Book Review: Bombay Meri Jaan

I bought this book on impulse, in a fit of patriotism and affection for the city (also because it'll be some time before I'll have the money, and more importantly SPACE for a large coffee table book on the city - anyway Bombay is so beautifully captured in a variety of forms - even words!) I was not less tempted because of the fact that the book had been edited by Jerry Pinto, whose writing I fondly remember from my mother's Society magazines. Also the cover was just so lovely and coffee-table-book-esque - an aerial twilight shot of the BMC building - towering majestically over a sea of buildings, much like a lighthouse, with a flash of crimson irridescent lightning behind it, a beacon of tidings. Here, see!

I also bought it because it featured writers from a variety of places and times, writing in a variety of literary forms – poems, prose, documentary/dissertationesque writing, plays, songs, a comic, cartoons by the inimitable Morparia littering the book, even a recipe for Bombay duck, and, among my favourites, a piece on the origin of Bhelpuri!!!! I skimmed through the list of contributors, including Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Rudyard Kipling, Khushwant Singh, Paul Theroux, Duke Ellington, and I needed no further encouragement. It promised to be a veritable khichdi, or perhaps bhelpuri?! (Ok, too soon in the script for sidey pun).

I shall start off on the review without further ado. There is no particular connection between the stories, so the order seems to be rather random, though you immediately notice that great pains have been taken to encapsulate every tiny aspect of Bombay life’s, nature, and people, from a native point of view. There is little glamour and exotica – no fawning descriptions of erotic temple sculptures, of encounters with sages or mad medicine men, no backpacking adventures. In short, no touristy kitsch. Just pure desi dish (oh god I am moved to ill-timed eloquence).

The first piece is a poem by Nissim Ezekiel entitled "Island", about, well, Bombay. I have always been too dumb to get his rather dreamy wordscapes, so I always end up getting lost in them, and have to find my way back to the beginning and pay more attention. It is about the confusion that is Bombay, but I have anticlimaticised it here. It is taken from his Collected Poems, published in 1989.

The second one is a memoir, sorta, by Pico Iyer, called "Bombay: Hobson-Jobson on the Streets", from his novel, Tropical Classical, published in 1997. It is about his wandering around the city, discovering its delightful eccentricity and unsurpassable memory, which he likens to “a mischievous boy – irritating, engaging, quick-witted, and eager to make good”(10). I really enjoyed it much better the second time as I was skimming through (I read the first ten stories a couple of months ago).

"Where I Live" by Arundhathi Subramaniam, is a poem and a technicolour description of Bombay’s third world situation.

"A Very Young Person" by Rudyard Kipling is from Something of Myself. It’s quite cute! His dad was John Lockwood Kipling, principal of JJ School of Art. He talks about his maid and bearer and the time when Mahim actually had woods! They lived on the Esplanade… where was that? Chowpatty or Breach Candy?

J. Gerson da Cunha compares Paris and Bombay’s evolution into major cities in his rather redundantly titled piece picked from the Origin of Bombay, 1900.

Khushwant Singh, too, writes about his "Impressions of Bombay", excerpted from his autobiography Truth, Love and a Little Malice, written in 2002. His piece recounts brief stereotypes, the incongruity of highrises and slums, beggar women and the monsoon.

Adil Jussawala, poet and essayist, writes "Three Uneasy Pieces", about a fire in the slums of Colaba, his guilt at living in a highrise, and a reminiscence of a Bombay of the ‘50s.

Paromita Vohra covers the Leave and License clause, and her fascinating experience as a middle-class single professional woman living in low-income PMGP housing in Andheri and the people and broken lives she encounters, from the perspective of a participant observer, in The "One Billion Rupee Home". This is one of the first pieces that, for me as a woman, is truly engaging, because she introduces far more characters as a collage, than simply letting the city take centrestage.

The "Cult of the Golden Bull" by Nina Martyris offers the perspective of a mercenary Bombay, the city of stocks and scams and cellulois dreams, from the 1800s onwards.

Vilas Sarang offers a piece from Fair Tree of the Void, entitled "Bajrang, the Great Indian Bustard". What starts off as a typical lover’s tryst on Juhu beach becomes a surreal nightmare involving a corpse and bustard – one that makes you laugh and then go “Huh?” and then "Oh." *Shakes head*. Something else only.

"Urban Fabric" by Naresh Fernandes documents the rocky evolution of Parel, the textile mill district, into a service sector, sprouting malls and offices, from the prosperity, to the Dutta Samant strike of 1982, to the Marathi poet-activists that give a voice to the workers’ aspirations.

The "Great Water Wars", excerpted from Ravan and Eddie (1995) by Kiran Nagarkar is not about Holi battles, but about the very real water mafia in Bombay’s chawls. The sadistic control of demand and supply, playing with human desperation in a manner that leads to shocking consequences.

Jeremy Seabrook writes about slum demolition and the counteractive measures taken by slumdwellers in Colaba, in "Clearing the Slums"giving a rarely seen human face to a bunch of statistics to clutter up newspapers and make citizens and the parties they support feel good.

Dilip Chitre describes "The View from Chinchpokli" and evocatively hitting us with his middle class malaise, from his work, Travelling in a Cage (1980). Reminds me of Common People.

Nikhil Rao, in "Hoops, Hunger, and the City" talks about the rise of basketball as a constructive means to keep kids off the streets and get jobs, in areas like Colaba, Matunga and mainly, Nagpada. Much more interesting than I expected, given that I’m NOT a sports fanatic.

Salman Rushdie launches a cannonball of feisty words and idiosyncratic educated Indian English that he is known and loved for in "Dekho Dekho, Art Deco", extracted from The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Not his best work, I thought, just from reading this excerpt (but maybe because the story is more about Bombay and less about the actual plot. I shall definitely give it a shot though). He talks of a child’s feelings of neglect when he discovers that his parents’ first love is the city they’re helping grow.

"Bhelpuri" my faourite! by Rahul Srivastava, succinctly describes my feelings when he tells me that chilis are NOT native to India. "A pang of pain and a look of disbelief inevitably greet such an assertion. 'Chiliies are not Indian?' they say with utter disbelief even if they have heard this before. 'But then what did we eat before the Portuguese brought them here from Mexico in the sixteenth century?' The inability to imagine any food from the subcontinent without this spice can cause much anxiety to its inhabitants and even lead to deep anguish about their cultural identity". It chronicles its evolution and, as a bonus, ALSO ends with a dollop of common sense with regard to the imperialist project of recording history.

"A Brace of Bombay Ducks" from Farrukh Dhondy's Bombay Duck (1990)- wow this is a subject of enough debate as to merit an entire book!) corrects my vegetarian impression as to the fallacy, and moreover, takes us over an atymological journey as to the origin of the aforementioned fallacious term.

Sunil Gavaskar, apna Little Master, talks about his cricket playing childhood "In the Gully" very lovingly. From his biography Sunny Days, 1976.

Then we step onto Ornithological territory through Salim Ali's idyllic childhood on Khetwadi and the erstwhile holiday resort of Chembur - now a bustling suburb spilling over with humanity, in the early 1900s in "Special Providence" excerpted from The Fall of a Sparrow (1985).

Jerry Pinto takes centrestage in "The Day it Rained Gold Bricks and a Horse Ran Headless", the fantastical title of which actually hides the solemnity of an earthshattering day in April 1944 when the SS Fort Stikine exploded on the docks, leading people to think Japan had attacked.

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas also describes a bit of Bombay's experience with war in "War comes to Bombay", from Bombay, my Bombay: the Love STory of the City (1987), through his encounters with American soldiers.

Now we are introduced to a foreigner's perspective as Aldous Huxley steps in, ecounting his experience upon "Arriving in Bombay" (from Jesting Pilate: India and Burma, 1948) shuddering at the liberally 'eclectic' architecture and noticing in surprise the 'live and let live' manner of the natives.

Then, we are pleasantly surprised by a comic on the "Story of the Freedom Struggle", from every Indian child's comic mainstay, the Amar Chitra Katha Series.

We then jump forward to a slightly more feminine angle, with Gillian Tindall's "First Ladies and Inferior Women", from her novel City of Gold (1992), which talks about the sexual intermingling of the races, particularly white men and Indian women, and the phenomenon that eventually led poor English women out into the colonies to seek white husband and live like sahibs.

V.S. Naipaul, with his exasperated satire, writes about the incorrigible corruption that is Indian bureaucracy, as he attempts to recover some liquor that had been confiscated at Customs, in a sarcastically titled "A Little Paperwork" from his novel (surprise!) An Area of Darkness (1964).

Busybee (Behram Contractor), editor and journalist, reminisces about the cinemas of old (about 50 years ago) and the superb service and grand ambience that used to be available then in “Temples of Desire”.

Sitara: Dancing Tigress from Nepal is about the film star Sitara and her many violent bestial affairs, from the eyes of a film journalist, in Saadat Hasan Manto’s book Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World of the 1940s’. I want to watch her movies now!

Paul Theroux concludes, rather wonderingly, although pessimistically, that there are too many Indians for India to prosper, in “The Rajdhani Express to Bombay”, from the Great Eastern Railway Bazaar.

Arundhathi Subramaniam gives her tribute to the “5:46, Andheri Local”, from her anthology On Cleaning Bookshelves.

Andre Malraux writes a rather confusing essay on his experience with the Gita and Elephanta.

Next is a pictorial essay “On the Waterfront" by Chirodeep Chaudhuri.

Duke Ellington next talks about his impressions of Bombay and his is arguably first recorded confusion about the way in which Indian people nod/shake their heads, in “Talking Heads”, taken from Music is my Mistress (1973)!

Then we have Rudyard Kipling again who writes “To the City of Bombay”, mostly about her port and the loyalty of her natives.

This next one really interested me. “Scenes from a Life” is by Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla, whose mother, she claims, was the first English-educated Parsi woman. She writes about moving from the Parsi bastion of Fort to the English-inhabited Malabar Hill, as early as the late 1800s, of sending sweets and dancing at English balls with her daughter, Mrs. Cama. Her style of English, while evidently that of a strictly brought up woman, is more lucid than the English of the natives, from which we can trace the gradual evolution of the language we speak today.

“Son, Eat Your Fill” by Daya Pawar addresses the life of the Mahar community in the slums of South Bombay, in Kaavakhana.

“Muharram in the Mohalla” is a vivid essay on the history of the Muslims in Bombay, particularly the Shias, and their annual procession and plays to commemorate the battle of Karbala and the fact that we actually celebrate it in a more extreme style than is needed to. Talk about the convert being more straitlaced than the original. That’s the way it always is, unfortunately.

Funny, the stories get more interesting towards the end! “The Rage of the Marathi Manus” by Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar (from their book A Hundred Years, A Hundred Voices, 2003) is about the evolution of the Shiv Sena through the eyes of various individuals involved in its conception – how it started out as a social service to provide employment before becoming a powerful and militant pressure group.

“Fire” is some abstruse poem about the city, originally in Marathi, by Arun Kolatkar.

Next is an excerpt from Doongaji House, a 5-act play by Cyrus Mistry about a dwindling Parsi community in a deteriorating building.

OK, I feel as though I shouldn’t have summarized each story, but I’m not going to delete anything since I spent 2 hours on it. So I will briefly tell you that the last few stories are excellent ones about encounter cops, the Jewish community of the Bene Israel, the Bendibazaar Gharana for music lovers, Mumbai’s jazz history, Suketus Mehta’s impressions of Mumbai from the perspective of the riots. While the stories are about history, and seem a tad dated as the anthology was published in 2003, they are still, a story of Mumbai and its many characters, and they swirl about like a dreamscape in a crystal ball, so you are truly transported.

It ends with the song "Bombay Meri Hai". A fitting end to a lovely book that extols Mumbai in all its gutsy gory glory.

Read!!!!