Mumbai meri jaan.......my heart still beats for you

A recent blog posted on our family group triggered these musings, this nostalgia for a city……… Mumbai, where I grew up.

Typical of the city - it was Bombay then - our building of twenty-four apartments had people from different parts of the country. There were the rich Gujaratis and Sindhis, the tough Punjabis, families from Karnataka, UP, several of us ‘Madrasis’ and for long years one Maharashtrian family. Milk, vegetables, groceries were delivered at our doorstep and we shouted out from the kitchen window to call the ‘Istriwala’ from the adjacent compound to come and get our clothes to iron. For many years we had an elderly man as watchman whom we called ‘gurkha’ although he was from UP.

School was a ten-minute walk, halfway to which we had to cross the main road – a rather happening place in today’s parlance. I remember there being a lot of traffic but a steady organised flow. Monsoon months always meant at least a couple of bonanza school holidays because the main road would get flooded. With great excitement a bunch of us kids from the building, with our mothers in tow, would go to ‘see’ the floods.  It was the same main road where we went every year to see elaborate Ganpathi processions singing, dancing, praying their way to Chowpathy for ‘visarjan’ (immersion) at the end of the ten-day celebrations. On rare occasions dignitaries passed this way.

My college years began with my attending a college nearby that was within walking distance from home. After two years five of us friends decided we wanted to go to a more ‘trendy’ college in the city. We told our parents we wanted to major in Psychology offered only in a couple of colleges in the city. After some initial resistance our folks relented and we got admissions into college at Churchgate. We were ecstatic, and it had nothing to do with studying Psychology!

The big change in our young lives was that we now had to take the famed ‘Mumbai local’ (train) to get to college.  Our student passes cost twelve rupees for three months. Most mornings we’d take the harbour line 7.37 local or the next one at 7.41! Such precise timings and the trains were never late. The surging crowd pushed us into the train, tightly packed in the ladies’ compartment.

We merged into the bonhomie, laughter, deep conversations as all of us hung on and the train speeded ..…….Wadala, Sewri, Cotton Green, Reay Road, Dockyard Road, Sandhurst Road, Masjid Bunder stations ………reaching VT station (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or CST now) in just over twenty minutes. At CST we jostled our way out pushing and shoving past millions of commuters while also dodging water dripping from overflowing fish baskets that robust Koli women (fisher women) carried on their heads as they hurried past us towards the trains. Mumbai local has taught me never to be forgotten lessons on how to elbow my way through life.

Across from the heritage CST building there is the iconic municipal corporation building and that majestic ‘old lady of Bori Bunder’ the Times of India building. But then we were giggly teenagers engrossed in our non-stop chatter and hardly glanced at these magnificent structures. From CST we turned into the side road that led to another landmark building, the GPO. Here we joined the long winding Que to get the BEST bus – a Mumbai classic - to Churchgate.

These years were filled with friends and activities, a mix of purposeful, judicious and frivolous. Evenings were often dance or music classes, Marathi tuitions. Eagerly awaited weekend visits to the library, which was just a great collection of books stacked tight on overflowing shelves built just off entrance to a grocery cum stationary shop almost on the pavement. Gorging on paav bhaaji, going to the beach for bhel puri rather than sun and sand, hanging out at arty Samovar café (sadly shut down now), bun maska at the corner Irani hotel, window shopping on Colaba causeway but picking up the more affordable export rejects from Fashion Street.

Movies at Eros or Regal or Plaza cinemas, pious Tuesday mornings at Siddhivinayak Vinayak temple, classical concerts at the coveted Shanmukhananda sabha, downing dhoklas and khandvis at a Gujarati friend’s or dhansak served vegetarian at a Parsi friend’s, watching "Matka' breaking gopalas nervously, Navratri dandya at street corners   …….. the city never held back its generous offers! 

My post graduate studies at the Tata Institute (TISS) offered me a view of Mumbai I might have not seen otherwise.  Mandatory field work twice every week took me into municipal hospitals, homes for abandoned children, blood donation camps, psychiatric wards and the like. My first job as a community developer was at the BDD chawls in central Mumbai. I visited Dharavi long before it became a tourist destination and its gully boys became hip hop rappers. During a survey that I was part of, I became conscious of the stark difference between the lives of people I was surveying in the slums of Worli Naka and that of their seriously rich ‘neighbours’ living in mansions just a stone’s throw away on Worli sea face. While I was busy gaining these weighty insights, my parents waited anxiously for me to return home safe from my community sojourns.

Then I met a dashing handsome Naval Officer! On our first date he took me to the United Services Club spectacularly located on the rocky shores of the Arabian sea within the Naval base in Colaba. His good looks, that gorgeous setting …….. how can a girl resist? We were married in a few months and for the first time I left to live outside Mumbai.  Later we returned to Mumbai on Naval postings and our children were both born there. The house we lived the longest in during this period of my life was  within the Navy area next to the imposing Afghan Church. Here I had the luxury, unheard of in Mumbai, of just crossing the street to work at the Spastics Society of India. We finally left Mumbai in 1991.

It’s been almost three decades. But every time I have gone back to visit, I am filled with a warm feeling as I look down at the city from the air before landing. My ears perk up in pleasure snatching snippets of conversations in Marathi.  I rejoice at the sight of the Kaali Peeli taxi amidst the Ubers and Olas. I am delighted I can still slip back into Bombaiya, the Hindi dialect of Mumbai. In these intervening years the city has been through many assaults. Communal riots, bombs, terror attacks, floods. Each time I am filled with anguished disbelief……

For over two months now Mumbai has been caught in the grip of the virus. And today a cyclone threat looms, something that hasn't happened in over a hundred years.  Why you, my Mumbai?

Please don't lose hope, you will recover, you will heal..........Mumbai meri jaan......my heart still beats for you.