I
N MAHIM YOU SEE THE SAME THINGS over and over again. That’s my father’s old neighborhood. His father brought the family there in 1950 from the villages. They ate lots of fish in the villages and lived a peaceful life. They even had a dog. But they were poor and my grandmother kept having babies.
So my grandfather left solo to Bombay to find work. He found it all right. He worked three jobs in the city down by the seaport and some nights slept out on the docks. After two years he’d saved up enough to rent a flat in Mahim on Shitladevi Temple Road and sent for my grandmother and their children.
Life was new again. But hard. My grandfather was hardly around and his children were scared of him.
Life was new again. But hard. My grandfather was hardly around and his children were scared of him.
Soon, my grandfather’s mother came to live with them too. She was a tiny, fierce lady of many talents. She taught my father how to sew, how to sketch portraits on scrap.
My grandfather had lived in Bombay before – once, in the 1930s, as a student at Wilson College. A year after he enrolled he dropped out and returned to the village to support his mother. She was alone. My grandfather’s father was not well, mentally, and had been locked up in an insane asylum. He died there.
Back in the village my grandfather taught mathematics and grammar to high school boys in a one-room schoolhouse. A few of those boys made it to college. When he returned to the city alone in the winter of 1948 some of them found him places to stay and food to eat.
I’ve been going to Mahim for a long time now. As I’ve said you see the same old things. Even the walls in the little flat my father grew up in are the same color and they’ve yet to change the piping.
The metal desk in the veranda where I first wrote some of this down is where my grandfather played solitaire, my father studied as a medical student, where I drew as a kid, where my uncle does his accounts. The gatekeeper in the building is an old man now but he’s been around since I was a kid. He still has a head of thick black hair but walks with a limp now and won’t speak unless you ask for matches. There’s a buck toothed hunched back woman named Kaashi who hasn’t frowned a day in her life. She cleans houses in the morning and makes cigarette runs at night. There’s an old woman with very thick bifocals who comes to give us flowers every morning because my grandmother took her in for a few months when she made the move to Bombay from the villages back in the fifties.
There are people, aging people, who’ll very soon be dead and gone and who no one will remember because the people who know them best will be gone too but there are, of course, discrete, unavoidable traces of that place that will never change.
The birds who shit on the window grates. Victoria High School. The yellow\black curbs. The morning crows. The large trees the kids climb to tie the yogurt pot and knock it down for Dhahiandi festival come August. The cigarette shack where I buy loosies, the electric lighter on the wall by the magazine stand, the stray half blind heaving dogs. Shitladevi Temple Road. It’s the cement. These big square slabs of hard, smooth pavement. They must have been laid down a hundred years ago.
Now the train bombings of July 2006 happened at our train stop a mile from our home. That’s the train stop my father used to go to medical school every day. The stop I go to when I visit my uncle in Powai, or my aunt in Dhaisur.
One morning, walking there, I saw a cab run over a baby. The baby’s mother was screaming Stop Stop! She was literally tearing her hair out while her child was stuck under the back tire flailing her little arms this way and that. There were hundreds of people on the street and I was standing on the median between lanes. I grabbed my balls as hard as I could.
The cabbie heard the mother and moved the car forward while two women charged him slapping him in the face numerous times. The woman scooped her baby up and ran with her to the nearest patch of sidewalk where there was a row of green tarp spread under a fruit cart. She laid the baby down crying over it. By that time I’d crossed the street.
That happened the summer after the train bombings. There was still rubble everywhere, the beggars sleeping on the footpaths in the dead smelly heat, the dust in your throat. Only destruction can alter both our notion of time and space in one shot. Our world, our neighborhoods were not made for us. We’re holding place for the next kiddy tall enough to hop on the ride. That’s all. Destruction, it seemed, was that awful equalizer.
