Once Was Bombay , livre ebook

Pinki Virani

ONCE WAS BOMBAY
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Preface
Crime & Punishment
Mazagon, Bombay-10
C mon Barbie . . .
Salvage, Savage
. . . Let s Go Party
A Modern Morality Tale
The Lala in Winter
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
ONCE WAS BOMBAY
Bombay-born Pinki Virani, 42, a journalist for nineteen years, has risen from correspondent to editor. She has reported extensively on race relations from Britain and the politics of communalism from all over India. Pinki Virani holds a Masters in Journalism.
Pinki Virani s other best-selling books are Aruna s Story and Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India , both firsts of their kind in the country.
For the Journalists of Bombay who fight to preserve the sanity of this city under siege; and without whom it would have long since succumbed.
We must become the change we seek in this world.
Mahatma Gandhi
Tis not the dying for a faith that s so hard-every man of every nation has done that; tis the living up to it which is difficult.
William Thackeray
Preface
W ho killed Bombay?
We did. Each of us who thought ourselves to be an island; and took positions to maintain personal privileges, purses and prejudices.
Who turned a shahar into a shamshaan ghat, our city into a crematorium, the fires of which keep burning as the corpses keep getting heaped on, in a city of gold now filled with ash?
Our politicians did. Every single one who has passed through the sewers of contemporary political history.
Beginning with Mohammad Ali Jinnah whom his doctors had informed that he had but a brief while to live, and yet he insisted on partition; heroism at any cost, uncaring of what would undoubtedly happen to those who preferred not to pack up and leave with him. They are still paying the price, the brave ones who believe this to be their only home; the sins of the fathers-even ostensible ones- always visit the children. This is God s way of ensuring that families learn.
And yet, karmically, we condemn ourselves to repeat history. That partition again in Bombay when Bal Thackeray chose to launch his movement which summarily excluded meritocracy. And then, once again-this time the final apocalyptic partition-when Lal Kishan Advani set out on his yatra of malevolence on a mechanized rath. Have they ever really cared about us, these men in Jinnah mould? Or our children-the traumatized survivors of riots and bomb blasts-whom they now insist must carry on, holding aloft their flaming torches of hate? Will they let our successors live out their dreams in the city of their birth; or must they be forced to leave their mothers and motherland so as to shut out the vituperation of their political successors?
We always liked to believe that Bombay was an island, unaffected by matters elsewhere in the state or the country. What a genuine shock it was to see for ourselves that something happening so far away to an old building should change our lives forever. As Justice B.N. Srikrishna puts it in his commission s report of the riots which followed the structure s demolition, The rath yatra clashes were thunderclaps portending the storm. Now we have moderation as the BJP s mask-of-the-day and its family doing the rest, that jumble of alphabets in capital letters which indulges in low-intensity, localised communal sniping, carried out in relative quiet, while the state government looks away discreetly. Analyse Abheek Barman points out: As long as the head count is below some horrendous threshold, sniper fire does not penetrate upper-class consciousness, brutalized by caste violence, political killings and the daily din of religious fanaticism.
But what about us, the middle class?
The workers, the taxpayers, the salaried, the ones forever condemned to remain anonymous and yet suffer the most because every government has claimed to be for the poor and been by the rich? Us, who have converted the mechanics of a civilized life in Bombay into its centrality? We, who have brought to this city with our behaviour the inherent decency of a Madras and the day-to-day intellectualism of a Calcutta? Yes, we came into our own after liberalization when we became a cynical campaign cool of a marketing strategy for filling glossy publications with advertisements-the great gullible middle class, buyers of anything sub-standard and over-priced but with a foreign label. We did not bite, we are habitually circumspect; we were promptly forgotten. The middle class rules in the West, but middle class India has always been ignored by even the supposedly socialistic politicians. Thus our own history never champions our cause; and because we do not champion our own-instead we make deals to survive- history never feels sorry for our exclusion.
We are led to believe that events outside our homes should never touch us. Go to office, open your shop, keep working, they exhort, don t chink about it, just manage, adjust, we will take care of everything. And we go, lambs to an everyday slaughterhouse, proud to be Bombay s backbone even if we never receive anything concrete in return for it. And now see how foolish we are, how trusting, because as we look at past newspapers and police records- the two tellers of Bombay s greatest truths-we find that we have been had. To use apun ka Bombay ka language, Solid chutya banaaya.
When the British had to be sent back home we were out on the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder; during the Indo-China war we took off our bangles for our jawans; Aye mere watan ke logon, jo shaheed huye hain unki zara yaad karo kurbani. Dying every day cannot constitute a shaheed, and thus there can be no aankh mein paani for us the middle class. And we must also remain dry-eyed; what else can we be.
We can only avert our eyes and try and hold our breaths as we journey through the corridors of our city every morning, every night in return direction, aching but without fail. Trying not to look into those miles upon mile of slums, on the one hand; ugly but expensive buildings on the other. They say the slums first came up because of floods and droughts elsewhere in the country, records suggest that latter-day migration has been from Maharashtra s small towns and villages because there is not enough to keep them there. But isn t our state supposed to be the most progressive and where is all that money going when Bombay is paying through its nose to support several states as the country s commercial capital? They say the buildings are expensive because they came up hurriedly to house this flood of rich people who came from Karachi and Sind during partition; the structures are ugly for the same reason, no time to design them. Therefore the only architecturally interesting buildings of Bombay are the ones put up by the British and the art deco ones on Marine Drive and Shivaji Park which came up a little later.
So, here we are caught between what is always called the filthy rich but never the stinking poor. Well, we must just return to our one-bedroom flats to convert some space into a toilet-cum-bathroom so that the bathroom can become the kitchen and so that the kitchen can become the second bedroom and the child s study table can go to the living-room balcony and the balcony can be enclosed to make place for it; the grills can go up on the balcony and right around the house because bullets ricochet these days; and on these grills can be stored all that for which there is no place any more in the tiny house, the tricycle, the big cooking pot, that trussed-up bundle of clothes to be ironed, whenever there is time, on the pressing-table folded up behind the bedroom door.
The politicians said Bombay must be with Maharashtra and when their clamour peaked in the late fifties we looked away as they beat up the Gujaratis who wanted the city for their state; not that being in Gujarat would have been any different as is now being proved. They said everyone must speak Marathi and we set up expensive tuitions for our children; now their children go to English schools and their families produce Hindi pictures. For a brief moment there, a very small while, we wondered aloud if Bombay could simply be a city-state, that would have been splendid, but we were shouted down, by the industrialists who saw this as a curtailment of their business interests, by the politicians who looked at it that way too. No chance of it happening still, even though the industrialists might well agree today, and Bombay certainly generates enough money to take care of itself; it would be wonderful though, a sustainable solution to most of Bombay s current problems.
Bombay as a city-state: just think about it; most of the politicians leaving the city and taking their nurtured voters with them, the unclogging of state government as we now see it, a chief and his management-experts-chosen by us, paid by us, answerable to us-from the best of our bureaucrats, to run our city s corporation. Bombay the city-state: a model for the rest of the country and internationally.
Ah, this couching na vete. If wishes were horses would not the middle class be cantering by now?
In the meanwhile we must keep swiveling our chins. As when we looked away when they beat up the South Indians and burnt their shops because they spoke better English and were good at accounts. We averted our eyes when the goons went to where the Sikhs live in the city and demanded protection money while other goons beat up their brethren in Delhi after her guards shot Indira Gandhi. After that we never sat in a sardarji s taxi even if the man s cab was the only one available; earlier our fathers would make sure that we flagged down only such taxis to take us back home after the night-show pictures. How must they have felt, those sardarjis when we just went away from them; and those sardarni widows who waited, and waited, for justice and fought for it for so many years to indict that black-spectacle wearing politici