Monsoon Country 2

On a day like this, I feel grateful that I don’t live in Bombay anymore. Fifteen consecutive Bombay monsoons cured me of the concept that rains might be poetic or romantic because in Bombay what the rains represent is the stink of damp clothes, soggy biscuits, fungus on every untended surface, and turds and plastic bags that flap around your ankles as you try to cross a flooding road. (For a longer whine, please read Monsoon country 1)
One of the most striking annual features of those fifteen years of monsoon was a newspaper front-page headline which said, “City limps back to normalcy”. Usually on another day there would be a three-column photograph, an overhead street shot which showed nothing but large black Bombay umbrellas. Though the photograph was doubtless shot fresh every year, it looked like the same photograph. Surely they were the same umbrellas.
What ever happened to those umbrella photographs? I went looking for one a few years ago to illustrate something I wrote about in my book on stories from Sindh but could not find one and felt sorry that I had to send the book off to print without it. Eventually, I came across this on pinterest.
The reason I wanted it for the book was because something my mother told me made me realise that in Sindh in the 1940s, an umbrella was less a household item and more something you saw only in movies and magazines. What could the displaced people of Sindh, who had lost everything they had and arrived with nothing in Bombay, thought and felt when they encountered the relentless torrents of rain and the acres of jostling umbrellas of their new home?

Hill Road

Heaps of cotton clothes

Fixed price, white-hot in noon sun,

Hill Road, I miss you! // when can I go again?

Bridget rides again

Sitting comfortably in back seat when ghastly screeching and lurching. Self thrown up in air. Moments of slow-motion lucidity observing self in highway accident and anticipating high drama. Scorpio shuddered to halt, 4 of us dazed but relieved that still able to move limbs and nod head. Foul scent of country liquor overpowering. Ravi at wheel trembling. First time in 15-year-career, accident of any kind. Father in front passenger seat also trembling but more from Parkinson’s disease than shock/horror.
Man on scooter racing down wrong side of road slapped self carelessly onto us. Ravi veered and car shuddered, landed in ditch in centre of highway. Urgent longing to believe that nothing has happened and we can carry right on home. However, car trapped, so unable to move.
Disembark! insists loud pompous voice at window.  Terrified of imminent lynching by crowd. Saved by flashback to movie in which heroine is dragged to stake screeching and howling. Had resolved that self would never be silly ninny but go with head held high and sophisticated smile on lips. Now have chance to show world. Pompous voice belongs to medium-size man, no match for woman of traditional build like self, and melts away (intimidated) into crowd.
Angry crowd gathers, shaking thunderous fists. Man on road is dying, put him in your car and take him to hospital! Yes, but car stuck in ditch, remember?
Scooterist prone next to scooter, unconscious. Pool of blood. Sardarji wearing lungi sidles up to Ravi asking, you driver? Yes, Ravi perspires. Police will come, says sardarji with sly look, tell them you are passenger! Tell them driver ran away! Man will die, your life ruined! Gives conspiratorial wink, nods from side to side.
Noisy traffic thundering past. Bike stops, and highly competent-looking individual alights. Is angel in disguise, off-duty inspector Galinde from nearby policy station. Waves crowd aside in authoritative manner. Whips out cell phone and calls for assistance.
Watch with amazement as ambulance arrives in ten minutes and carries away unconscious scooter rascal. Smell of spilt liquor still strong – bootlegging activity in vicinity, confides inspector.
Crane fortuitously passing by. Inspector Galinde stylishly commands it to halt, pull hook out of smashed Honda City and into our poor black steed. Daddy led to side to wait till crane has towed car out of ditch. Poor old daddy shaking violently now, less from Parkinson’s than fear of suffocation by crowd who have now developed loving feelings and clamour to help support him.
Mild-looking police team from nearby chowky pull up in van. Inspector Galinde hands over situation with flourish and rides away in puff of glory.
Rescue car arrived from home, hurrah. Police officer Chaher now wants to take Ravi to chowky to record FIR. However, am loth to let faithful long-tenure admin assistant into hands of police in middle of darkest night! Chaher, slow and reliable, reassuring, walking gingerly as might one with bunions on feet. Sit cosily on side of road under streetlight and give statement to police. Shrewdly remember to say was on way home from Mumbai (not “Bombay”) in order to impress personnel of force. Squeeze into small rescue car with box full of food packed by loving aunty to take home for family in manner of Red Riding Hood carrying basket to grandma balancing on knee. Moist patch on lap as last felt when dandled baby (now 19) on knee. Fear bladder accident due to stress and middle-age-woman-incontinence syndrome, however only raita from box of goodies.
Next day, send Ravi to police station for chowky procedure, RTO, insurance etc. No news for several hours. Pacing with worry and images of police brutality in manner of Bhagalpur. Try phoning chowky but no response and engaged tone alternate. Call 100, no response. Call several nearby chowkies but no solutions. Lady at police control room very kind but unable to help. Ponder calling commissioner’s office but what to say? “Hello Additional Commissioner Dhiware, do you remember me, I’m Saaz Aggarwal, can you help me find my driver?” Decide on the whole better wait for bit. Ravi returns unhappy but in tact.
Next day learn that man on scooter will never again ride down wrong side of highway. Corporator phones, suggests we pay money to bereaved family. Police officer at chowky agrees. Has yielded to stereotype that traditionally built woman wearing pearls in back seat of gas guzzling vehicle must surely be wife of crafty unscrupulous builder or similar (in manner of self and Bhagalpur blindings assumption). However self is merely hardened woman of world who believes that safer wear helmets, obey traffic rules, and avoid alcohol. Unfortunately only charity permitted by current circumstances is kindness and patience to those in immediate vicinity. Explain to all who will listen that if not for Ravi’s reflexes and superior control of vehicle, self would also now be needing all kinds of help or perhaps none at all.
first appeared as Bridget bangs-up on Mumbai-Pune highway, Lives to tell tale in Sunday Mid-day on 19 Feb 2006

Bombay Clichés at Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery

Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery is a pristine space – beautifully maintained and managed. As someone without training or experience or even artist friends, I am so very fortunate to have had my first show in this classical and highly-regarded gallery, from 6 to 12 November this year.

By another stroke of great good fortune, the show was covered by many publications – including every major newspaper in Bombay and Pune. Partly this was because of its theme – Bombay. But the real reason for the huge publicity was because it was the prominent art critic Ranjit Hoskote himself who gave me the names and phone numbers of all the art correspondents. I know Ranjit because for some years we worked in the same office (Times of India, Bombay) and I’m very grateful to him for sparing the time to view my portfolio and for his generosity in sharing the names and numbers.

The biggest coverage was in Sunday Mid-day (seen alongside) which does not have a particular art correspondent, but when I called the desk to ask if they would cover my show, the person who picked up the phone happened to be Alpana Lath. When I introduced myself, she told me that she used to make the pages when I wrote a column for the paper in the mid to late 1990s. She was now the editor, loved the images I sent her, and when the paper appeared with a full page devoted to them I was absolutely ecstatic. 

I’ve posted quite a few of the press clippings here, as I am very proud of them! Some were phone interviews, since I live in Pune. However, I visited the Time Out Mumbai office where editor Naresh Fernandes – whom I also know from my days with the Times. It was in the early 1990s, and he had just started his career; I enjoyed his writing style (as he did mine), and I made an effort to stay in touch, including during his stint with Washington Post. Naresh too found my work interesting, and it was a real thrill for me to be featured in Time Out!

All this press coverage, interestingly, did not bring a huge crowd of visitors to the show! Very few people actually came off the street and most of those who did were art students or people on a lunch break from nearby Nariman Point offices. It was a pleasure to interact with them and a spiritual learning experience to observe different reactions.

My first buyer came in on the second day of the show. I had brought around fifty paintings to exhibit – how and why so many were made in such a short time is described in these press interview clippings – and I spent that first long buyer-less day, 11am to 7pm, in the anxiety that I was going to have to take them all back home. The first buyer was an art collector, Sidharth Bhatia, who had read about the show in Sunday Mid-day. In fact we were acquainted, as he used to work with the Independent when I was with TOI ; they were owned by the same company as the Times and had their offices in the same building.

Not surprisingly, there were quite a few paintings left at the end of the show. But I was lucky again, as they were all packed and taken on commission by Niloufer Kapadia of the elegant Fourth Floor gallery at Kitab Mahal. She had read about the exhibition on the alumni network of The Lawrence School, Lovedale, where we both had the great good fortune of having studied at.

When I read what I’ve written above, it strikes me that the success of my show was much more about being in the right place at the right time than any particular artistic talent. And I think that sentiment is also reflected in the welcome note I wrote for visitors to the gallery, which I displayed on its notice board:

WELCOME

And thank you for visiting this exhibition of Bombay Clichés!

I lived in a city called Bombay for many years. 

All that while, I never forgot the feeling I’d had, when I first came here as a teenager (an extremely awkward teenager from a rather cloistered, privileged background) of being an outsider. The feeling came back to me very strongly when I started working on these paintings and I noticed that my characters had turned out (quite unwittingly) to be rather calm and self-contained, so caught up in their own private worlds that they cut the viewer out completely. This reminded me of how I felt back then.

Today, nearly 3 decades later, and having lived away for 12 years, Mumbai is still the city to which for various reasons I feel most connected. When I started working on this collection, my idea was to use simple line strokes to portray the complexity that makes Mumbai an alluring symbol of the realities of the universe: constant movement, relentless expansion, predictable patterns, extremes of all kinds, seemingly precarious but perfectly reliable balance – and continuous change. I added the pen embellishments partly to represent the frolic and bustle, partly because I was trying to create an innocent, folk art effect - but in the end because, really, I’m a writer and not a painter at all.

The paintings are priced at Rs. 5000 each.

In case you want one which you can’t see here – any particular scene, colour combination, design – I’ll be happy to make it for you!

Here, then, is my outsider’s view of “my” Bombay. I hope that you, visitor or native, will feel the warmth and humour of these scenes as I do.

Saaz Aggarwal

Communities, Mumbai

“Table join-madi,” I requested, delighting the Chembur roadside restaurant waiter with my fluent Kannada, and he hovered around for more, eventually disappointed to find that there wasn’t any. Partly it was the way I casually stretched out that “join”, but mostly it was the word madi, a handy and flexible connector with strong cultural and philosophical undertones that enables one to string together words of practically any other recognizable language, and distinguish oneself as reasonably-versed in Kannada.
It’s true of every city, but more particularly true of ours. Distinct subcultures – tight, village-like communities – coexist in painstakingly carved-out domains. Some are conceptual, and circumscribed only by their own peculiar rituals and culture. But locality, of course, is the most common determiner of community: for years I have thought of Colaba as my village, with familiar faces dating back thirty-five years and more. Back then, I was an ethnic minority so rare that there were only two of us, my brother and me. Our lives had a sheer backdrop of pain and isolation, unable as we were to shelter in any of the community niches of our compatriots. But today, along with exponential choices in areas as diverse as fizzy drink, career and Internet vendor – choice of community too abounds.
Occupants of the same carriage in the local each day are subject to hidebound, time-bound hierarchy and sacrament of great significance which set them apart as a unique entity. Members of Mensa have all the uppercrust edge of Brahmins with five-thousand-year old traditions. Those who met and married through the TOI Matrimonials will have a fellow feeling for others who did the same. Beggars at each separate traffic light have distinct territory, vision and mission, and (unwritten) industry best practices all their own. Even intelligent-looking women who sniff disparagingly at buffet tables, dismissing them as “press conference food”, will pass each other on the street with a certain cosy familiarity of attitude. It’s this fundamental sociological reality that gets you the very best idlis in Matunga, and, if exotic pure-veg concoctions in world cuisine figure on your scheme of things, you will surely take your NRI visitors for a meal at Shiv Sagar.  Every minority group – religious, sex-related, educational, privilege – follows its own set patterns.
Threads link individuals, (as madi did the waiter to me), forming a link between their communities, and this integrates the whole. In the case of Mumbai, despite the staggering different categories, there is a well-defined and easily distinguishable amalgam. This stereotype describes us as brisk, business-like, goal-oriented, action-oriented and completely no-nonsense. It goes on to flatter us as highly adaptable, and with a high tolerance for discomfort but a low tolerance pretence or posturing.
And yet, each little microcosm characterizes a whole host of different habits and rituals which engender a vital sense of belonging. Everywhere we go, we bump into others of our particular ilk, and this, despite the teeming multitude, gives rise to the illusion that Mumbai is actually quite a compact, well-knit place.  It’s all we can do to keep regulating our various faces to retain our rightful places in each community while maintaining the sanitized front of a Mumbaikar. Or, as we say in Kannada: “Adjust-madi”. 

Crawford Market

For a few weeks each year, mangoes hit the ceiling at Crawford Market.
Higher and higher they pile, their prices swinging in inverse proportion, until the competition arrives – first lychees, then cherries, plums, and peaches, and then the most luscious, irresistible pears. They are scattered on stalls and wooden crates in the area, some even obscuring the brilliant fountain in the centre of what was once courtyard to this rotund Norman-Gothic building.
With the floor strewn with hay turned slimy by fruit peel and other unnamed substance, this section of the market is reminiscent of Covent Garden – not as it is now with its naked aborigines and painted performers, but back in the My Fair Lady days. The fountain was designed circa the same period, by Lockwood Kipling – father of the inimitable Rudyard, who was born nearby at what is now the Dean’s residence at the JJ School of Art, in 1865 – and some of his bas reliefs adorn the exterior.
In later years, the foreign influence would be represented by products of diverse nationality. Alongside stalls vending standard Indian market produce, tubs filled with soaps of Chinese and Thai make sell for Rs10 onwards. Bottles of French shampoo jostle for space with tubes of Swiss face scrub, and shelves groan under the burden of Taiwanese Black Bean Sauce and Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
A few days ago, I walked the slippery, narrow lanes leading into Crawford Market with my mother-in-law, soaking in the heady aromas of rotting flesh from the meat market and decaying dung from the caged animals – pet dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, goldfish and more – that lined the route. For me, Crawford Market had been a familiar haunt long before it was named Mahatma Phule Market; for her, it was the first time, and the most special treat I could think up for her brief visit to Mumbai.
As children, gawking the bustling metro on our annual visits, a high point would be the visit to the nearby Badshah Cold Drink house, where we would guzzle mango juice, marvelling its availability in December, and scrape every last bit of kulfi off the plate. Those were the days before ice-cream came to the hill resort near which we lived – and the parking lot outside Crawford Market could still manage a space or so for shoppers.
In later years, when I lived and worked nearby, Crawford Market was where I went to buy inexpensive return gifts and decorations for kiddy birthday parties; faux-silk Diwali saris for the bai; and fruit of the utmost variety and quality. Nowadays, I still undertake the four-hour drive from Pune every few months to stock up on essentials, and revel in the distinctive population of the place: the canny vendors; the throng of memsaabs in their tight t-shirts and clip-clopping stiletto heels, haughtily pointing to that, that and that, at first one shop and then another, followed at a respectful distance by a coolie balancing a wide, shallow strip-bamboo basket on the head; and, of course, the coolies who come in a wide permutation of size,  nutritional intake, regional mix, and gender.
Where else but at Crawford Market could I buy the half-kilo of active dry yeast and the litre of vanilla essence which ensure that home-made bread and cake are economically viable? And where else could I buy several months supply of paper napkins, toilet paper, aluminium foil, garbage bags and more at one shot without destabilizing my budget?
Proudly showing my mum-in-law around my favourite shopping complex, it irritated me that she was initially unimpressed, but gratified as she struck good bargains on aam papad, jelly, and pasta.
The pasta at Crawford Market comes in every shape and size of traditional pasta, some in brilliant, unorthodox colours. It’s sold in sackfuls, like any other grocery product, labelled ‘Italian pasta’, and one of the stall keepers offered us a packet of ‘pasta masala’ to go with it. Intrigued, I asked what it contained but the boy was vague. Masala, he repeated: “salt, garam masala … it’s masala for Italian Pasta.” I politely declined.
Sated, fully-laden coolie in tow, we headed for the exit and my mother-in-law, with the practice born of long years of pure-vegetarianism in this barbaric non-veg world, gently steered us out by a less aromatic route.

Lovely short pants for madam

“Poora Bombay mein AC lagne wala hai!” and he swept his arms in a huge circle to demonstrate, wriggling his eyebrows and wagging his head knowingly to provide that extra bit of entertainment for the yokels gawking, fascinated. “Agli bar Bill Clinton aayega to aisi garmi nahi na hogi!”
The yokels, who giggled on cue, were my teenaged Pune-bred children, and we were on our quarterly pilgrimage to Fashion Street, Mumbai, to stock up on some essentials. We had stopped now at stall No. 61 A, owned by Bobby Roy, entrepreneur and entertainer.
When Bobby confided, in an early encounter, that he is also a dancer and sought-after dance teacher, I couldn’t help gazing with fascination at the long line of men – young and old, crude and sophisticated, friendly and surly – each positioned in front of a ramshackle wooden stall hung higgledy piggledy from top to bottom and side to side with garments of every size and description. Here they stood, remote in time and space from the villages of their birth, calling out with great guile and persuasion, “Madam, Baby, see this side, no!” and “Lovely shorts, come here Madam!” “Best price, for you only!” “Sir, shirt for you, you son?” (and so on) to the ardent bargain hunters. I wondered how many more gems of purest ray serene the dark unfathom’d stalls of Fashion Street bore.
The goods are largely unremarkable, but with some patience, and a bit of luck, you can take home garments of excellent quality, at a fraction of the dollar price quoted on the labels they invariably sport. For those who frequent Fashion Street, treasure hunt is an exciting hobby. Each piece must be checked carefully for fraying, uneven warp, crooked necklines, and other minor defects; deep colours that might bleed to death in the wash are regretfully rejected.
Bargaining, naturally, is an institution. Some Fashion Street familiars go by a fixed formula: offer half, or a quarter, or a tenth, of the price initially quoted, and work up to a mutually acceptable mean via the age-old courting dance in which feigning shocked disbelief, and outraged demands that the other party come to their senses forthwith,  play an important role.
The other, more sophisticated, method is to take a good, hard look at the garment under consideration, and make an offer based on what it’s worth to you. Pre-requisites to this free-market act are a strong sense of micro-economics, and stable self esteem. These will ensure that you close the deal at your price – with the Fashion Street ace of “okay, fine, but just add five rupees to that. Five rupees is nothing to you, right?” Which is fair enough.
At Bobby Roy’s, where my kids outfit themselves with jeans, ‘cargo pants’ and an astonishing range of  trousers, whipped with a flourish out of wooden crates like rabbits from a hat – we pay what Bobby recommends. It’s invariably a bit above the market, but a reasonable margin for his jokes and enthusiastic personalized service (Bobby even remembers our myriad waist sizes!)  when we visit the frantic, unfriendly city.
By contrast Mahadev, another long-time supplier, is sober and professional. His stall is the single major contributor to my own wardrobe, and we operate on a flat price established years ago. I now enjoy the facility of one who slips in discreetly, selects independently, offers a secret bundle of freshly counted notes (thereby confounding other shoppers still engaged in price debate) – and quietly departs with a large white polythene bag suspended from two fingers.
The other day, Sara, an American friend, admired a flower-embroidered t-shirt I had bought at Mahadev’s, remarking how beautiful it was. “That would be the height of fashion in the US!” she exclaimed.
I glowed inwardly, and wondered if I should be shameless enough to say aloud what I was thinking: “Naturally it’s the height of fashion. I bought it at Fashion Street, didn’t I!”
first appeared in Times of India, Mumbai 24 May 2001

Big city, small city

A few years after I first came to live in my little shaded neighbourhood in Pune, still exulting in the sandpit and flowering trees and comfortable parking that fifteen years in Bombay had somehow exemplified as an impossible dream of luxury, I became aware of a rather subtle phenomenon. People would say hello to me, and I would say hello back, impressed by their friendliness, but completely unable to place them. Embarrassed, mildly disbelieving, my newly-wedded husband explained that these were our next-door neighbours.
This was a big surprise. I wondered how these could possibly be people who I passed by frequently on the way to and from home, yet I knew for sure I had never seen them before.
Pondering this puzzle for a while, it struck me that this must be a legacy from all those years of living in little apartment blocks piled higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, with grandmothers and dogs and Sintex water tanks and African violets all jostling for their little inch in five hundred square feet of space. To walk down the corridor was to smell someone else’s dinner. To look out of the window was to encroach on someone else’s most private moments. To curl up with a book was to be distracted by the loud whacking, by merciless mothers, of children who couldn’t remember their seven-eights-are. Of course we had to find ways to keep ourselves to ourselves!
I lived in Bombay for fifteen years, and never thought I’d move. That was me, there, attending book readings at the British Council, plays at the NCPA, and inhaling deep to hold my breath as the double decker careened past the aromatic Sassoon Docks and lurched to a halt outside Bus Station. That was me boarding the coach at the Air India building in the dim hours to catch early flights out into the unknown, laughing happily when concerned security guards asked why my father or brother hadn’t come to drop me. Me who tried to comfort the bumpkin on a visit to friends in Santa Cruz while she watched, dismayed, as the train whizzed past not only the Santa Cruz station, uncaring, but also the next four, and had to face the prospect of grievous bodily injury while attempting to disembark. And yes, I can remember trying to buy vegetables at Andheri market. What a savage place it was! We were like animals, vying for the same prey. The aggression levels of Andheri market, Andheri station, and the environs, will live as icons of dread in my memory forever.
And Colaba, Colaba – for years I have thought of Colaba as my village, with familiar faces dating back thirty-five years and more. All this seems to me, when I think about it now, like snatches of existence from another lifetime. I still own property in Bombay – another of life’s miracles, for a humdrum person such as myself to possess a piece of the planet on which a size-four foot stands on a fortune.
And for many years I lived in a little kholi in Bandra with a Kathak class right below me. Visitors sometimes asked, “How do you LIVE with that noise?” And I would say, “What noise?”
I honestly could not hear it at all, and went about my daily activities with the incessant thumping and banging and jingling of bells entirely outside the scope of my perception.
Years later, focussing on this habit for the first time with dawning awareness, sweeping my neighbours with a sincere and appraising eye, I began the long process of breaking free.
Was it just me? Hadn’t we all developed this facility? Wasn’t it a normal, big-city phenomenon? Didn’t the glazed, faraway look in the eyes of public-transport commuters the world over as they gaze, unseeing, into those of their co-passengers, speak of the same trend?
Here, in Bombay, we had blindly accepted hideous black-and-red
window grilles (or sometimes evilly white ones), and installed double and triple doors with multiple locks on each, and a large ugly padlock hanging outside ostensibly for safety but really more just to delineate our personal space. After that, working on an auto-pilot with the wisest guiding light, we went and developed this special type of blinkered vision in which only we and those who we knew personally actually existed.
Now when I visit, walking down the streets of Bombay, suffused with the warmth and comfort that one can only experience in one’s own true home, I am acutely conscious of how the teeming crowds on the railway platform affects me. On one hand, it’s impossible to describe the exhilarating freedom in the anonymity which no small town, not even my nearly-there, wannabe adopted home can provide. An insignificant corpuscle flowing in a moving mass of humanity, I need never pretend to be who others think I am.
On the other, an intense claustrophobia arises. I long to take deep breaths, but am inhibited by the sundry fragrances that suffuse the air.
I see familiar faces where there are none. I smile at people who I think I know. Hardly anyone smiles back.
first appeared in Maharashtra Herald on 25 Jan 1998

Monsoon country

She was looking for a good place to spend a few weeks writing her poetry. So, of course, I suggested Bombay. After all, the rains were due to arrive, and what more poetic concept exists on this planet, as sure as June rhymes with monsoon, as sure as one brings the other?
So she wafted in with the cool breeze from across the seas, bringing a whiff of exotic scent, and it blended and was lost forever in the heady aromas of monsoon Bombay: the new batch of fuming automobiles crowding the thoroughfares; the nearly-dried fish caught unawares and turned soggy by the early showers; the squatters’ rights that floated up from along the tracks where they are dropped every morning and cling to your hem as you struggle to cross roads knee-deep in the swirling cocktail that comprises equal parts of rain water and overflowing sewage.
I could tell she was intrigued, and on one occasion leaned forward delightedly, asking, “Is that a flock of migrating birds?” It wasn’t, of course; the little dots of white that roosted on the beach below were merely more squatters, delivering up still more of that early morning business to the sea.
Duly chastened, she sat back, and, some weeks later, didn’t say a word but peered, suspicious and disbelieving, at the peacocks that we could see thronging Malabar Hill and dancing on the roofs of old houses in unbelievable, illusionary glory.
In Bombay, visitors are fondly informed (in a kind of cultural counterpoint to “lovely weather we’ve been having lately!”) that there are three seasons: hot, very hot, and unbearably hot. After a few weeks of this I noticed she no longer smiled but nodded disinterestedly, having realized that this was not a little joke, nor even mere propaganda designed to lure unwitting tourists. The poetry was doing fine: the quality of rain (quoth she) falleth mercilessly from heaven and is a bit difficult to describe. We agreed that it was not quite the monotonous never-ending sleet depicted by Maugham and his empire-building cronies in an attempt to ruin the reputation of the monsoon countries. Neither was it the little patter of raindrops to which she was doubtless more accustomed back home. We got one excellent sample through the shutters of a Local into which the stereotyped mass of commuters (hapless victims of one another’s odours) was crammed, racing off to collect the pot of gold at the end of their own personal rainbows. Another time, thunderous buckets overflowed over us, a foretaste of the revelry to come on the auspicious occasion of Gokul Ashtami.
Greenery had sprung up across the city just as if it had been invested in the stock market. We had noted, with some alarm, the new trends in full coat-pant type rainwear, the kind which enables one to bike to work and stay dry, yet drip over the others in the lift.
It was time for one of those episodes in which the city is ‘thrown out of gear’. And it came to pass that it rained full speed on high tide day. People lived to tell the long and boring tales of how they were trapped in the bus (or car or train) for hours and hours, with no respite from the rain. Finally the deluge began to abate. Systems were restored. We were survivors!
Recovering from the terrible blisters induced by the gorgeous genuine-imitation plastic rain shoes the poetess had ventured to acquire from a roadside hawker, she found herself, in the language of the day’s headlines, limping back to normalcy.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 28 Aug 1995

Home out of range

If you lived, say, in Los Angeles, and commuted to work, the most relaxing part of your day would be the journey home.
Commuting, Los Angeles psychiatrists and mental health workers concede, with all its opportunities for unwinding and allowing the day’s events to fall into perspective in the individual’s private space – a sort of limbo between work and home where you are answerable to none – is the most deeply therapeutic technological advance made by humankind. This is what a Los Angeles psychiatrist, visiting Bombay on a powerful grant to make a longitudinal study of why residents of Versova, Marol, and other satellites of Andheri are so insufferable and nasty, confided to me.
This was several months ago, and we were on our way home (to Marol and Versova respectively). Crouched comfortably on the edge of the stony, crowded planks that pass for seats in the Local, we chatted amicably while other women thrust their bags in our faces in revenge for having occupied places they might otherwise have had, and unwound rapidly to the jerking jiggety-can of the train and the high-pitched complaining sounds that the occupants filled it with. Therapeutic: deeply so.
After a particularly vicious jab on the forehead, the psychiatrist casually, quite without thinking, stepped hard on her assailant’s little toe, looking innocently at me all the while so as not to get involved in any scuffle that might ensue. Marol, Versova, Los Angeles, what’s the difference, I mused. The only way to retain my sanity, I decided, was to dissociate myself from psychiatrists.
So I got myself a lovely little place in Town (yes, truth they say is often stranger than fiction), about as far from work as my former home was from the station, and moved.
It was goodbye forever to the Ladies – train compartment, I mean, not toilet. In one smart stroke I had evolved from being a poor sod in a mob, devoid of identity, into a genuine, suave urbanite.
Two-and-a-half hours of travelling time saved every day, and god knows how many calories of energy. I was the envy of the old crowd I was leaving behind to carry on chopping vegetables on their laps, tearing their mothers-in-law and bosses apart, and shredding vendors to bits for bindis, bangles, and samosas all the way home.
Everything is so much more expensive in Town, they said enviously. Ah, but think of how much I’ll save on transport, I gloated. You’ll find my address easy to remember I went on, trying to conceal my triumph. It’s the same as the number of the train we battled our way onto for so many years.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I’d been gloating in vain. The hours dragged, long winter evenings went on and on. And travelling by bus – that was just no way to go, though I will admit that some conductors came close to compensating my deprivations, the way they harangued passengers for change and flung pathetic old geezers off with a nifty ting-ting of the bell.
Of an evening I’d wander down to Churchgate station and gaze nostalgically at the frantic, grasping, gasping crowd – a wretched, lonely onlooker. It was no good. Being a mere observer only deepened my sense of isolation. I searched for solace and found it one day when I discovered the Colaba Woods.
Now this Colaba Woods is not the venue for a teddy bear’s picnic where tree lovers might bask in forest glades or other such poetic concepts. It is a landscaped garden with parallel tracks for walkers and joggers, and very enthusiastic they are, too.
I’d walk down every evening and relax there for an hour, feeling at home. It was quite a lot like rush hour, with toes available for trampling, large abdomens to jab with sharp elbows, and smelly little brats to jostle out of the way. When the monsoon came by, it was even more jolly therapeutic. I’d march down with my umbrella, delighting in watching the walkers and joggers skip smartly out of my way. It was ever so soothing.
That took care of aggression and subliminal vindictive urges. Adventure was a little more difficult. Where could I find an equivalent of dashing young men leaning at desperate angles from speeding Locals, clinging by the skin of their fingernails to window rods or clutching tightly to the roof, seemingly intent on acquiring a one-way ticket to that great Dombivali up in the sky? There was no easy solution to this. I tried to satisfy honour by watching pedestrians break through rope barricades to make a dash across the road through zooming traffic. Not many got hit but occasionally the wrath of a policeman would nab a miscreant and that would keep me going for a day or two. And when my pining for the rabble of hawkers rose to an unbearable ache, I would catch a cab and persuade it to stop at a traffic light. It wasn’t much, but it helped.
first appeared in Saturday Times 27 Feb 1993