretched to the very limits of its resources, it is still a working wonder… Yes… Mumbai survives by rules, it thrives by shortcuts. To my right, the clock at Rajabai Tower shows 10 am- peak hour is approaching. Time drives Mumbai-but so does money- or the lack of both. In this super-speeding city, two men trudge a handcart laden with gas cylinders across the junction; a fire-engine’s bells helplessly pierce the soundscape as it is caught in the snaking queue of vehicles. To my left, below the skyscrapers separating me from the sea, the street is a flurry of activity - wayside quick-food shops, with the characteristic blue plastic roof, getting into gear to feed affordable nourishment to office-goers, who no doubt left their suburban homes at unearthly morning hours. These stalls are a saga of initiative and resourcefulness, of the art of dodging municipal authorities, of keeping clients happy-and themselves surviving. The ubiquitous chanawalla has spread out his meagre wares on the pavement and is getting his act together; peanuts for survival? Surviving on peanuts? Yonder, to my left, the squalor of the fishermen’s colony co-exists in peace with the impregnability of the Cuffe-Parde high-rises… people walking unperturbed on the pavement strewn with drying fish are the definition of the city’s quintessence: ‘live and let live’. I wonder how this city holds in the same generous embrace and address the minister in his luxurious bungalow near the sea and the tattered woman sleeping on an old newspaper on the pavement just around the bend. Amidst the noise of non stop honking and the occasional screech of brakes, I catch the soft strain of a flute… the song of survival of a man who no doubt came to the city with hope and who did find it… I wonder who in this posh locality buys road side flutes…
A flock of pigeons takes off suddenly from the terrace of the next building- ah! Pigeons- those assertive co-residents of Mumbai’s flats and a symbol of the city’s liveliness and generosity of soul – a space-starved city preserves its ‘kabutarkhanas’ (enclosures where pigeons are fed) and selling pigeon feed feeds many an ingenious Mumbaian.

As my eyes rest on the fishing boats of Backbay from my west balcony- little pennants fluttering atop, deceptively lazing in the still backwaters, I am suddenly aware that for all its vividity and variety, neither the view from my balconies nor my verbosity can ever really grasp the wholeness of the great city that Mumbai is …, that calling my description a microcosm is pretentious, it is more a speck -the neatest speck of Mumbai; that I am as far removed from its squalor, its tempers, and vices, as from the nitty-gritty of its building blocks, its industriousness and its sense of adventure.
The thirteenth floor is well the thirteenth floor and can I help feeling closer to the clear blue September sky -which is also Mumbai’s- than to the distant earthy fight for survival at Dharavi?