I promise, I would not talk about the spirit of this city and how it braves bomb blasts and deluges.
Bombay(Mumbai has its own history,but,we ll get into nomenclature later. Suffice to say,Bombay sounds more inclusive) has, like it does to a lot of people, baffled me. Its an absolutely ordinary city I would like to think. There can be little extra ordinary about a city of trade, that essssentially Bom is.Still, something about its demography totally blows my mind.
Every day on my way to my workplace and back, on the sides of the railway tracks I see these double storey houses(hutments,if You like to call it),each room not more than 10 by 10. Your cubicle in an intercity train is perhaps larger. People have been inhabiting them for years now. I wonder what their concept of space is. Interestingly for a little larger area, people are paying a bomb to live in high rise apartments in the same city with probably a swimming pool and a play court around.
Coming back to the houses on the sides of the rails, these houses have on an average 6 to 7 people living in them.How perfectly is it juxtaposed with the houses in Bandra,where families of four own bunglows with N number of rooms..a room for guests..a room for guests closer..a room for children..a room for childrens’ friends perhaps..room for well..I don’t know who all...
Again talking about the rail houses, If you look at the ethnographic divisions, and the amount of time people have spent in living in these conditions, you would realise, the thin line between a migrant and a local blurs away. People have been migrating to this city for ages now and have agreed to live in these conditions. While some have moved up the social ladder,others continue to live in here, though contented with their destinies perhaps.
I also see these endless stretches of apartments, not in ramshackle though, inhabited perhaps by the middle class and the lower middle class. The apartments look droopy and they seemingly demand repair. The pink has turned to brown from the water dripping from the ACs and the white has turned black because of the rainwater sipping through the walls and also the number of years that the building has stood here. The most ordinary and hard working people live here. Also, those people who have larger worries than people living in those rail houses. Worries not of managing a meal for another day, but worries of the falling prices of stock and the defaulting loan and the payment for childrens’ education, Payment for the car bought a year ago,payment for childrens clothes and books and birthday parties,the electricity bill and the telephone bill.payment for the weekend movie at an ac mall/multiplex, payment for shopping at the same pretty, glittery malls with huge bill boards that hypnotise the inhabitants of these apartments..all these from salaries so meagre that, you don’t know where and how to save for any future post retirement.
For all these reasons and many more, Bombay repulses and attracts me now. Just when I would think,I have figured it out, it throws another color into my eye and blinds me. There is something unusual about its ordinariness. Bombay belongs to the rich and the influential,majorly the political class and the big mill owner,like evry city does and these people make thier ownership visibly clear..be it through the name of the roads or buildings or bill boards or posters on the houses of others.The non-inclusive also live here,with a minor stake in the ownership of Bombay and they are many in number.SO they have crammed themselves in box houses, ghettos and tinned enclosures. They are beguile and the political prey. The right wing and the centre..all jostling for their ethno-regional compliances.
A city that has glaring class differences, that people with rose-tinted glasses like to call Amchi Mumbai...Our Mumbai and One Mumbai and all...is at best a hypocritical city. A city that refuses to look at its own reality that one class rules the minds and lives of the others, without their knowledge, by continuosly selling themselves to the other classes..be it through votes or swanky glass windows and revolving glass doors.
