I love Mumbai-it rocks!

train to Vashi

I visited Mumbai after decades, hey, don’t go guessing my age, there are better things to do.

I fell in love with city.

Mumbai is rocking late at night. Thanks to the sea breeze that cools the most heated soul and asks them to stroll down Marine Drive to enjoy nature’s gift, away from cramped tenements and trains full of teeming travellers. It is the sea that makes the trade-off between industry and space bearable.

Mumbai is spiced curry at its best. Thanks to a cooked cauldron of cultures that sits a fair, plump Bohri Muslim in an embroidered black burqa who reads a quick magazine next to a multi-nose pinned, necklaced, Maharashtrian with crooked teeth, a big bindi, and weathered skin listening to music with a hands-free to her ear— on a train seat from Bandra to V.T. station. Thanks to the cafes like Mondegar that line Colaba Causeway where “because I am worth it” women wear low waisted, very blue jeans and drink beer late at night to the sound of Western folk music, even as the black and yellow out-dated Fiat cabs with stuffy, blue velvet seats and the red ‘Best’ buses ply the streets outside. Mumbai offers you cheap vada paos and bhel on Marine Drive and the mouth-watering, though high priced fruits at Breach Candy that can make the most satiated mouths drool. It has ‘cutting’ chai that you can have ‘dhai-dhai’ (fast) before you catch that train to somewhere, since Mumbai has a train service that everyone travels by. So when the heavens sing their megh malhar and the rains pour, its no-show at the offices, and everyone has to understand, because the trains cannot run from Borivali and Andheri to Tardoe or elsewhere when the homes and tracks are wet and inundated. Here, the language has its own mix, where the ‘darlings’ heard at Cusrow Baug are interspersed with the ‘kai ko’ sounds of Matunga, and the cauldron continues to spice up its curry.

Mumbai is mannered. Polite men move their arms out of the way so that women in a hurry do not collide with them, an ability of manners sorely lacking in the aggressive north [where women are taken head- on and have to themselves steer clear if they want to, regardless of high heels, shopping bags, screeching kids in arms and usually excessive weight]. Those catching a bus have to stand in a serpentine line that is not straight like a Chinaman’s pigtail, but is more like a ‘z’ at the end of which you may board the bus, one after the other, please. There is no pushing or pulling here. I did not know this, and played by the aggressive rules of Delhi, getting ahead and putting one foot on the waiting bus, waiting to be pushed in by the others, when a voice behind me asked me to get to the end of the queue. What queue? I looked around and, of course, in my hurry to catch the bus I had not spotted the people standing in line patiently in the heat of the mid-day sun. My face red and a stupid smile on my face for apology, I went and stood at the end like a punished student who speaks out of turn. But this kind of well-mannered queue-ism is unheard of in Delhi for sure.

Mumbai has a Fashion Street —a far cry from the high-end Champs Elysees of Paris, but one that may definitely be compared to the Janpath of Delhi for cheap clothes, footwear, bags etc. Most goods can be bargained for and the prices brought down to half the quoted strength. Yes, I have tried it and it works. So you make up with quantity when you are not looking for exceptional quality, and the bargaining also lifts your spirits because you believe you have emerged a victor after a blood-thirsty battle of prices. And then you suddenly feel exhausted with all that energy spent in haggling, and move to the Jehangir Art Gallery for a pint of beer in artistically ethnic surroundings to lift your spirits once again. The Jehangir Art Gallery has been there for donkey’s ears, because I had visited it decades ago as well. A kind of nostalgia gripped me and I was surprised, because it had not happened to me in other places at all.

Another surprise. Mumbai has a highly developed sense of community and environment consciousness. Well-heeled gentlemen take the train to their offices instead of a cab or a private car. There are several reasons for this. One, they reach their offices faster. Two, Mumbai people are, despite their wealth, careful with their money. This can be because they still belong to the old school of thought that if you have it, don’t flaunt it. The most baffling reason for a person like me from Delhi is their community and environment consciousness. The rich will take the train because they do not want to add to the city’s pollution or create traffic jams. They also do not believe that by taking the train they are coming down the social ladder in any way. Many of them also don’t run their air-conditioners unless absolutely necessary, saving on power costs of course, but also because of the increased awareness regarding CFC.

Despite the rains that pelt it announced and add to the dirt, squalor and stench as you wait for the train, clutching hard onto an umbrella and wondering why you are visiting it when you can be in a dry place called Delhi, you know that Mumbai charms you with her downpour of more than mere rain, its how her heart throbs in the midst of it all.

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Ticket to Ride

Sahi?

Okay?

Theek hai?

The words are spoken by a man behind me, I don’t know what he looks like, but he has a heavy and loud voice.

Route no. 534 from City Select Mall at Saket to Anand Vihar. And I’m on it. So I get to hear this, experience a lot more.

The hair on the young boy in front of me curls nicely, like a cat’s tail comfortable.

A man on the street puts a cigarette in his mouth, lets it dangle and then lights it as the bus moves on, leaving him behind like a flash in the noon light.

White and brown spangled belts, on two different people, one of them has an orange skin tight nylon shirt and a big blue square watch on his wrist, embroidered blue jeans. The other disappears before I notice him, apart from wearing a belt in keeping with that of the orange shirt man.

On the road someone is selling helmets in blue, black, green, they are heavy upturned caves waiting to be filled by cooked heads. People working far away on dry fields, are visible. Trying to grow something in this blazing heat that makes everything wilt and bake is an amazing enterprise.

On the passing pavements now, rows of red tomatoes, ripe to bursting, their colour heightened by the strong sunlight, asking to be picked up and washed and eaten, or they will squash very soon on their own.

Cucumbers peeled and cut in the open-a cool invite to passersby.

Balloons now, shaped in all kinds of toy forms.

The bus conductor calls out, “Mother Dairy Depot, Anand Vihar, Anand Vihaaa…aar”, hoping to drum up ghost passengers from the pavements.

The boy with the curly hair leaves. Two girls with their mother now occupy the seat in front.

The kids, almost twins in the fact that they look alike except one is older, obviously since she is slightly bossy, are dressed in nylon pink and green dresses, their hair tied on two sides tight, as ponytails, with old fashioned ordinary long-forgotten use of red rubber-bands, no fancy stuff here. And despite the heat, and despite this nylon cloth clinging, and despite the fact that their mother occupies the seat with them, and she is not slim, they are excited. I can feel the excitement in the way they look out of the window, chatter and talk to their mother about this and that. Their hair is long in curls, but brittle and brown with split ends, lots of conditioning needed here, and the younger one scratches her hair, so most probably it is lice ridden. Their father, darker-brown skinned, grey and balding already, sits in the seat in front of them.

The mother takes out a coin, one of the girls hands it to the father and the father throws the coin far out. It is for a beggar on the pavement near the traffic light where the bus has stopped. The beggar slides along the hot pavement on his thin behind, his legs are thin, useless sticks, and picks up the coin with the mutilated fingers of his right hand. There is no emotion on his face.

"Lao ji," says the conductor to no one in particular. “Give, please” this means, money for your ticket to ride.

“Char ka mera.” pipes up the guy next to him. He is not betting on anything. He is saying that he wants a ticket for Rs. 4/-.

The bus is decorated in the front with the usual posters of gods and goddesses of the Indian pantheon. What is new here are two steel rods strung with multi coloured bangles which add more colour to the colour. A tall thin man comes and stands in such a way that my view of the front of the bus is blocked for the moment. My attention shifts to the girls and then outside.

“Lao, bhai” the conductor is on his prowl, brown safari suit suits the predatory nature of his approach. In his simple words of “Give, brother”, a world of meaning. It means fish into your pocket and take out the fare.

“Teen ka dena” and the conductor hands over the ticket to the person who asks, quietly. He does not argue or ask till where; people who are regulars know their route cost.

The bus moves at a monotonous speed as though the heat is taking its toll on it as well, and rocks and jerks and makes straining noises like an old man trying to gather steam. This swaying and the drone of the engine and the heat hitting the face from outside, the people within, all combine to make me want to close my eyes and doze off. I clutch hard onto my purse in case I do.

“Now at Kalkaji mandir, I am in the bus, standing, will reach in fifteen twenty minutes, it will take the time it will take,” says a man into his mobile, philosophical like.

“Family passenger, gate par chalo, stand aane wala hai,” shouts the conductor suddenly. He is asking some family members to disembark. Which ‘family passengers’, I try to see.

“Maharani Bagh wali family passenger, aage se utro.” The conductor is shouting for the family to disembark, we have reached the Maharani Bagh bus-stand. I see a couple get down. They are the family? The conductor’s terminology foxes me

The girls in the front are fidgeting, they want the destination to arrive, and tell their father about how they have traveled this route before and seen the Akshardham temple, which their father is pointing out to them, earlier already. So he says nothing then, and returns to his thoughts.

“Do rupey kiske hain?” Whose two rupees are these? asks the conductor, and someone extends a hand out to grab the two rupees, acknowledging his ownership

Gulmohur trees blaze orange in the sun, so do the bougainvillea in their pinks, purples and reds. The amaltas blooms a soft, soothing yellow. The parks where the children are playing despite the hot summer sun, are parched dry and barren of grass. A stray growth here and there indicates what might have been. A forgotten green.

Stanislavski has talked of an actor’s journey. The actor’s path is set, but how he reacts to the beautiful events that he sees as the journey unfolds is what helps him create his acting. I cannot see anything beautiful on this journey of mine. My path is set too, but I just want to get home, the sun’s heat brings tears to my eyes.

School children clamber on to the bus, their white shirts hot emblems in the sun, their navy blue shorts dark against their brown skins. Their faces are tired after a stultifying day at school. There is hardly any joy or laughter among them, though some smile shyly when I look in their direction. I smile back.

A man behind me talks loudly into his mobile, chomping as he talks, and it is not because he is eating something, it is a harsh chomping of the jaws, as if he wants to destroy something, the world perhaps.

The bus turns a corner sharply and I grip onto the seat with my buttocks and grab the hand rail tight so as not to fall off my seat and onto the bus floor. The bus careens around, then stops abruptly at a red light, and I look at the crowd standing within the bus and wonder as to how they have not fallen onto each other, how they can maintain a centre of balance despite the antics of the bus. Man is capable of anything, I muse to myself.

We are approaching Balco, a local market, and the labourers laying bricks on the pavement doze on their haunches, their head between their legs, right there on the street side, impervious to the traffic, noise, heat, dust, flies—nothing bothers them right now.

Somnolent slumbering in the mid-day heat, and the bus moves on, an elephant that grunts and splutters as it makes its heavy way in the city jungle.

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