The Swarming Life: Bombay

I saw a lean figure listing forward, in a blue synthetic shirt, walking with a briefcase. He stays in our colony. He was once a skinny kid who lingered on the edges of cricket matches in the park, refusing to play but laughing if someone slipped or got out. Then he became a teenager with awkward rat-fur whiskers and oversized specs. Now he's a man, twenty-something, oxidising day by day, working for a spare parts supplier.

As I walk past him, I think of time, of how his face would broaden into middle age, how his mind would be ready with the harsh practical lessons of ration cards, home loans and vehicle installments. And I pray for him. He hurries, you see, for an auto to the station for a train to a station for a train to a station for a train to a station for a taxi (sharing) to his office gate; and all's reversed in the evening.

I don't know. Maybe he dreams of charging on a wildebeest, African grasses crackling for him, while in thundering drums and ritual vapours a hundred grass-wearing women call out. Maybe.

He also makes me rake up an old uneasiness about this city I live in.

Atticus's beautiful post has got me thinking again about Mumbai. I have always loved the city; to say 'Bombay' in Bangalore had a special charm for me, a glittering metropolitan exoticity of speed. I boasted about the city's gangsters, and lied about film stars walking everywhere in the streets and how we were used to it.

I belong nowhere, but Bombay gives me places I can call my own, in my own quirky ways, in a crowd of a millions. I have walked around Fort in endless, aimless patterns, in the heat of the day, in the dusking glooms, in the solemn yellow daubs of night. Where I pause, letting the eye linger on high Victorian friezes, I sense the heart of this large amoeboid form , and its throbbing, bustling beats. Like blood corpuscles, people hurry, pouring into Fort in the morning, retreating into suburban flats at night. The trains halt in light and shadow, platform after platform, exhaling people, then inhaling them. The trains, the crowds, the floods, the heat, they come and go, and life goes on, and people die, and money flows, and children who travelled with their mothers in ladies' compartents now hang from the doors of men's compartments, chewing one-rupee gum, with slick, straight hair and middle partings, one foot at the door, another at the window, a bright green comb jutting out of the pocket. With heavy, measured wings, Eliot's powerful lines move in my mind:

London, the swarming life you kill and breed,
Huddled between the concrete and the sky
Responsive to the momentary need...

I belong in quieter places, with fewer, simpler, naiver people who won't push you or shriek as they hooligan past each other for a seat when a local arrives. I miss the Bangalore of my childhood, the sounds of sweeping coconut brooms at sunrise, and Suprabhatam on the radio, and women bending at thresholds, their fingers perfect with rangoli. I miss the early morning flower sellers, whom you could call out to if you were a grandmother. Mallige! Baa pa illi. The Mallige seller's name is Mallige. The irulli seller's name is irulli. Alugadde! Baa pa illi. I miss the roads sprinkled with bluebells, and women plucking hibiscus, and the shivering winter cold when you walked slowly, hand in pockets, thinking of your love and the warmth of her face as it moves towards you, an eerie shadow in a lonely street. And crouching men in monkey caps, walking past you, every breath billowing like beedi smoke.

The smell of filter coffee. The thud of a fresh crisp Deccan Herald- which would dwell on bad roads and Gowda-flavoured politics- and then of how Dravid "caressed the cherry with sublime elegance". Retired men with wattled throats, some brisk, some pretending to walk, others huddled under peepal trees for decisions on world affairs. Coffee in tinytot tumblers of steel at one-minute eateries. Vans returning from the wholesale market, piled with fresh bargain vegetables for someone's wedding, and six little cousins craning out of the window.

Damn the IT crowd. Bangalore was much more than them, so much more, and now perhaps the new-found money has cut across the city's throat, like the blade of a swiss army knife, bought in Chicago, sharpened in Chickpet, to leave the city choking in its own blood.

And Mumbai beckons like a mistress, with the leaping of paan on British stone, the blurr of the sweeping crowd like bolts on assembly lines, the guarantee that you will find one eccentric person wherever you look. The Public is everywhere, with a detached tolerance of the stranger: men can walk around, waving happy wands, abusing that traitor of a sky, while couples neck and cuddle. Even a street scuffle gathers but a handful of people, for the rest have a local to catch. And Fort is the place. Rich with the moneyed, rich with beggars, full of bhel and pirated porn, where curators, traders, hawkers, consultants, all arrive and leave as one.

The streets explode before me, with their visual pungency. Tribal families, maroon and green and glass, framed by cooking fumes behind the NGMA bus stop, in the full blast of noon. Beggars rest at ticket counters at Victoria Terminus, stretching out their slender grimy hands. Little girls run after a potbellied trader, carrying babies at their waist; the trader shifts from foot to foot, picking his molars with his finger; the baby shifts from waist to waist, scratching a tiny, lice-infested head. And late at night, near the same counters, with lips of trademark red, prostitutes slowly loop around the crowd, their gaze in searching beams. Outside, other women wait at the subway's entrance, adjusting their tops, bearing college-like bags, for a stare that might mean business. The subway's madness of light and sound and bustle. And urchins crouch behind the station-bridges, bullying each other, sniffing glue. Footpaths fill with men on sheets, scratching as they yawn...

What does one say about Bombay? For all the talk of opportunity, of how anyone can make it big, for all the riot of movement and sound and colour, and all the grime of rain-worn walls, people age quickly here. Their life is measured in yellow train tickets and footpath deals. Bombay takes its routines for granted. As men tumble out and tumble into the choking mouths of local trains, day after day for the thirtieth year, they forget that this is a choice they've made, that there are other, more human ways to live...

Lord, grant me the wisdom. Also grant me a little cottage in small-town Himachal, with a fireplace, and a thousand musty books, and a cup of Darjeeling tea, and a ridiculous troupe of noisy, shiny-nosed kids to teach.