I grew up in Delhi, very much a child of our capital, at ease with all its faults and all its irresistable charm. In the summer I would visit my grandparents, in Almora, in the hills of the Kumaon. And sometimes I would travel to Bangalore, two days in a train, and be plunged into a world and culture that I loved and hated. One moment the city would feel like home in a way even Delhi never did, the next it would be a strange land full of foreign tongues and the heavy, overwhelming scent of religion hanging in the air.
Mostly though, the years passed and I lived and studied in Delhi, and formed images of the world I had not seen from stories and movies. From the words of friends, from urban legends, from pictures on Orkut, from gossip and daydreams. Cities mostly – thats what caught my imagination – as they do for anyone who has grown up in one. There was New York, made so familiar by countless movies, episodes of Friends, and later by 9/11. There was beautiful, soaring Sydney – beloved by new wave Bollywood directors, a city you fell in love with watching Dil Chahta Hai. There was Paris, a sort of unattainable high watermark of culture and elegance, a sexualized, sensualized, aestheticized town – equal parts art, women, cheese and crepes. And in India there was Bombay.
Somehow I managed to spend 25 years in India without ever walking into Mumbai. And yet Bombay is a city I saw every day. It was in the news, on the front page, on the back pages, the business pages, page 3 and everywhere in between. It was in Sportstar, Stardust, Outlook. It was what everyone saw as the face of urban India, modern India, young India. There was only ever one candidate for India’s first city. Bombay’s insouciance, its reputation for carefree enterprise, money, hedonism and variety gave it a cosmopolitan, global, confident air that even Delhi lacked.
Then there was cricket. Cricket in the nineties belonged to Mumbai – everyone knew that. We all watched but if any city had a claim on the heart and soul of the game it was Bombay. And if you, like I did, devoured books on the history of Indian cricket with their stories of Hazare and Shivaji park – well then you knew the game had always belonged to one city.
Every hindi movie I saw would throw together a few actors and songs in order to clothe a set of vignettes about Bombay and it was no good wondering why Delhi virtually never featured – quite simply movies meant only one place and it was silly to pretend otherwise. So Mumbai, for all of us in school and IIT who had never been there, was this glorious, glamourous world of beautiful women, of melodrama, of colour.
And those books. It didnt matter who – Rushdie, Seth, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Keating, Naipaul – if they wrote about India, they wrote about Mumbai. They would write with affection and nostalgia and suppressed irritation (well thats the most Naipaul can bring himself to do). Full of inside jokes and no doubt pitch perfect adjectives describing their muse, those books would tantalize, leave you curious and wondering, and gently close a door leaving you on the outside. Try reading Satanic Verses, Sacred Games, even Inspector Ghote without having seen the city they wander through.
I could go on, but you get the point. Its been over three years since I graduated from college in Delhi and my friends have migrated to the parts of the world – ending up in those same cities which captured my imagination as a child. New York for those in this country. And Mumbai for those at home. Somehow though I never managed to go there myself – save a few hours spent earlier this year – only enough time to fall in love with a cafe by the sea.
Its an aching sadness therefore, to see images of places I have never seen and yet always seen, burn. Over the last few years the Shiv Sena, Congress, and Raj Thackeray have done their bit to chip away at the cities soul. An exercise in blasphemy, rendered bearable by its futility. This time perhaps, things will never quite be the same. To watch the Taj burning is like losing the last strands of a dream in the morning.
