Opinion Bombay’s Baumgartners

In Mumbai,if you don’t work,you are nothing. Every morning is a project filled with courage,enterprise and often heartbreak. The children selling flowers and pirated books at traffic signals; thelocal trains crowded beyond belief with dabbawallas,fisherwomen,salaried employees,suburban students commuting to downtown colleges,and train hawkers vending baubles to them all: all these are part of a living,working city. Mumbai is a palimpsest that continues to hold out its arms to the waves of migrants who wash up on its shores: the uprooted village families huddled under the flyover that they have built; the teenage runaway curled up in a corner of the chai shop; the young MBA hanging on to the train strap,perspiring in his white shirt and tie,making the journey from Malad to Churchgate hoping to be part of the India story.

The other thing about Mumbai is this: that it is not one but two cities,and it is acutely aware of this split identity. In one Mumbai,half the population of the city lives in slums,with one toilet for every couple of thousand people; in the great churning engine of Dharavi,the population density can reach up to 1 million per square mile. Mumbai’s poverty is in some ways more acute than anywhere else because of the lack of space on this narrow island-city: everywhere in this city of reclaimed land,inside one-room chawls,in the long lines for community toilets,there is a struggle for privacy and for the time and space to think. In the other Mumbai,armies of workers polish the silverware in the homes of those on the richest lists,homes equipped with helipads,ballrooms,private gyms and terrace gardens. Do the two worlds meet? Yes,every day.

Where else but in fiction can so many hopes,so much violence,such contradictions,find expression? In novels,such as Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters,where a professional letter-writer pens letters for illiterate migrants who watch him “like the hungry on a feast to which they had no hope of being invited”. In the South Bombay of Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai,a magic-realist and fantastical “insaan-soup” full of colour and diversity; and in the great shrieking grief of The Moor’s Last Sigh when that fabric of community is ripped apart. In Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie,which follows the intertwined lives of two chawl boys,one Hindu and the other Christian. Even Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games,ostensibly a crime novel,is interesting not because of flamboyant underworld don Ganesh Gaitonde as because of Sartaj Singh,a divorced Sardar policeman with middling prospects who finds himself involved in a matter beyond his depth.

The best Bombay fiction is lit up by the lives of ordinary men and women,their quest for dignity,their daily struggles and failures. There is no better example of this than Saadat Hasan Manto. Though he wrote for the film industry,some of his most humane fiction tells of the lives of people on the fringes in the city,including sex workers and their clients; and some of his finest Bombay fiction was written after he had left the city that he loved for ever. Similarly Anita Desai,in Baumgartner’s Bombay,writes about the city through the eyes of the gentle Jew Hugo Baumgartner. Although he has fled the Nazis and been interned in India,it is in the Bombay of the 1970s that the novel opens,where Baumgartner is feeding stray cats among the vagrants in the alleys of Colaba behind the Taj Hotel,unwittingly preparing for the final tragic chapter in his life.

Finally,it is not even fiction but poetry in which the most fleeting of urban moments can be captured. Arun Kolatkar’s eye for the city’s smallest living things misses nothing,not even the pi-dog “who thinks of himself / as the original / inhabitant of the island”,and not the scrawniest kitten,not even tiniest shrimp in the fish-wife’s basket.

In a Kala Ghoda poem he writes about Annapoorna,“Our Lady of Idlis”,perched on the traffic island,who serves up a feast. When she wraps up,the moment is gone:

The pop-up cafeteria/ disappears like a castle in a children’s book/— along with the king and the queen,/ the courtiers,/ the court jester and the banqueting hall,/ the roast pheasants and the suckling pigs,/ as soon as the witch/ shuts the book on herself —/ and the island returns/ to its flat old boring self.

The writer is a Mumbai-based IAS officer,express@expressindia.com