The streets have a story: Meet the man who has made Mumbai’s landscape his business

Jam has an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Mumbai’s terrain, treading each galli, deadend, main road and highway with a comfortable familiarity since 1992, when he was a budding architect in Pakmodia. With no formal training in cartography, he was asked by the police to make a crime scene map of a murder at a petrol pump in Worli. That was several years after he got a degree in architecture from one of the most prominent art schools in the country, Sir JJ School of Art. He set up a modest practice, but ended up devoting more time to advising tenants in Bhendi Bazaar to repair their crumbling homes. “There was a communist professor in college who would remind us not to make more money than we needed to survive,” says Jam. Making maps for the Mumbai Police certainly never paid much.

His maps of the crime scenes were probably impressive enough for the Mumbai police to give him more assignments. He was soon requested to map the jurisdiction of Pydhonie police station, which stretches from Masjid Bunder to Kalbadevi. Similar gigs followed, but they were all restricted to the familiarity of south and central Mumbai. In 1993, the senior inspector of Pydhonie police station was transferred to Kasturba police station in Borivali East, which, says Jam, is the end of the hinterland. “I said it’s not possible. Who will travel that far?” says Jam, of the request to map Borivali. “He said, ‘I will give you Rs 500 for each trip you make. In those days, it was good money.” Jam went on to map every police station between Bandra and Mulund.

While police maps call for accuracy just like any other records of geography, what sets them apart from the rest is their necessity to include places of worship, pockets affected by particular crimes and arrows to denote the flow of traffic. This makes it all the more remarkable that Jam mapped all of Mumbai before making the inevitable switch to computer software in 2005. Route maps for religious processions required Jam to denote areas of potential communal sensitivity with large red dots. “I walked through each road and recorded features of old structures, observed the placement of utilities and talked to every person I could find,” he says. His best friend during these excursions was the mill special, a constable at each police station who served as the local intelligence officer.

Jam always preferred to explore places on foot. At times, the police would drive him around in official vehicles. “There were lanes in Dharavi that were too narrow for cars to pass. The policemen and I would then continue on foot,” he says. Dharavi and Wadala were also the most challenging to map, each of which he spent a week on. “Those two places are just too big and have so many small lanes,” he says.

Those days, Jam worked out of the first floor of a building in Nagpada, which housed the office of the Additional Commissioner of Police, South Region, on the floor below. “PKB Chakraborty (a former additional commissioner) gave me a cabin with a 15-ft long table to spread the maps on,” he said. His tools were loose foolscap sheets, German-made Rotring pens and pencils. Reproducing congested lanes on maps meant that Jam had only millimetres in which to squeeze in names. “I’d get names of roads printed in small letters, cut the paper into squares and stick them on,” he says.

Some of Jam’s work in the late ’90s, which includes security plans around Vidhan Sabha during the state legislative assembly sessions, contain handmade symbols for watchtowers and armoured vehicles.

Jam would also scribble a small chain to mark lanes plagued by incidents of chain snatching. But he never really had to worry about the intricacies of design until he worked on an evacuation plan for last year’s Mount Mary fair for the Bandra police. “This senior officer was not happy with the clasp of the chain. I had to draw several variations of the chain before he was satisfied,” he recalls. “We have taken all those symbols that Sir made by hand and designed them on Corel Draw,” says Abdul Musabbir, Jam’s young assistant.

These days, the duo works out of a cramped second floor office in Old Bengali Pura Street, across the road from Crawford Market. The walls are filled with building plans and a bay of computers occupies half the space. The balcony overlooking a sea of rooftops till CST railway station makes the workspace appear larger than it is. Jam moved here after the Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad took over his previous office and his family moved out of Pakmodia Street.

The flow of work has remained steady, if not overwhelming. The cases which have employed Jam’s craft read like a highlight reel of some of the city’s worst tragedies in recent years — the route taken by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in November 2008, the scenes of destruction caused by serial blasts in central Mumbai in 2011, the wreckage in Marine Lines caused by an inebriated Nooriya Haveliwala crashing into a police bandobast in 2010, the site in Panvel where 13-year-old Aditya Ranka was stabbed and burnt to death, and assisting the police plan a proper route for the funeral of Syed Burhanuddin, the leader of the Bohri Muslim community, in January 2014 after a deadly stampede at Saifee Mahal in Malabar Hill. “The morning after the stampede, I marked all hospitals along the route the funeral procession was to take, in case of an emergency,” says Jam.

His more recent assignments include making a detailed map of the high-security Naval Officers Residential Area or Navy Nagar and marking every unmanned spot along the city’s western and eastern shores where boats may dock undisturbed. That has not kept him away from police stations, whose jurisdictions he updates annually.

The metropolis, however, has grown over the last one decade, changing with it its landscape and, for Jam, its defining characteristics. “Mumbai has developed so haphazardly that I get lost in the same lanes I walked in years before, especially in Parel and Lalbaug. When I go back to Pakmodia Street, I think, ‘This can’t be Pakmodia Street.’” Jam’s ongoing quest therefore, is reduce some of the confusion, especially around the jurisdictions of neighbouring police stations. In the late ’90s, there was a suicide at a south Mumbai hotel, which then came under the jurisdiction of the Cuffe Parade police station. “But the footpath on which the body fell was under Azad Maidan police station. After that, the police implemented a long-pending proposal to create Marine Drive police station,” he said.

While ordinary citizens are still made to sweat over jurisdiction, Jam says his maps are still far superior to those of Google’s. “They have shown Kumbharwada in Bhendi Bazaar and Kamathipura in Nagpada. Kuch bhi kidhar bhi daal diya hai. Google pe toh shahar styanaash hai (They have put anything anywhere. The city is not right on Google Maps),” he bristles.