Matiyaburj

Tewari, 73

Coming out of Khyber drunk on white wine and red wine, I began looking for a taxi in the night. I saw one taxi driver exchange a few words with another in a language I knew so well. He agreed to take Manu and me towards Grant Road. The driver was an old man. My drunken senses began flying as the taxi gathered speed. So out of impulse, I began talking to the old man. I told him that I loved it when he was talking in Bhojpuri. I asked if he was a Bihari. He was.
How long have you been in Mumbai? “40 years.”
And you still remember your language?
“Can one ever forget one’s language?”
Then he asked where I was from. I said Bihar (I was brought up there) and Calcutta (where I studied).
“I used to drive a car in Calcutta in the 50s,” he said. It was his boss’s car. He had come to the big city with his mother from a village in Bihar.
Manu got down at VT station and we resumed our night journey and talk.
“My maalik (boss) was a very good man. I would drive him to his office everyday. I had his car.” Then his company asked him to move to America. He said: ‘Tewari, you will also come with me’.
We were now in Church Gate.
“I was so happy. I told mother that maalik had asked me to come to America with him. She got really worried. My father had passed away a long time ago and I was her only support. She forbade me from going. But I had promised my boss. I was in a fix. I didn’t know what to do? Everybody around me knew I was going to America. Maalik had asked me apply for a passport. But what could I do? I had to refuse. He was a good man. He said if your mother did not want to come, don’t.
My mother was relieved. I was a good, responsible son. After my maalik left, I began driving a taxi around Calcutta. I also took mother on a pilgrimage to the four holy sites. I fulfilled my duty as a son.
Then I came to Mumbai. It’s been 40 years, driving taxis. They all know me, respect me. I am 73 now. Can anyone this old drive a taxi?”
He halted at Lamington Road. Slowly I staggered down, missing him already, and paid fare of Rs 50 and saw him speed away, smiling, satisfied, the old man in his taxi.

Spirit of the clan

Descending from the roof of a plastic recycling factory in Dharavi on a bamboo ladder, I was reminded of an anecdote Andre Malraux had written about Carl Jung and Native Americans in his autobiography Antimemoirs. I shared it with Nick as we lumbered out. Jung, the Swiss psychologist, was doing a study on a Native American tribe. That day, they were on a tree house. The tribe’s chief asked Jung what his tribe was and what animal represented his tribe. Jung said that in Switzerland, people neither have any tribe nor any animal to represent it.
Soon it was time to descend from the tree on a ladder. The Native Americans climbed down the tree with their backs to the ladder, as if walking down a staircase. Jung climbed down the tree with his face to the ladder. It was the opposite of what the Native Americans had done. Once on the ground the tribe’s chief pointed towards an insignia of a bear on Jung’s jacket. He said, “Of all the animals in the world, only one climbs down a tree with its face to the trunk. It is the bear”.

Hajj Musafirkhana’s windy top floor rent

Pratham, an NGO that rescues and rehabilitates child labourers, provides shelter for some of the kids in a windy hall on the top floor of an old caravanserai at Crawford Market. The building is called Hajj Musafirkhana where the Muslim faithful stopover for a night or two before resuming their pilgrimage to Mecca. Uma Subamanium, a young woman overseeing the kids’ hostel that day, said the owners had suddenly hiked the rent. “They had rented it to us on grounds of charity since they said we are doing a benevolent job.” So the NGO used to pay a “compassionate” rent of Rs 12,000 a month. “Now they are asking for Rs 25,000 a month,” she said. The charity had ended. “Yes. It’s a huge amount, we know. But Johnson & Johnson will pay it on our behalf.”

Communists in trucks

Trevor, Siddharth and I were traveling in a taxi when we saw some trucks filled with people moving past. All the people in the trucks were standing and were packed back to back. They were holding red flags of the Communist Party. Atop one truck’s cabin, we saw some people rhythmically beating drums. The people seemed villagers, going a rally somewhere. Though tired, they were full of zeal. It was like a procession, to a distant revolution, through the thick traffic of Mumbai.

Is that a Hussian?

As light slowly spread around the darkish dining room of Khyber, Kalpana, all of sudden, exclaimed to the waiter: “Is that a Hussain*? Is that by MF Hussain?” The waiter smiled and nodded: “Yes. Hussain designed this room. We call it the Hussain room”.
We gaped at the murals of women on the restaurant’s rugged half-lighted wall, like gaping at the Buddhist paintings in the dark caves of Ajanta & Ellora.
*MF Hussain is India’s most-famous painter.

Sleaze

In the deluge of sweating people flowing in and out of the hot street, two are selling pornography, the CDs in cellophane with titillating women on the covers.
“Mister…what do you want? Arab?…Russian?…we have everything.. listen…” says one seller flashing the sleazy discs like playing cards as unmindful women in black burqas keep passing by us. The women know what their men buy.

Cuffe Parade is the gold cufflinks on your Raymond suit you parade as you walk out of the big apartments to your sedan.

Rich ball, poor ball (April 24. 7.45 am)

By Hotel Taj President is a basketball court. In it is playing a group of rich boys.
In a ground conjoining this court is a group of poor boys playing cricket.
The rich boys are plump. They wear sports shoes. As they toss around the basketball, they communicate in English.

The poor boys are dark and wiry. They wear dusty sandals. The bowler challenges the batsman in Marathi. A tree trunk is the stump. He bowls to him fast. The bat misses the ball, the ball misses the tree and the ball rolls into the basketball court. The bowler, by instinct, shouts: “Ball, ball!” to draw the rich boys’ attention. Their sweating heads turn; there is indecision in the air; one rich boy stoops, picks up the ball and, with a quiet air of resignation, throws it back to the poor boy. The games resume.

Two deliveries later, the bat misses the ball, the ball misses the tree and the ball rolls into the basketball court. The bowler shouts: “Ball, ball!” The rich boys don’t pay any heed. The ball has now rolled past the court. There is indecision among the poor boys. One of them walks into the court, retrieves the cricket ball as the rich boys play basketball and silently, the head bowed, returns to his waiting mates watching him with pitiful eyes.
The game resumes.

Garden of Egos (April 22. 7.30 am)

In the apartment block park is the long flower bed. In it are names of the residents of the apartment to identify the plants they had once planted. The T-shaped dwarfish tin plaques, gored into the reddish soil alongside every plant– some wilting, some carrying on– bear names like DR SUDESH PATEL, SMT JAMNABAI LALANI, MR ADIL BOATWALA, MR MICHAEL DECUNHA.

At first glance, one may mistake the names, in black capital letters on the white plaques, to be names of the plants’ species, as is the norm in any normal garden. But here, in Cuffe Parade, the plants bear only their planters’ names.

But what will the park-goers say if one day Dr Sudesh Patel’s plant begins to wilt and Smt Jamnabai Lalani’s plant starts blooming?

Isn’t that obvious? (April 24. Around 6 pm)

Through big tinted window of the moving bus, a cream coloured bungalow on the road to Cuffe Parade entices me. I see it from afar and the house becomes more enticing as I inch closer. I begin noticing its Portuguese design, the stuccoes on the front, the porch hidden by foliage and a gate and above all the smoothness of the light cream colour over all the different patterns, freshening up the old structure, making the building wholesome and also homily. It’s a lovely, warm feeling, admiring that home as I am moving, as the bus is almost brushing past. Suddenly I see the house’s name etched in deep silver above the creamy porch—Lovely Home. I chuckle. In India, we like to state the obvious. I do it all the time.

Coexistence (April 22. 7.25 am)

 By the sea is the park. In it are residents of the tall apartment blocks walking round and round in the hot and moist morning. Among them is a middle-aged woman, in a tee and track pants, shedding weight by circling the winding oval cement path. Beyond the park, with abandoned fishing boats in the middle and some hutments on the edges is a patch of blackish saline marsh land. In it are squatting two men, their pants pulled down and their bottoms out, defecating, their open backs against the people in the park. They know that the apartment’s plump woman is walking past their oozing bottoms now glittering in the sun. Yet she is retracing the path with the same view, again and again. Seeing and not seeing. It seems this happens everyday.

Bombay does not have heroes, people who are larger than life. The megapolis cannot support any hero because every person, every clog in the Bombay wheel, is rotating on his axis. Like the hotel liftman going up and down all day. Like auto driver retracing paths. The tiny life circles merge into each other in trains, streets, buses, ferries and, after this shared journey, become whole again.  

There is another reason. The roads are too full. The street has every possible face and physique and every possible emotion, from Colaba to Bandra to Mahim, and in this jamboree of survival, even a person walking in the streets in the most outrageous dress will go unnoticed. As he would pass, his oddity would flicker like a lighter and vanish as instantly. His oddity will not be acknowledged. And that’s an insult to the hero– his failure to lure.  So the hero lives elsewhere, outside the city he is manufactured in.

Larger than life posters of Bipasha Basu and Sachin Tendulkar look comic and even ridiculous on Marine Drive. In Jalandhar’s Model Town, people won’t take their eyes off.

The city is not in awe of its Amitabh Bachchan, its Anil Ambani, its Hafeez Contractor and its Raj Thackarey. The outside is.  The outside is the market. The city is the factory.

You have to be a wannabe actor or a wannabe entrepreneur to know this.  An unknown Shah Rukh Khan from Delhi had to come to Bombay to tell Delhi who he is. The hero of every other place except Bombay has to be in Bombay to lure every other place. So, in a way, Bombay is like America.

Here are the studios where everyday the fable of SRK is manufactured, shot-by-shot.  Like a factory where a tractor is manufactured every five minutes, assembly-by-assembly. What will happen if the tractors do not get exported? The owner will go crazy. What will a factory do with a product it cannot send out?

What will Karan Johar do if his film does not get screened outside? The filmmaker will go crazy. 

A factory does not use its product. A factory is not meant to do that. It is meant to send the product outside.

Hence Bombay, which is a factory, has no use of its hero. It sells the hero outside.

The city has the expertise to vivify your unrequited imagination and toss it back.  If you accept it, this new experimental film, this new fairness cream, it becomes real.  

And the factory does not even know how beautiful, lethal its product will turn when it hits the market. From the factory of the newsroom to the market of the newsstand, do we journalists really know?

I write all this in flux: What I had seen and what the mountain life is now. Since October, an invigorating Kullu ka Dussehra, a hillock fired up for rain, a whole village gutted like an inferno, up in the hills, silent elections, the changeover, half of another village gutted like an inferno, snowflakes, decay, resurgence…

This unnamed tunnel is the hole in the Dauladhar Mountains, like a bullet-hole in the body through which you drive your car.

So this tunnel is not beautiful. So it has to be ugly– the inside of the mountain’s mouth. The mouth is also man-made. So the tunnel is ugly. It’s torturous. The girl from the mountain finds it torturous. “I close my eyes when I cross it.”

But the tunnel is also beautiful. It’s wondrous because it’s man-made. Hence it’s beautiful. It has to be.

So the tunnel is beautiful and not-beautiful. This is not about points of views or perceptions. Not-beautiful and beautiful is the truth. The tunnel is man-made so it’s ugly, so it’s beautiful. Both are one and the same.

So why should I alone be emotional, partisan, when I realize that the tunnel is both?

But there are points of views, perceptions. When I was crossing this tunnel in this long, heavy and extra-cushioned super-deluxe private passenger bus, in the night after Dussehra, I alone was in pain and in awe. I felt sad that the tunnel is there. But it’s there and it must have been chiseled out of the mountain by men and women like me. It must have been hard: making this hole in this handsome but stubborn mountain. It must have been hard: working in the harsh and dangerous conditions, in heat and rain and snow, in poverty and helplessness.

But this was not an emotion arising out of the watching a drama or the reading of a poem. It was real. It was as if the heart had slipped off the unreal path and rejoined the River of Sorrow flowing below the History of Sad Times.

Yet all this was not normal: my sadness, this tunnel. I was in awe because the tunnel was over two kilometers long! It had seemed unending. I was gawking, finding it to be never-ending. Every single inch the bus moved, that every inch meant days of blasting and chiselling. My every moment of pain and awe was also the workers’ every moment of pain and awe. I wanted it all to stop, the tunnel to abruptly end, the workers’ work, already done, to end.

It did not. It went on and on.

I was pained also because most of my co-passengers were dozing while they were crossing this Victory of Human Will. They seemed indifferent; they seemed bored, because the tunnel was too long and suffocating and unnatural (even though they were inside this long, heavy and extra-cushioned super-deluxe private passenger bus with berth sleepers one-upon-the-other and also honeymooners) in all this overwhelming ‘naturalness’. Unlike me, they were not gawking. They were not acknowledging the beauty; they were only acknowledging the ugliness. But both are one and the same. The tunnel is not-beautiful and beautiful.

So inside the tunnel that night were two kinds of people: one who found the tunnel painful and the other who found it beautiful. So inside this one tunnel were present two total perceptions– the tunnel had accommodated both: light and darkness; love and disgust and, above all, life and death. But this other pair surfaced occasionally, like the making of the tunnel or the unmaking of the mountain itself. This pair was ever-present, like some days’ later, when inside a similar tunnel, inside a similar mountain across the common Beas gorge, five similar labourers maintaining it similarly just died. Their shaft had snapped off its cable and sunk into the blackness like a stone. Victory of Human Will had paid the impaled mountain its irregular rent, counting it off as the fixed cost of sustaining the tunnel victory, to move forward through the backward pushing rocks. The mountain had never pestered Victory of Human Will for rent; but he thrust the rent upon it anyway, supposing that rent was part of the tunnel’s being and, believing in the threat that the impaled mountain would, on and off, extract its fee in unbearable pain. So human will offered the mountain its own ilk, like a sacrifice, like the goat (braying in the Manu Temple’s coarse bloody yard, up on dirty Old Manali.), like those men, never acknowledging that to avert that catastrophe, it engineers that catastrophe.

The bus is out of the tunnel and the stars have descended on the mountain and there are none in the moonlit sky. I swear.

Who are you?

When dawn of an early winter hotly broke over the Kullu Valley and one-by-one sun-filled its vast arid brown apple orchards and its tumbling silvery gorge, wizened, burnt mountain men in tattered sweaters snaked down the hills in a loud rattling tractor to the cold, damp and glittering riverbed and began their daily ritual of hammering its submerged ashen rocks— splintering the smooth round stones into scruffy bits with constant ricocheting thuds!

Puzzled, with the naked sun burning up my forehead, I watched them toil on the riverbed, leaning on the dharamshala’s balcony, waiting for some tea, in the chilling gusts, I watched them toil on the riverbed, and the puzzle vapourised.

I luxuriously lazed while they laboured undignified. The tourists luxuriously lazed while the locals laboured undignified.

Why?

Because the local is labouring for the tourist. It was so shameful that I had to withdraw inside. When I would see them again the next morning, doing the same thing, no pity would erupt, only pure, cleansing shame, without any chances of redemption. It could make you sweat.

Are you spineless?

The climb uphill strips my limbs with fatigue, with degrees of slant—45, 50, 60, 72…The head falls off, the legs fall off, the chest falls off. The only thing that keeps climbing is my spine, to Nicholas Roerich’s Himalayan museum, above Naggar.

The sun heats on my back and I climb. The yellow sun through the blackish pines is feeding the white tree of my spine. My spine becomes my mountain. My whole being, over 6000 feet up the sea, shrinks to the turns of my backbone. I become my spine. I heave. I rise. I am swelling, bursting at the seams. It’s exhilarating; it’s happiness and you don’t want to come down, ever.

You see the valley like a hawk—the uneven curls of the gorge and the rows of black slates on the little house roofs shining like slivery scales of river fish.

The mountain is scampering me up, even on the old Maruti Omni and in the evening’s bluish-orange translucence of the rising village path to Old Manali, I finally see the bent old woman. She is hauling up a hoe on her rickety shoulder, returning home. Jesus dragging his crucifix. Such a long, wooden, soiled, sharp, earth-slicing hoe, on the spine. To sweat is also to bleed, in the eternal mountain’s silent burden of being.

But why is this village so dark, so gloomy; is there no light, no electricity; why are the small, cheerful children scampering down the narrow, muddy path with empty plastic diesel cans, why do they have to fill the yellow, blue cans with water from the black, hard tubewell and carry up home the wobbly, heavy, cold water cans in their feeble white hands, the weight tilting their little frames? Who am I? What am I doing here? I offer help but the kids scatter.

Then I see her again, down the low mountain road in Kullu the next translucent evening, a LPG cylinder strapped to her spine. I can arc my head to only gaze, at the coolie being pushed by her luggage.

Hammer and sickle

The translucent interlocked brick-red hammer and sickle, dabbed carefully on a concrete bridge pillar half-sunk in the boulders of the deep but arid gorge, as traffic enters Manali, is meant to seen by all, and everyone does. The red mark is meant not to be ignored. It is like a cut, a bruise, a nick, a dent, corrosion, a brimming implosion, on the smooth knee of the hill station. The mark is not easily forgotten because it does not belong to the pine-high town. It is an anomaly, so our driver for the day, the local from Kullu, shrugs of the sign and the responsibility. He says he does not know.

But I lust at the sign. Because he too knows that this opium-and-snow-and-ecstasy mountain is marked, in red.

The Devtas

I see the Kullu ka Dussehra, on the vast ground under the sunny mountain’s shadow, with silent metal and wood deities sitting in their tarpaulin chariots and a swaying sea of fifty thousand people or more in all colours and contours, buying, selling, praying, singing, dancing, eating, living, making music, making merry, merging into each other, once more becoming God’s Own People.

The roadside tree in Noida is rising from a raised enclosure, round, bricked and filled with soil. The tree itself is small, with a bluish-grey trunk. Its long leaves are the usual dusty green, but jagged neem-like on the fringes. They wave with the occasional gusts; they flutter in silence as the Sunday traffic passes by in the hot afternoon.

The soil in the enclosure is turning black in the flying roadside dust and on this utterly dry bed of deep-grey granules stands a tiny plate of rusty brown iron. The plate has two walls at right angles. From above, it’s L-shaped. In the sun, the shadow of one side is falling on the other making the plate seem an iron sundial.

I recognised the iron plate from the sensation it gave me—the shiver of looking at or caressing or unwillingly, in my imagination, licking cold raw iron, the visual or physical contact aligning all the granules of iron in my hot and throbbing being into a sudden, similar metal plate. The plate shot up and pierced, from my imaginary touch, and punctured my consciousness from the fingers straight to the back of my reeling head, my head feeling as if it had just been knocked by a plate of iron. I looked at it again and long enough and it happened again. It was too much, like a sick indulgence. So my attention wavered and caught eye a tinier plant with two leaves rising beside the iron. Something happened in me, seeing the plant and the iron coexisting and mutely flourishing, also beautifully. And also because the new plant was looking frail and phosphorescent beside the unbendable and dwarfish iron so that one seemed to complete the other.

One part of the unlikely pair was once flattened and angled when red hot under an unknown ironsmith’s blows and the other was nourished from the seed itself with the warm caresses of wind and rain. Yet they were together, side by side, equally in existence, as if the pair made up the being of this forming metropolis.

Six months have passed and being in Noida, at the same market and remembering suddenly that it was there, I looked for it and seeing the tree, I lumbered towards it, in the evening darkness, palpitating funnily this time. And I found it taller, more mature, in the cool dark, far away, indifferent to my gaze unlike that blazing afternoon. It was all too dark really. Then, disappointed I looked down and there it was, still standing, the iron plate. But even this looked longer, like growing up like the complementary green and tender two-leaf plant beside it. But there was no plant beside it. Only the deep brown iron in the scraped off top soil of the barren, save the tree, enclosure.