Wednesday, July 20

It is raining. It rains here in fits and spurts superimposed on a general background of rain. Broken cobbles punch through tattered streams of water on the streets.

The streets are cobbled here. It’s one of the things I like so much about Bombay. Not just the picturesque bits of Bombay, though. Everywhere, up to about the middle. Many of the rooftops that you can see from flyovers are tiled, like in a village in France. The streets meet at circles, where pie-slice buildings rise up past the over-arching flyover, some with rich people in duplex apartments, and others accommodating the poorest of the poor amidst their cramped spaces and common toilets.

It will always be Bombay for me, though. Bombay brings to mind a city where the air is thick with dreams- a city where poor students rub shoulders with criminals on the trains; where irritable Parsee grandfathers look out alone from their balconies, waiting for their antique circular-dial phones to ring. In Bombay there is a place for everyone-every budget, every profession, and every idea.
Mumbai is, well, bomb blasts and extremist Hinduism.

There’s a temple here, and across the road from it a middle aged woman sits on the pavement, with a cow, and some bundles of grass. People who come to the temple pay to buy a bundle of grass to feed her cow. She has a large umbrella, a plastic stool to sit on, and cheap shoes. As I watch, she takes out some plastic gloves from her bag, the kind we use at the hospital to place IV lines, and puts it on. She gathers up the cow dung on the pavement, strips the gloves off of her hand around the dung with the ease of long practice, and tosses it into a large garbage bag marked with a biohazard symbol, off to one side.
That’s Bombay, man.
It’s something.
Bombay, you bitch, why do you make me love you so?

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is it with Bombay and making strangers fall in love with it. its a cramped place, over populated with people who have unattainable dreams. it has the disparity of a BMW driving in the shade of a chawl. it has strange people who resiliently walk back to work after facing regular adversity. and yet every person who i meet who's lived in bombay loves that crazy inexplicable place. Why? is it because everyperson will find one of his own in that peculiar place... i wonder.

Aquilus~ said...

Thats it. Its got character and charm, and an inexplicable way about it that pulls you in.

Aquilus~ said...

It's the perfect city for the lonely hearted.

ibedebi.blogspot.com said...

It's a city for dreamers, a city for people whom history turns misty-eyed. I love Bombay too, in spite of its broken roads and squalor.
Delhi, in spite of its classy modern appearance, will never have the dignity that Bombay has.

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Anonymous said...

another thing common with all those who love bombay is the inevitable comparison with Delhi. why again?

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