Mumbai again!

Mumbai again

I keep writing about Mumbai, a city that is a bundle of contradictions. The city is like an eccentric friend whose presence annoys you secretly, but his affection makes you miss him the moment he walks away.

I recall my first trip here on a wet and rainy day in 1962 when I was 11 years old. A war was simmering with China. Shammi Kapoor’s all-time hit film ‘Professor’ was running to a packed house at Novelty on Grant road where I stayed.

In a short period of few months, I would complete 25 years when I finally landed here with one suitcase, hope, dream, and a bit of faith to make a life here.

As writer Anuvab Pal said in his ode to Mumbai, the city keeps you on the edge. Living here is like permanently being backstage, two minutes from a show that is a sold-out performance.

Mumbai can be madness at one moment and serenity at the next. The city is constantly and daily emerging into layers after layers of unfathomable pains and pleasures, trials, and tribulations. Nothing ever stops here and newer replaces new as you watch the world out of your train, car, or bus window.

VS. Naipaul captured the Mumbai contradiction succinctly when he said that when he exits Mumbai airport, the air that he smells feels like a child's wet diaper thrown on his face. And as he moves around the town, he describes his most romantic moment as sitting in Sea Lounge at the Taj Mahal Hotel watching the ferocity of rains over the harbor.

Mumbai's DNA is not its beauty but efficiency, not its charm but bias for action, not its history but the ability to deliver. This is a city for those who want to survive and succeed.

Mumbai has shaped itself in a disguised harmony that comes out of chaos leading to order, squabbles leading to co-existence. Mumbai accommodates anyone who puts his two bits of work in her coffer. You pay here to live. Nothing is free.

It amazed Satyajit Roy at Mumbai musicians completing the background score of his movie in 12 hours that took him 12 days in Calcutta and yet remain unfinished.

The city is ever vigilant and never sleeps. You pay for a service and they deliver it. Lifts never stop functioning, power never fails, water never stops, have money, will travel is the spirit here.

But on another day, traffic gridlock holds you back, you struggle to access auto or taxi on a rain-soaked morning, dug-up roads bounce you around like a roller-coaster ride. The city can keep you on tenterhooks.

But those of us, who made living here and now would not live outside Mumbai, have carved out a slice of life that compensates for all the eccentricity we face.

Sitting by a bay window at Woodside Inn, Colaba watching traffic swirl by at Regal circle, wading through tons of traffic to reach Matunga for Sharda Bhavan or Rama Nayak meals, climb up to Pali Hill to enjoy bhel puri, watching a play at Prithvi Theatre, and watch the sunset over Carter road promenade.

Personally, Mumbai gives me the anonymity that I seek. It affords us, loners, a convenience to slip out of our house or workplace and become nobody that one might want to be. Bombay never allows people to ask us who we are and why we are here.

In this city, my private world remains intact eternally, my soul untouched by friends, neighbors, and colleagues forever.

No one cares for the pretense of dress, level, face, cast, money, gender.

That's my Mumbai.