One of my earliest memories is from a year of my childhood spent in Faridabad in Haryana. My father used to travel a great deal on work. My mother, a Bombay girl (Mumbai was called Bombay then) who had grown up in a large, chattery family in a large, chattery building in the neighbourhood of Matunga, was alone with my sister and me in a house that felt too big just for the three of us.
So she used to bring us into the garden, with a bit of leftover kitchen atta for us to play with. In a corner of the garden, my mother would sit us down and tell us stories. She cleared a space in the grass which my sister and I lined with dry leaves. She broke off bits of atta and rolled them into shapes as she made up the stories. She would start with fairy tales, but they all ended up being set in Bombay. This made us giggle. There was something adventurous and different about my mother’s fairy tales. “This is the palace, and this is the princess, and this is her Ambassador car and” — here she would grin, and pull out a bigger piece of atta and flatten it — “this is Chowpatty beach. This is the sea.”
Imagining the city This became how I imagined Bombay: as a piece of children’s installation art drawn in a clearing in the grass, decorated with twigs, pebbles and bits of leaves, with an atta princess and an atta beach and a wavy atta sea. As a city of stories and paradoxes, where waves of the new were constantly being inscribed on the old, and where anything was possible.
I realise now that as she turned her homesickness into the stuff of stories, my mother was teaching us about imagination, about the uses of fiction, about how to retain a sense of place even in the midst of placelessness.
She was teaching us to love stories.
My parents had met and married in Bombay; I was born there. Over the years, as we moved to different places, Bombay remained the one constant in our lives. We came to the city for the holidays, to our grandparents’ and uncle’s homes in Matunga. We borrowed bunches of soft, floppy dog-eared comic books from the little lending libraries at King’s Circle. We curled up in the balcony to read them, while plump grey city pigeons gurgled in the nooks above us.
When I met and married a man who worked in Mumbai, I brought thirteen boxes of books with me. My husband and I lived by the sea, in a second floor apartment in a sprawling, palatial building that, we were told, had once been the Bombay home of some royal family. It was government housing now, divided up into odd-shaped apartments of different types, and quite dilapidated, with gently crumbling plaster on its walls and verdigris on the door handles. There were giant snails in the garden and fruit bats in the great samudraphal tree. In the monsoon, the rain dripped all day long, the wind wailed outside the windows with a human voice, and the warm salty air got into everything: the kitchen appliances, the woodwork, the pictures on the walls. We loved the house.
I felt as if I already knew the city, not only in its geography — the reclaimed lands, the local trains — but also its heterogeneous humanity, from the insaan-soup of Salman Rushdie’s magic realist novels, the close-knit families of Rohinton Mistry’s family epics, the fierce humanity of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories. I recognised the bylanes of Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay , where a Jewish refugee from Europe thinks about the stray cats of Colaba and shuffles out to feed them every day. I had seen the elderly fisherwoman of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda poem, and the scrawny kitten who follows her hopefully. I loved the pi-dog that symbolises the city, the one that Kolatkar describes as:
“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 a pirate’s
rather than a cartographer's regard
for accuracy.”
Later we moved to Parel, to a neighbourhood that had once housed the great mills of the city, a vast hub of work and community. The neighbourhood is gentrifying now; it has artisanal bakeries, air-conditioned coffee shops, and large swanky cars that cost as much as houses parked in the basements of glass-and-steel office buildings. Mumbai is changing constantly; bookshops and Irani cafes are shutting down, and the pavement booksellers at Flora Fountain were evicted a decade ago. I still have a copy of a book that I had found at one of the pavement bookstalls before the pavement booksellers were evicted. It is a college anthology of Indian prose, titled Statements , edited in 1976 by Adil Jussawalla and Eunice de Souza. One of the works in the anthology is a celebrated essay by the painter F.N. Souza, a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. In the essay, which is titled “Nirvana of a Maggot”, Souza talks about life in a quiet Goan village, comparing it with the city of Bombay: “its rattling trams, omnibuses, hacks, railways, its forest of telegraph poles and tangle of telephone wires, its flutter of newspapers, its haggling coolies, its millions of clerks working clocklike in fixed routines, its schools that turn out boys into clerks in a mechanical, Macaulian educational system...”
Mumbai in Bengaluru Early last year, I moved on a work transfer to Bengaluru. My husband, who works in banking, needed to stay on in Mumbai. We now live between both cities. He comes to Bengaluru every Friday evening, for the weekend, bringing a sense of Mumbai with him. Sometimes I make a Mumbai breakfast of kande pohe on Saturdays; sometimes, in the evenings, a Bombay sandwich, with beetroot, onion and green chutney.
My husband brings me news of Mumbai. Mani’s Lunch Home has closed down. Curry Road is open again. The Marathi film Sairat , which has been running houseful every Sunday in its one remaining Bengaluru show, has been running for three months in all shows in Bharatmata, across the road from our house in Mumbai.
Like my mother did for us, I am trying to teach my children to love stories. This month, for their bedtime book, I am reading a story set in Bombay: Anita Desai’s affecting children’s novel The Village by the Sea . We are reading about the little village boy Hari who has run away from his village to the city of Bombay. Through the kindness of strangers, he has escaped danger, and found some work in a cheap eatery, and a place to sleep at night. A friendly watch-mender offers to teach him his trade. But life in the city is a struggle: “The work was not easy in that firelit kitchen of the Sri Krishna Eating House that seemed to grow hotter and hotter and never to cool down even at night.” We read about an elderly birdwatcher, modelled no doubt on the legendary Salim Ali, who goes to watch his beloved baya birds at Thul, in Hari’s village. “The birds are the last free creatures on earth,” says the elderly ornithologist to young Hari. And then, when the boy tells the old man about how he learned to mend watches during his stay in the city, and how he will now ply his trade in the village near the new factory, the old man cries, in excitement and wonder: “Adapt! Adapt! Like the sparrows and pigeons that have adapted themselves to city life and live on food leftovers and rubbish thrown to them in the streets. You will have to adapt to your new environment.”
Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta is in the Indian Administrative Service and currently based in Bengaluru.
