Bombay the ‘insaan soup’

Arun Kolatkar, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie. Writers and poets have immortalised the city. A riffle through famous Bombay books Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta

At the Topaz Permit Room next to Novelty Cinema in Mumbai, happy hours are from 11am to 6pm, and you get beer for Rs 80. When we go there to park awhile before the 3:30 show of Sarkar, the gateman looks meaningfully at me and tries to dissuade us: Yeh beer bar hai. Yahan ladies daru pilaati hain.

But it is at night, Suketu Mehta tells us in his intense and splendid Maximum City, that “the city is humid with sex,” when “fully clothed young girls dance on an extravagantly decorated stage to recorded Hindi film music, and men come to watch, shower money over their heads and fall in love. The intersection of everything that makes the city fascinating: money, sex, love, death and show business.”

If Mehta writes about the city “unfolding luxuriously” at night, Gregory Roberts, in his sprawling, funny, heartbreaking Shantaram, gives us a different moment in the city’s night life: “At midnight, every night in those years, the cops imposed a curfew on Bombay. Half an hour before 12, police jeeps gathered in the main streets of the central city, and began the enforced closure of restaurants, bars, stores, and even the tiny pavement shops that sold cigarettes and paan.”

But when I returned to the city of my birth some years before Shantaram and Maximum City appeared on my bookshelf, it was the ghostly midnight rider of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children that I sought: “Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then...”

It was a December night, our train getting in past midnight, friends bringing us burgers and fries. Past midnight, but the streets were bright and electric; Haji Ali shimmered like a fairytale above the water; and people walked barefoot to the Siddhivinayak Temple.

This is the “insaan-soup” that Rushdie wrote of. Here is Manto’s Mumtaz as he leaves for Pakistan, saying goodbye to his three Hindu friends, to the city, “its wide avenues, its magnificent buildings,” and to the memory of a pimp who lay dying in front of JJ Hospital. Here is Manto’s Tarlochan, “up to the knees” in love with the Jewish girl Mozail in Advani Chambers, for whom he goes to a barber in Fort to get his beard shaved. Of the angry graffiti scrawled in the mootri near Congress House and Jinnah House.

The city of Firdaus Kanga’s childhood, where “a little glamour lasts a long time”; the 1970s Bombay of young Cyrus Readymoney in Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy, where Haathi Mere Saathi runs ‘House Full’ in 22 halls across the city; where there is a pool of lilies on the edge of Bandra; a glass house facing the sea; and a father’s signature like the Gothic front of Victoria Terminus.

Here are Ravan and Eddie, those lovable rascals from Kiran Nagarkar’s novel set in cwd Chawl No 17. Here, also, is Sandeep’s corporate, antiseptic Malabar Hill Bombay in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address, from where there were “no sounds, no smells, only a pure, perpetually moving picture.”

‘Did you not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody?’

Here’s the city of Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters, and on its cover Sooni Taraporewala’s photo of an old Parsi gentleman watching the sea. And the early 90s liberalising Mumbai of Ashok Banker’s Vertigo, opening one Monday morning at Churchgate, where, “sweat-drenched, lice-stung, elbow-shoved,” you fight to get off the train. The Bombay Meri Jaan, where Naresh Fernandes and Jerry Pinto bring us Nissim Ezekiel’s island, its “host of miracles”; Salim Ali’s “special providence”; Cyrus Mistry’s Doongaji House, and Paromita Vohra’s idea of living in Bombay – “Bandra by day and Manhattan at night” — and the reality of being “a refugee from Leave and Licence”.

The Bombay of two faces, good and evil, where Sartaj Singh, in Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, watches how “the water on the window made the world outside a vague blur of brown and green.” Where one Bombay confronts the other with troubling questions: “Do you really hit people? Torture them?” Where Sartaj is forced to reply, “Yes, sometimes it’s necessary.” Where he would like to reply to Megha and to the other half of the city she stands for: “It’s your world also, but I am 31 years old and I live in the parts you don’t want to see. I live there for you.”

And finally, the Bombay of the streets, of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems. The pi-dog that looks “a bit like / a seventeenth century map of Bombay / with its seven islands / not joined yet, / shown in solid black / on a body the colour of old parchment / with Old Woman’s Island / on my forehead, / Mahim on my croup.” The rat-poison man, his poster leaning against the wall of the Wayside Inn; the Man of the Year in his rainbow-coloured muffler from Chor Bazar; “the witch of Rampart Row” whose sari is “red like the city in May, / with all its gulmohurs in bloom.”

There’s the Bombay I’ve inherited from my parents, Busybee’s Bombay, with its old Irani cafes, “old photographs and marble-topped tables and Kyani’s delicacies announced on blackboards in artistic chalk.” There’s the city my husband lived through, the Parel street where, in 1993, he saw men burning taxis: the riots when, as Rushdie wrote in chilling italics in The Moor’s Last Sigh: “Bombay blew apart.. There had been nothing like it in the history of the city. Nothing so cold-blooded, so calculated, so cruel. Dhhaaiiiyn! A busload of schoolkids. Dhhaaiiiyn! The Air India building. Dhhaaiiiyn! Trains, residences, chawls, docks, movie-studios, mills, restaurants. Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn!”

Over time, I have found the city not only in its streets and bylanes, but also in the thousands of pages on which the city has been reimagined in a series of quintessentially Bombay moments, sometimes sprawlingly, in Shantaram and Maximum City; or in vignettes: the Andheri local of Arundhati Subramaniam’s poem; the 106 bus that the boy in Amit Chaudhuri’s poem takes, shunning the family’s Mercedes Benz, pretending to be poor; and from Shantaram’s Café Leopold to the table at Sea Lounge where Banker’s Jay Mehta feels a sense of vertigo. Every Bombay book offers a fleeting glimpse into this constantly churning urban reality, this shifting series of narratives, allegories, performances. The city is centre and periphery, order and chaos, progress and anti-progress, utopia and dystopia. West and East, Lanka and Ayodhya. Everything is Bombay, as Rushdie exclaims in The Moor’s Last Sigh: “Bombay was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.”

And so perhaps the most telling description of Bombay is still Rushdie’s when, speaking of other places, he says, breezily, “In Bombay, such things never happened” — but then cuts himself short in mid-sentence. And asks, with aching accuracy: “O Beautifiers of the City, did you not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody, and to all?”

The writer lives and works in Mumbai

Reading Anil Dharker Columnist Gregory Roberts’ Shantaram struck me with its grittiness and powerful narrative style. He captures a Bombay that many of us don’t know and don’t want to know. Its emotional centre rests on the fact that it is Roberts’ own story in the seedy side of Bombay. Watching Girish Kasaravalli Filmmaker The last film I saw was Talk to Her, by the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. I found it brilliant and very interesting in terms of the story and the way it has been handled. The film also finds a mention in Time magazine’s list of 100 best films. Listening Joy Sengupta Actor I’m floored by Shantanu Moitra’s score for Parineeta. The best part about it is that unlike most soundtracks these days, the background score does not clutter the lyrics. The lyrics evoke visuals in the listener’s mind and Moitra’s music complements that.