Matiyaburj

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.

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