Our relationship to urban spaces like Bombay seems as fraught with complexity as human relationships. To simply walk around the city, one encounters endless artefacts of Empire: Victoria Terminus Train station that vaguely resembles St Pancras Station in London, the Willingdon Club with its wood panelled rooms and grandfather clocks. All juxtaposed of course, with squalor and slums, then the cool, sharp gleaming new constructions in the metropolis, these imperialist spaces, allegories of Englishness live on in the city, as a reminder of its former colonial identity. Bombay is perpetually alive with colour and sound: the street sweeper in her dazzling orange and yellow sari, the Bollywood song whistled by the boy riding his bike, the kissing couples along Marine Drive, hiding under bright umbrellas, one adorned with jolly green cartoon cats and frogs, another all the colours of the chakras. It is a crowded City, reeking of the ghastly smells of humanity that compete with delightful aromas of the food from the street sellers.
The Banyan Tree continues to appear to emerge triumphantly from the concrete, bending across the road as though reaching out to the Bougainvillea on the wall opposite. Beneath her, is the quaint family owned café, a resounding tribute to the fact that the Starbuck’s invasion, with its foul froth hasn’t succeeded in colonising the City in the way it has London. Bombay, is above all else, a city that celebrates freedom and complexity, decrying any easy sort of classification. If I am to live in any urban space in the world, I’d prefer to be here. London, is simply too grey by comparison, too riddled with checks and balances, signs and rules, disembodied voices that tell the presumably stupid public how to behave, the weighty commitment to security and monitoring the populace, at the expense of human liberty. Canary Wharf, the financial hub of London, has to be one of the most soulless, monitored places on the planet, a wretched example of the cold excesses of contemporary masculine design. “They’re not a happy lot,” the black cab driver told me, “they never smile in the cab on the way to Canary Wharf.” In Bombay, eccentricity is prized and obsessive compulsive cleanliness is not. There are relatively few rules and yet given the population of 20 million plus - perhaps due to the fact we aren’t endlessly warned to be fearful and on the lookout- is remarkably free of excessive violence. As a woman walking alone at night here, I most certainly feel infinitely safer than London.
Invariably, as I have done here, we lazily attempt to classify and compare and contrast the characteristics of our cities, just as we do with people: good/bad, kind/cruel, easy/difficult, exciting/boring, or masculine/feminine perhaps. Mumbai is often described as the cosmopolitan relative of New York and Delhi, a cousin of Washington. Mumbai is without a doubt, highly creative soil for writers and artists alike. The City is also a seducer for those of us with curiosity, a desire to navigate around our experiences, however difficult those feelings may be and find our way through; make some sort of order out of it, on the inside at least. Just when you think you have lost your foreign footing altogether and consider heading for the nearest airport leaving her for good, she seems to beckon you to stay, with her simple kindnesses, and chance encounters that spring up with kindred spirits. One of those for me recently, was with a spirited film-maker, from Juhu, the Bollywood favourite residential spot in the north of the City. I asked her what mattered to her most. “Freedom,” she resolutely replied. “Freedom,” she repeated, only this time her eyes with a striking stare. In that moment, it is as though she was the voice of the city.
The Bombay we all know has a personality and like all relations with other living beings, exist somewhere in that space between ourselves and the other. My fantasy of Bombay is not yours. I am what you make of me, just as you are what I make of you: something that occurs in the relationship of translation, in the air between us. The Bombay I know, often seems to flaunt her trait that enjoyment as an end in itself isn’t something sinful; as though she maybe the Gateway of India, but not the Gateway of Puritanism. On other days I notice her ingenious character, when I see someone use a car battery on her head to run a cast-off cassette player to listen to her favourite Bollywood tune. At times, she thoroughly irritates me, as she echoes the broader world personality from Boston to Brighton to Bombay that wealth provides the opportunity to be utterly greedy, useless and irresponsible. Yet the huge Mercedes always stops for the cow in the road. Sometimes, I want to say to her, “I’m leaving for the beach in Goa, you’re just too hectic,” and I do and then she woos me back. She can seem characterless, when mimicking that dreadful trait the British left behind, of saying ‘Fine’ when you ask how she is (no one who cares really believes her by the way).
Yet I feel sympathetic, when she insists on chattering about buying land, given she’s heaving with about the same population as Australia. I wonder what she does, when nobody is looking and whether she sheds a tear that so many of the birds she used to love have left. Or that through her eyes, whether her family seem like little bugs living in the crevices of towering concrete monstrosities and does she at times, feel as a mother does and say “at least they are all safe.” And how burdened does her body feel, given that has had more surgery inflicted upon her than Michael Jackson. I want to ask her how worried she is about her health, and what she thinks of the doctors opinion, like that of the environmentalist Debi Goenka, that she is close to breaking point and collapsing into the sea under the weight of cement.
And if she is speaking to us, I want her to tell us if she feels we are we listening to her? I want her to teach us what she needs before it is too late. If she is indeed our muse, we must remember that she is also a living system, with her own nature and needs; the alternative perspective warrants a vandalism of neglect. And I don’t want to hear us resist her with that convenient platitude, “But this is India,” a few syllables short of saying frankly I don’t care.
I want her to hear that I am grateful to her for her hospitality, for the way she allows people flock to her, in search of a livelihood from villages and cities, for how she never turns away a soul in need, always finding a space for her new guests, even if it is as simple as a small corner of a pavement.
I want to know her better.
There are times here in Bombay, especially for the migrant, when we all feel more than a little out of place, yet ‘in-place’, is perhaps to risk being frozen in time, caught on a security camera, obeying instructions we are so accustomed to, that we have stopped noticing them. Certainty and predictability is a risky business to cling to too tightly, order and control a menacing force against the spirit of feeling alive. I think Bombay has a little more faith in her citizens to do the right thing, and perhaps London might learn something from her by making human freedom a more central in urban considerations. Of course identity or indeed sanity necessitates some continuity in the threads that run through our lives that provide a sense of who we are, as we migrate and experience new places with such diversity as Bombay. But perhaps we get to know that ‘who we are’ in more profound ways by being at least some of the time, out of place. This third way of hybridity that Homi Bhabha, another writing star from Bombay, calls forth requires us to go beyond the reductive dichotomies of good/bad, old/new, familiar/foreign, inside/outside, evoking the enormous potential of another way that celebrates, rather than merely derides the turbulence of complexity. Of course, such transformations (which they inevitably are) are profoundly difficult, and disorientating as well as enriching, testing our very sense of reality. We just need to pay attention to the signs inside ourselves. Then hang on in there and enjoy the journey.
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