Matiyaburj

These two I did in the spring of 2007, in PhotoShop.

Mechanics. Mechanize. Mechanism. Mechatronics. I am. My finger. I am my finger. To myself. For them, I cannot be. A lean, crumpled, hair-laden skin, nail-headed, generating motion at will. But I, my finger, isn’t what it ever seems. I am the millions and the millionth cell, and above, the bodybone mechanism—the system of mutually adapted parts, bound, veiled under the fragile pink.

I am a mechanism. Running on the knowledge of blood of which they deny the knowhow. So they shiver and shake when the fuel oozes out, and gape, and wipe, as if someone has put the blood from the outside, as if it should be anywhere but there. Like the flesh isn’t there. The blood, the city’s underground drainage. It’s so vital that it’s scary. As they clean me and hide me– something of me, as vital. The underbelly draped, trapped to show there isn’t any or, maybe, not to show there is, and yet draped, because it is. The drape cannot deny its existence. Absence feeds on presence. Gets fattened.
Like I am: present with my finger’s mechanism. Withering with Marx.

I am my greatness. My unprovable greatness. As great as it may be. The ocean’s oceanic mountain. No one has to climb it to prove it, toil to freeze the sweat. It is simply floating at the summit of the sea-level. On a glorious morning, sunlit, fluttering the moist hairs inside the seawind of the blue blue vastness. It’s me under. Me. I have no ascent.

Yet, could he ever descend so easily, drilling the deep, prove his footprints on the barren, desolate toes of the mountain’s unfathomable base, where I sink, stone-laden, never to float up again. My historic feat! Diving below myself.  Through textures of a low-life, hollow crevices—fumbling along sleazy, run-down bars, salivating over left over dignity like dog brothers stalking greasy dustbins—into the sandvalleys of a billion nothingness as I de-scale the bottom to reach the peak never to return, to tell the flat world swaying in ignorant harmony of the mad waves.

Like a second, split, but a second nonetheless, squeezed between the transition clock of a pair of empty and loaded cluster seconds. Seconds, time-full and drank, and filled again to be drunk again.

I am the uneven, the protruding edge of a finite second, broken, tiny, clinging to the ground on the barely-there and unacknowledged bridge between two body-seconds. An anomaly in useless physics, the extra quarter of a full-bodied second, however, wherever, yet present.

It is, I am, the hollow silence, the pause between two gulps of water being drunk, the intermittent breath where no drop is consumed. Yet it is this presence that makes the drink enjoy itself. 

Food is not like us, humans. The first bite or scoop or sip does reveal the palate’s entire DNA. After that, the food’s invasion into your senses repeats itself– bite-by-bite or scoop-by-scoop or sip-by-sip and your happy tongue, programmed after the first taste, rejoices in advance on what good thing will fall into its lap. And it does. The tongue keeps savouring the unbelievable sameness and then, suddenly, it cannot eat anymore. So sad.

But we humans are the unmaking of all this. The person in question remains a person in question; his first impression never-lasting; his last impression his first impression.

Incidentally, when I, the famished, first nibbled an exotic assortment from an Oriental wok (pan), with my left hands holding an alloy steel knife, my ears tuning into overhead neo-Western music (Dido and all) and my right hand clanking the clattering white bone china cutlery with a fork, this subtle revelation had not yet dawned, even though it was high noon. All this came later; much after the soul had been satiated with a hodgepodge of fragile South Asian delights. Even personalities could change, by the way.

The restaurant in question was four-months-into-business Purple Rice, boxed with international flair in Sector-35, and its 23-year-old London-returned owner, Vipul Dua, assorting all sorts of exoticas for learned gastronomy and revenues.

I debuted here with Purple Treasure Soup, said to be the creation of the chef (Bhasker, scooped from Taj Delhi, now wearing a purple bandana) with eight types of exotic vegetables. Swooshed in, the crunchy-munchy pale liquid did do some good.

I followed up with lamb, with Paper Thin Lamb, with soft shredded meat stir fried with three types of bell-peppers and served, smoking; the itsy-bitsy creamy white bits trapped amid shreds of greenish foliage. Full in taste, the chewed lamb melted on contact and the taste-buds exhumed a lingering acknowledgment.

But barging into the lamb were mouthfuls of another crunchy-munchy—the very red and very brown Chicken Lettuce Wrap (boneless chicken breasts wrapped in lettuce leaves and tossed with some Thai sauce). The pieces would gently explode in the mouth’s gentle squeeze and fill the hot, dry tongue with instant fantasies.

The Zumbo prawns, as it turned out on eating were, prawn-like. They had a make-do name– Hot Chilli Prawns—and a nationality too—Indonesian. Really meaty, when guided, glided out of the stick and plucked golden brown.

On the black-brown round table swam in the promised Standing Pomfret, whole-fried with Malasian know-how and Xo sauce. Like fish eating fish, the sea/river fish, smeared with thick and tangy gravy, was dismembered, sideways, and eaten with my fumbling brown-wood chopsticks and eaten with the driest and the lightest chicken noodles of my recent memories.

Dessert has dates and I had honeyed Date Pancakes, the Chinese flour wrap popping out a chocolaty paste that the nice ice cream flowed into and made the mouth hot, cold, sweet and someway indescribable, the dripping honey apart.

All over.

The mouth is now buzzing with sting bees of smell. I swallow the saliva and silently, the jasmine tea arrives in a white porcelain kava, with remnants of some floating leaves. Sugarless, tasteless and also aroma-less, the warm brown water feels grudgingly good on my burning taste buds, like jasmine tea gliding over white porcelain.

After the trees had been cut down to widen the road beyond the backyard, the little birds flew in again. They perched on the roof’s edge and began co-cooing to the sunny new emptiness. Above, caravans of cloud-puffs were drifting east. Below, the road-roller was ironing the dug-up soil.

Wild gulmohar yard

red blooms rotting

on moist earth black

deep-green

clouds

love-dark

shadow afternoon’s

sweet, airy yard

sky growling

gathering

bird singing

bulb going

lashings

cold

wet

love-dark

scented moist earth black

how the pouring washes us apart.

        Bokaro, Jharkhand, June 16

The crane flew alongside the train. Small yellow legs thrown back taut, off-white wings outstretched wide and the orange beak straight, on the bird’s probing but calm white face. And with a slow, beautiful arc with its curvaceous wing-feathers above the bright green watery foliage, the monsoon slush, the bird swooped down, like a leaf falling through air. The bogey, with me on the windy window-side, overtook the silvery bird falling with gusts and whiz.  

Some time later, the butterfly came, first almost brushing the moving windowpane and then slowly fluttering away, its orange wings with black round patterns brightening up a receding village’s cloudy landscape.  

In the end, a bug got hit. The buzzing insect flying in from the other way got hit by the fast, crazy train window, and it fell, into that window’s sill, upturned, wreathing in pain, then falling quiet. A violet-greenish black-bluish bug, gasping on the sill, sheltered from the gusts and unaware of fast losing its territory, its landscapes, of being on a speeding train compartment.

I watched and studied and thought and tore some newspaper and made a cone that was wobbly and light and began lifting the injured bug up. I didn’t want to touch. It was an insect. I didn’t know what type. The limp insect was also fragile—the tiny legs, the mini wings brittle to human touch.

But always, at the paper cone’s contact, the insect would slip, its round body bounce away. And then, it revived. The upturned legs shook, quivered. I tried to pick again but failed. The bug now knew. It shirked. It turned and stood its feet and began bumping around the sill on its many broken, many intact restless legs. Then silently, with effort, it began climbing off the sill, probing, knowing new, metallic territory, approaching me, the berserk bug. And now I caught it, gliding it into the cone, and slowly, holding my breath, offered the bug tottering inside the sunlit newspaper to the howling, blasting window wind. The paper dropped, regained shape as it got pushed back in the open air and flew away. I rubbed my hands and looked at the window sill now.

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?