LIFE|CULTURE|INDIA
Mumbai: The City Of A Million Dreams
An incomplete portrayal of Mumbai through brief encounters
‘Bombay kandengi endu India!!’
Unable to suppress her pride at seeing at least one city, Parvathy sprinkled her smug words — Why bother seeing India once you’ve seen Bombay — at the village like pigeon feed.
I was 5 when Bombay beckoned for the first time.
It was my aunt’s wedding; the one who lived with us until her marriage. She was my favorite among the three and I bawled — my throat constricting, making me gasp for air — on the streets to leave her behind in a city that was a galaxy far, far away in my five-year-old world.
I remember very little from that visit. The white noise of parting had muffled all else.
I know I went to Nehru Planetarium only because of that stolen book. One of the kids, an evil spawn of a damned relative, had stolen my glossy, colorful book of planets that my mom had bought after the visit.
My predictable anger at the kid made sure I never forgot his face, and couldn’t think of him as anything other than a book thief, even when he became an accomplished doctor later in life.
The beach, Juhu as I learned later, still stays in my mind only because of the bhelpuri from the food stall — the foodie in me experiencing street food for the first time in my life.
It wasn’t until another fifteen years that I truly saw Mumbai. Bombay had become Mumbai by then. As a newly minted graduate celebrating her adulthood, I chose to visit my aunt and spend a few days in Mumbai.
She lived in a new apartment building next to a large shopping mall, which also had a cinema hall that played Kaminey, an adult-rated violent movie that dealt with all things Mumbai. It had violence, sex, xenophobia, slum life, drug trade, police corruption, and fantastic music.
And I went to the movie alone, only because my cousins were too young to fake adulthood. I wouldn’t have, and still wouldn’t go to movies alone anywhere else in India but Mumbai.
Everywhere else, even with a companion, I would stay alert for the groping hands. But in Mumbai, I felt a safety in the crowd I had never felt anywhere else until then. It didn’t catcall or grope. Even at night, it felt safe to be out and about.
Going to Mumbai years after watching Kamalhasan’s classic movie, Nayakan, and a few weeks after reading Hussain Zaidi’s ‘Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia’, had felt like visiting Don Corleone’s playground. The characters in my book had shaped that city in innumerable ways.
I had a mythical fascination with Mumbai — the port city’s role in British India, its underworld dons, and its red-light district — that made me sordidly curious.
I didn’t care much for Bollywood — Bombay’s checkmate to Hollywood. But I was fascinated by how the city attracted millions of people from across India, feeding them dreams, and letting some escape the drudgery of survival.
I did what any domestic tourist does. I visited the Gateway of India, Worli Sealink, Chattrapathi Shivaji terminus, Siddhi Vinayaka temple, and its numerous shopping streets.
The timeless city stood in stark contrast to my village. For the first time in my life, I truly felt small. I had seen neither India nor the world. And Parvathy’s smug words resonated with me- Why bother with India once you have seen Mumbai?
I’m in Mumbai now, another fifteen years later. It’s unjust to call this a visit. I’m stopping over to visit my brother. What I see below, even before my airplane lands, is a concrete jungle. I struggle to see a patch of green, at least a square centimeter for every person in the city.
The city assaults my senses from the moment I step out of the air-conditioned confines of the airport. Battling the moment of intensely humid heat, I hail an autorickshaw.
Rain swept over the city shortly before my arrival, leaving its streets dirty, muddy, and stinking. The muggy air is making it a little hard to breathe. The trash outside the shops is soggy. Puddles add an accent to the streets.
The city that houses Finance & Banking, Entertainment, Consumer goods industries, and Textile mills essentially combines New York, Los Angeles, and Houston and doubles their combined population.
I may only remember a little of Mumbai from my first visit. But what I do distinctly remember is the chats and lassi from Juhu Beach and Dadar Chowpatty. Coming from a town far from the coast, we rushed to the waves insatiably. And during the lulls, we fed ourselves chats from the food stalls.
Even when I visited in my teens, street food was prominent in my memory. My cousins and I frequently grabbed a vada pav and washed away the spices with a falooda from the food stalls in front of the metro stations.
But with improved sanitation, my stomach has grown sensitive. I wouldn’t even dream of eating at any of these places these days without earmarking the following week for hugging the commode. Instead, we head to a Chaap restaurant that‘s clean and also serves bottled water.
I manoeuvre around the city in the next few hours, in rickshaws and taxis, watching the day meld into dusk.
It’s the eve of Ganesh Chathurthi, one of the biggest festivals in Mumbai. The streets are reveling in religious fervour, choking with processions. I know 11 days from now, these Ganesha statues will be respectfully immersed in the water, polluting the beaches that hug Mumbai. But Mumbaikars will worry about the waste later. The moment belongs to the revelry.
As we roam around the city in a taxi, which offers me a moving portrait of an energetic city, I wonder if Mumbai has changed or if my perceptions have.
It’s still a sprawling metropolis with enormous skyscrapers of tiny lit squares — behind each window lives one of the 24 million residents of the city, a microcosm of humanity. I’m no longer interested in the mafia dons, rather looking at each of those tiny windows for the life behind.
We stutter behind the procession and snake down the narrow roads when I notice a drastic demographic shift. There are no more loud cries of Ganapati Bappa Morya. Instead, if I stick around long enough, I might hear the prayer calls from the mosque.
I might see the hordes of men in white tunics and skull caps flowing into its mouth for one of their five prayers. It’s still a crowded street, but one that looks entirely different from the previous one.
The city prays to a diverse set of gods. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jains, and Buddhists call the city home. It feels like a paradise of tolerance and I wonder if any of my brother’s friends were born during the last riots in this city. The tolerance that might seem unshakeable today, among the streets of Ganesha and Allah, was a fragile pretense until three decades ago.
With its melting pot of religions, primarily Hindus and Muslims, this city had seen and survived some of the worst religious riots in the country, particularly in the aftermath of Babri Masjid Demolition in 1993.
The first round of riots was organized by Shiv Sena, the Hindutva party, resulting in the death of 900 people. In retaliation, three months later, Mumbai’s Muslim dons, Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon orchestrated 12 bomb explosions across the city, killing another 300.
Since 1993, Mumbai hasn’t seen a religious outburst.
I ask my cousin, who’s a practicing doctor, if he speaks any Marathi, the local language. And he shakes his head in the negative. Everyone speaks Hindi. And when they don’t, there’s always the colonizer’s language.
Mumbā or Mahā-Ambā or Bon Bahia or Mumbai was originally an archipelago of seven islands with no noteworthy identity. Muslim kings ruled over the islands that were inhabited by fishing communities.
Due to tactical mishandling, the ownership of the islands changed hands first to the Portuguese and later to the British, who combined the islands, reclaiming land from the water, into a strategic naval port.
Each of their influence is unmistakable, from the Victorian-era architecture of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus to the Portuguese Balcaos in Bandra West.
What was once an unremarkable set of islands owes its identity to Abe Lincoln and the 13th Amendment. When the slave emancipation in the USA spelled trouble for the cotton trade, the British encouraged cotton production in Vidarbha, in central India, and its handling in the textile mills in Mumbai.
The entrepreneurial spirit of the port city attracted, as it continues to, people from the rest of the country, particularly from the nearby state of Gujarat.
Thus, the city was built by its migrants, over 60% of its total population, making it perhaps the most cosmopolitan of all Indian cities. But as the Maharashtrian spirit swept over in the 1990s, along with the change of its name from Bombay to Mumbai, Shiv Sena made sure everyone knew that Mumbai was first and foremost Maharashtrian.
People from other states, particularly the poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, were often subjected to xenophobic attacks even when they have called Mumbai home for over a decade, as my taxi driver had.
When Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar in 2009, a humiliated outrage poured over social media. India’s netizens were ashamed that our best-kept secret, the largest slum in Asia, had spilled out. But the movie thrust slum tourism into popularity.
Getting out of the Airport towards Powai where I’m headed, I don’t pass through any of the declared slum areas such as Dharavi or Ghatkopar.
I also don’t pass through Antilla or the Jio World Convention Center which hosted Ambani’s $600million wedding a few weeks back. Some of those upscale neighborhoods to the south — Malabar Hill, Bandra West, Juhu, Worli — have even made autorickshaws illegal in the area. They house a few of the richest people in the country, from the Ambanis, Bacchans, and the Khans.
Yet, in front of the other average skyscrapers in my route are makeshift dwellings that are unsuitable for human inhabitation. I’m unable to lift my eyes and marvel at those concrete towers reaching for the skies. My eyes are fixated on the weeds, the poor people who dot the periphery of the city.
An apartment in those towers charges enormous rent, averaging at $600 for a two-bedroom apartment. Yet, those makeshift dwellings offer a cheap alternative to the resilient. In some sense, this dichotomy summarizes Mumbai. It’s a city that has something for everyone.
Visiting my aunt 15 years back in her apartment near the mall, all I noticed was the magnificence of the city. I only looked up and saw the shiny towers of Babel reaching into the sky.
But coming back now, I can only look down. I feel overwhelmed by the sea of humanity and wonder how I had missed that.
As I head back to the airport, I suddenly think about India’s mission to make it an economic powerhouse, and a developed nation by 2050.
But between India and its mission stands 1.4 billion humans, 24 million of who are in Mumbai. I feel a sudden wave of admiration for the enormity of the task. Each of them has a life, preferences, consumer habits, and goals of their own. How will this sea of humanity play a role in that?
‘Bombay kandengi endu India!!’ uttered Parvathy. And as I climb back into the flying machine, I mutter, ‘Bombay kandillengi endu India’ — You haven’t seen India until you’ve seen Bombay.
