The never-never city

I have always tried my best to avoid visiting two of our metros -- Calcutta and Mumbai. Earlier I dreaded these visits because I would set o...

I have always tried my best to avoid visiting two of our metros 8212; Calcutta and Mumbai. Earlier I dreaded these visits because I would set out from the green and spacious New Delhi. The drive from the airport into the city of Mumbai was a clear stretch of stink and squalour. True, I would stay in a luxury flat or a five-star hotel, but I had to go out on work. And there was nothing but filth and funk all around.

Being a committed morning walker, I would quit my air-conditioned bedroom to get a breath of fresh air and some exercise. To achieve that, I had to step over people sleeping on the footpaths and pass through squatter colonies which tainted the morning air with the compounded odour of fresh and stale excrement.

During the day, there was only driving, driving and more driving. Everybody seemed to be driving. That was the only systematic activity in Mumbai. The rest of the metros could learn a think or two from the drivers of this city. Naturally, I loved to miss an opportunity to visitMumbai.

Then I quit Delhi and moved to Hyderabad. This city, like all others, is growing and its traffic is assuming menacing proportions. Nevertheless, distances are short and there are no pavements on which the homeless could sleep. The destitute live in slums, but they are not as ubiquitous as in Mumbai.

Recently, I visited Mumbai after a gap of some years for a social cause. I was put up in a five-star hotel. Social causes are best advocated from such antiseptic places. Forty per cent of the inhabitants of the city live in slums, the morning paper of the day informed me. It is a half-truth. The fact is that 40 per cent live in slums 8212; and the rest believe they don8217;t.

I found that my wife had forgotten to pack one of the medicines I had to take at night. The hotel staff were reassuring: apparently, there was drugstore nearby.

The shop was closed. Oddly enough, a liquor shop was open. I passed it and came across a row of huts 8212; what is locally called a jhopadpatti 8212; on the side of the road. Notone of these tenements could be bigger than about 40 square feet in area. Some women were cooking dinner for the family on the edge of the road. Some gruel on makeshift hearths, which had to be tucked away before dawn. A thela-puller had gone to sleep on his vehicle out of sheer fatigue. And, I am sure, without a square meal. Two young persons were sleeping outside their houses8217;. Hungry and shrivelled children were sleeping in their half-starved innocence. They all looked like corpses. A woman was trying to feed her stoned husband. Another was rubbing oil into her husband8217;s scrubby head.

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I stood rooted there. I had never seen urban poverty up close, except in films. I looked at the hovels and then my gaze panned up to my temporary abode 8212; the magnificent hotel. I could not bear to linger in that terrible place any longer. Yet I could not walk back into my hotel where I was going to have a dinner which would cost the equivalent of a month8217;s salary of our maid back home.

I did not eat that evening. Iresolved never again to stay in a five-star hotel. Also, I would never visit Mumbai again. Sometimes closing one8217;s eyes allows one to believe that things which stare one in the face don8217;t really exist. The illusion is better than the reality.

That night I had nightmares. I awoke to find an acute hunger gnawing at my vitals. Then, I ordered a breakfast in my room. I was back to normal again.My resolve had been made the previous evening. Today was another day.