Blue boat, grey harbour

Did you see the commandoes taking position on the stone embankments that line the Gateway of India?

Did you see the commandoes taking position on the stone embankments that line the Gateway of India? The images on YouTube are very grainy, but you would remember the place we once sat, like many others. Anonymous, with our dreams and a paper cone of groundnuts for company. We sat looking out at the tiny fishermen’s boats, the rich man’s yachts, the for-hire catamarans with their raucous, ingratiating helpers. We looked, too, at the crowds and could tell that the newcomers were the ones suckers enough to fall for a tonga ride that meant standing most of the time in the crowded traffic that surged around the Apollo Bunder.

You would look at the fancy cars and point out the ones you fancied. Your preference changed every passing week. A Civic, then an Accord, a Skoda the week after. The corner where the Gateway wall surged to the left on the road leading to the Radio Club was the one we called ours, for a few hours every Friday when office closed early for the weekends. And while colleagues moved to Leopold or Mondy’s, and those more senior to the Royal Yacht Club, we went to our special seat, on the Gateway Wall. Friday was always a bad day — for everyone, it seemed, had the same idea — but other couples, the urchins and the rag-pickers who lived on what they found in the black, murky waters of the sea running by the Gateway, made place for us. Perhaps they understood, or lived lives as hidden as ours was then.

Once when you looked at the sea, its waters grey, with its spray rising like silver dancing dots on the old wall, you said Oman lay right across. And from there it was a short journey to Dubai or Sharjah. A jump across the sea, you said, and back. For Mumbai was always where you wanted to return. To Malabar Hill, or Cuffe Parade, or somewhere on Nepean Sea Road. An address very different from your dull Dadar one. There would be dinner every weekend at the Taj, you added, and we would run into each other in our more respectable middle-age lives. And these were our Friday dreams. Weekends were more sedate. You spent them with your gang of friends hanging out at Five Gardens, while I enjoyed cloying domesticity with stern though doting parents-in-law and the corporate husband, in not-too-far-away Parel.

There were times when we had to use the bathroom and we blithely walked into the old Taj, looking as snobbish and insouciant as we could in our old jeans and Fabindia tops, not meeting the eye of the doorman, always someone with a ferocious moustache and gentle rheumy eyes. And one day, rich with the bonus that Diwali always brings, we walked in more confidently, looking the doorman in the eye, past the impressive old staircase with its impressions of old Bombay, to the Sea Lounge Cafe. We took the table by the window, the one that made the sea look lovelier than ever, the window that turned its waters a Canaletto grey, you said, and there was even a lovely blue yacht you picked out for yourself. We had coffee — a cappuccino each — that cost the earth, but what the heck it was the experience that mattered. The old, stern waiter who served us, who perhaps took the night train from VT back every day to Borivali or even farther away, maybe Virar, seemed to understand. There was no reason why he should have added those extra cookies. One day, you said, and I agreed, one day… it would all be different.

No other hotel allowed you to live your dreams in quite such a way as the Taj did. We sauntered into other hotels too, trying the restroom in one, the bookshop in another, even entering the restaurants just to get a feel but it really wasn’t the same. The Taj, the Gateway and the sea, they all went together, standing by over all our ‘what ifs’.

And then there were the terrorists who came by the sea, close to the Gateway, and blasted and bulleted their way into the Taj. It was all there on television and then on YouTube. You must have seen it too, though you are now farther away than ever before, chasing your greenback dreams. One day… we had both dreamt. And then dreams don’t perish, just as the Taj never can.

Kumar is the author of ‘Letters from Paul’ and ‘Atisa and the Seven Wonders’

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