Bombay by nature

I generally don’t give a damn about others.

I don’t sit & criticize or bother ki how they look, what they are wearing, how they walk, what they talk, how do they commute to work. I don’t care if they use the public transport, like half of apna desh’s aam admi, or their own private SUV to get to work. In short, I don’t interfere in other people’s lives or judge them by the size or swell of their purse.

And I don’t want others to care a damn about me.

Bombay gives you that space. It lets you BE.

I read once that Aamir Khan’s ex-wife Reena travels to work by the local train daily in the heavy Bombay traffic. The thing with Bombay is, it doesn’t care where you’ve come from or where you’re going. It’s only about what you mean to the person at that point in time & place. If you are polite & friendly, your bus mate or train mate is your friend for the day. Kal koi aur bhala aadmi milega.

Bombay is also about not hiding things. I mean, people don’t take great efforts to push everything under the carpet. Every family has a skeleton in the cupboard. Yes, I’ve problems at work, yes, I’ve issues at home, yes I fought with my husband, yes my son flunked his test. So what? No pretensions. None of those “we are from a good family” drama, typical of Indian society. Everybody has a history. After all, like they say in Kannada, “yellar maney doseynu thoothey”. Translated in hindi, ‘sabke ghar ke dosay mein ched hai’. Everybody has a story he wouldn’t want others to know for fear of losing face. Also, most of them have struggled in life to reach where they have reached today. Some of them are still struggling. Some strive day in & day out to realize their ambitions in the city of dreams. Some isliye ki do waqt ki roti kamasakey. There is an unspoken, deeply felt empathy.

Bombay is crowded beyond belief. Yet, it’s also the only city that gives you a lot of space. You can just be who you are. Most people are not judgmental. After all, they would’ve seen worse. And if some of them are, you wouldn’t care anyways. “Toh kya … sala who kaun hota hai puchne wala” is how it goes. I love that about Bombay. Let me make my mistakes. Don’t question me. Don’t correct me. You want to live an error-free, carefree (oops) life, go on. Who is stopping you? Just don’t meddle with mine. I’ve only one life to live. Live and let live.

But strangely I wouldn’t want to go back & settle in Bombay now. The city has changed. The childhood memories have been erased. The people of my bachpan are no longer there. If some of them are still there, they may not be the same, maybe they wouldn’t even remember me, who knows. The Hanuman temple, the galli ke friends, the Jain ashram next to my house where the devotees always covered their mouths with a cloth, the tree lined streets, the bakery, the pan ki dukaan wala mama, the Jain hospital with the nurses in knee-length frocks, the nukkad mein khelna, ...it’s all over. People & places change. They take on a new character with time. They mean newer things to a whole set of new people now.

Or maybe, the city hasn’t changed. Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe it’s my mind stuck in the past that’s unable to face the reality of today. The city, where I was born & played, holds a very dear place in my heart. And no matter how much wealth & recognition, the place of your livelihood gives you, you will always cherish the city you grew up in. Bangalore gave me an identity, money, marriage, career, & motherhood.

Udupi/Mangalore gave me great education & a sense of direction & with it a desire to be the best of who I could be.

But Bombay gave me my childhood. It has the images of my early growing up years, in the late 70’s & 80’s, permanently etched on its worn out pages. I am totally, irrationally sentimental about the city.

Sayings

“Whenever you fall, pick up something”.


“By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends”.

“Virginity is only a lack of opportunity”. 

“Experience is the comb that nature gives us when we are bald”. 

“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful & has nobody to thank”.

You must have had a diary that has a quote at the bottom of every page. Or maybe seen these famous lines in email signatures. The quotable quotes, the sayings.

How do people come up with such one-liners that find their way into your heart? Expressing the essence of human life in one poignant line. I consider it a work of genius. Is it a lightning flash of brilliance or do you actually sit down & decide to write stuff like that & then think & think & pen down the lines one by one? It amazes me. To such an extent that back in high school, I used to even read two books called Wisdom and Quotable Quotes. Yaaaa! I even subscribed to Quotes once because a 6 month subscription to it was for like Rs 20/-.

Quotes are a favorite with educators. After all, they become easy choices as topics for essay writing contests. Who needs to break their heads over what topic to give, that will engage the students for 30 minutes when, all you’ve to do is, throw one of these heavy duty lines at them & they will sit there scratching their brains. It’s also the favorite of orators who insert these gems of wisdom in their speech for effect & applause.

I even sat myself down yesterday & said, “Look, you gotta write some intelligent lines. Now”. An hour later, I came up with a bland line like “Work smart & you will succeed in life”. Argh! Not my cup of tea. Actually, I have noticed that most everything is not my cup of tea. In spite of an M.A in English Literature, I couldn’t pen down a few impressive quotes. How pathetic!

This “write a saying” exercise is doing my 33 year old heart no good. What an ass am i! I aint no God. I can’t create beautiful flowers or animals or fish like Him. I can only enjoy them. Well, so it is with my love for sayings. I can only enjoy what the smart ones have written & left behind.

The Romance of a Village

Romance, by definition (& personal experience) is short-lived, fleeting; hence so enticing. The same holds true for my fascination with the rural life. Life in a village is so peaceful, so quiet, so romantic. Yes I know, have heard that a lot. But hey…I don’t want no peace. I would be miserable in a village.

I know many people whose ultimate dream in life is to make loads of moolah in the city & then go back & settle down in a village. I can never ‘settle down’ in a village. It would be my slow poison. Being confined. Not being able to go up & about town. That is my idea of a perfectly sad life. The eerie silence, the peacefulness, the quietness, the solitude, the absence of a hurried existence, the lack of activity, the ‘no hurry- no worry’ life would suffocate me.

The hustle & bustle of a city, its crowds, its movement, the uncertainty, the striving, the struggles – that’s my oxygen. I was born & grew up in Bombay for the first 10 ten years of my life. Bangalore has become my home since the last 10 years. My middle 10 years were spent in a village in Udupi. Today, sometimes, I am hit by sudden bouts of nostalgia. I miss Udupi. Sometimes! But my longing for the place is never for the place per se. What I miss is …

I miss the koli’s (cock) wake-up call in the mornings.

I miss the cow’s ‘ambeyy” reverberating throughout the village.

I miss the ‘halasina seydu” (a quarter of a slice of jackfruit). In Bangalore, you pay Rs 2 for a single seeded piece while back in Udupi I used to devour an entire “seyd” of the juicy giant fruit.

I miss the texture of our courtyard. We used to mix cow dung & water & spread that special mixture all over the front yard to keep it clean & nice.

I miss bangday (mackerel) saaru cooked in an earthen pot & eaten the next day. Aaah! Umm! Ssss!

I miss washing my head with ‘chik’ shampoo. Yup, that was a ‘famous’ brand back then. Modern day competition has wiped the poor thing out. We used to have these big pipes to irrigate the coconut trees. And at the main junctions, the water was let loose into a canal that was then directed into the individual trees using a shovel. We had to move the mud to either stop or let go the water. It was here, at the main junction, that on Sundays, we used to press our head against the gushing water & have a big splash.

I miss the piping hot ‘ganji’. Yeah. Really. A lot. The brown rice, the steaming ganji with kharada hapla (papad) or mango pickle or a nicely fried fish or a bowl of spicy chicken. Aaah! Umm! Ssss!

I miss collecting cashew nuts and earning our summer pocket money from that. One kg of the nuts used to fetch Rs 30. We used to compete with each other to collect the maximum nuts.

I miss the postman’s ghanti (bell). It was the most awaited sound; a close second came the sound of the fish hawker who sold fish on a cycle.

I miss the combo of halasina (jackfruit) kadubu wrapped in banana leaf & steamed & served with chicken gravy. Aaah! Umm! Sss!

I miss pathrade.