Mumbai is too protean to be amenable to an identifiable cititude, and too heterogeneous to be reduced to certitudes. Salman Rushdie often bemoans the demise of cosmopolitan, hybrid, mongrelized Bombay that was integral to his formative years, but which would increasingly give way to partisan parochialism. Suketu Mehta, in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), approached Bombay to depict it as it exists — the book is a tale of rival ganglords and gangs, tinsel glitter of dance bars, impossible and yet humane journeys of local trains, and people who come to and go away from Bombay, and in the interregnum between coming and going, become one of its own.
Maya Nagari: A City in Stories— edited by two resident Mumbaikars, Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, and published by Speaking Tiger — makes no claim to be the omnibus on Bombay or Mumbai. Jerry Pinto humbly admits that a city cannot be caught in words. All the more so for Mumbai because ‘it was not designed at all; it just happened and it keeps on happening.’ The book is capacious in the sense that it has stories from diverse native traditions, different languages — of course, Marathi, but also Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu and English — and captures an impressive chronological span. Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai compete for space with more contemporary tales about Mumbai and its ways, if only there are any.
A recurring theme: closure of textile mills
The book, while making fleeting references to identifiable iconic landmarks of the city, seeks to come to terms with people on the margins, people at various levels of deprivation, operating on the margins of morality, unsure of what tomorrow holds for them. Most of the stories are about lives half-lived or barely lived or dangerously lived in decrepit chawls, in public spaces, in theatres and textile Mills going to close down soon to give birth to new dreams while not accounting for nightmares of those who had been integral to these long-running and iconic institutions.
Jayant Pawar’s story, ‘Oh! The Joy of Devotion!’ is about the phenomenon of the cult of Lord Ganesha in the city and how the elephant-God inspires intense devotion. But it is also about how a textile Mill becomes an arena for contestation and conflict between the mill owner hell-bent upon closing the mill and desperate workers, who refuse to see the writing on the wall. They refuse to immerse the idol of Ganesha installed in the mill premises, forcing the mill management to agree to pay them their arrears and keep the mill running. Only inevitably, with the immersion of the idol over, mill management reneges on its promises. Workers stare at an extremely uncertain future, with no solace in sight.
In fact, the closure of textile mills is a recurring theme through many stories. Anuradha Kumar’s ‘Neera Joshi’s Unfinished Book’ dwells upon the increasing futility of trade unions against the obstinacy of mill workers and how trade unions are themselves losing their moorings. The closure of textile mills is a fait accompli. Neera Joshi’s love with a venerable trade union leader is bound to remain unrequited. Her book will remain unfinished.
Life in chawls, the warren of human habitation
Apart from textile mills, movie theatres are again looking down the barrel. Jayant Kaikini’s story ‘Opera House’ is a poignant tale of how theatres like Amber, Oscar and Minor are shutting down and shopping malls coming up instead. When the Opera House is about to be closed, theatre staff like Indranil are left wondering, ‘Where do we go?’ This existential question has no answers. Maybe they could become part of the milling crowd in the teeming metropolis. Maybe, Indranil would get some solace or work from the fraternity of floundering. Maybe all the flotsam and jetsam having no terra firma beneath their feet would find comfort in each other’s embrace, in each other’s deprivation.
Chawls — only inevitably — figure in a lot of stories. That warren of human habitation with peeling walls, sadness written all over those walls, accumulated and accumulating muckheaps, resilience being not some fancy word but merely another name for desperation to survive. Chawls, in numerous stories, inform us about what Albert Camus says, “how people love, live and die there.” In Urmila Pawar’s ‘Answer!’, the generational gap between the sweeper father Sudam and the educated unemployed son Baban brings simmering tensions out into the open. Sudam is a creature of convention, Baban is not satisfied with life as it is. He makes fun of his father. Unwilling to join his father’s profession and unable to join the sunrise sectors of the economy, he belongs nowhere.
Sudam feels helpless despite the fact that he is the breadwinner. One day, he realises that he had had enough and reads out the riot act to his son and now it is his son’s turn to feel abject and helpless. And here the father wonders if there could be no golden mean between what his son had been and what he had become. In another story titled, ‘A Cultural Movement is Born’ by Pu La Deshpande, a chawl’s brief brush with modernity ends in tatters when on the occasion of a group photography of residents, caste considerations creep in and the session ends with broken chairs, bad blood and ephemeral solidarity in shambles.
The closure of textile mills and theatres and decrepitude of chawls reminds one of what Orhan Pamuk says in relation to old Istanbul: “A city’s ruins help it to forget. First, we lose a memory, but we know we have lost it and we want it back. Then we forget we have forgotten it, and the city can no longer remember its own past. The ruins that cause as much pain and open the road to forgetfulness become in the end, the lots on which others can find new dreams.”
Love, longing and dreams
Even stories involving the middle-class, like ‘The Flat on the Fifth Floor’ (Mohan Rakesh) and ‘Percy’ (Cyrus Mistry), are mostly about unemployment, solitude, failure in love and vulnerability of dreams. Manto’s ‘Babu Gopi Nath’ is dark and redeeming at the same time: Babu Gopinath has been frittering away his ancestral legacy on the women of the streets. When he becomes enamoured of one particular woman, he knows that his fortunes are not going to last forever. So, he employs his dwindling resources to ensure a decent marriage for his love interest. Ismat Chughtai’s ‘Quit India’ is about the unlikely union between an English man who refused to go back to England in 1947 and his maid, Sakhu Bai. Chughtai rationalises it beautifully, “Your country and your race are Sakhubai who gave you refuge and love. Because she too is an outcast in her own country.”
Jerry Pinto’s ‘House Cleaning’ is about how a mother wishes that her son should get a good education and lead a good life even if it means his turning his back upon her: “Sometimes I feel so much love, Saheb, that my heart hurts…I see a boy with a new shirt and I want to give it to my son. I cannot give so maybe I give gaalis instead…” Shanta Gokhale’s ‘Decision,’ the last story of the collection, is about two brothers who defy the pull and pressure to join a slumlord and decide to be with each other. This decision is followed by their crossing the road and entering the chawl. They decide to cling to each other and to two small but beautiful words: home and hope.
It is a collection of remarkable short stories. It is not a book for those in a tearing hurry to declare that Mumbai is going to be the next Shanghai. Moments of consolation, salvation and redemption in the book are few and far between. And yet, this must be a quintessential read on Bombay-Mumbai.
