Matiyaburj

 

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.

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