ONE

For months, the front pages had warned of imminent doom. Bombay was reeling under an explosion of ‘pollution, crowds and noise’, noted one pessimist. Predicted another, ‘The urban landscape of Mumbai with its ever-increasing vehicular and population growth is a nightmare for everybody. And the nightmare will only worsen every year’.

Such a barrage of despair would have spooked the residents of most cities, but these forecasts were especially unnerving because they were contained in full-page advertisements aimed at getting people to pay outrageous amounts of money to actually live in Bombay. Every day, in The Times of India and DNA, in Mid-Day and the Hindustan Times, the real estate firms constructing Bombay’s present were proclaiming with disarming candour that they had no faith in its future. But even as they expressed exasperation with the problems that were besetting contemporary Bombay, the developers proposed a simple solution: complete retreat.

They were encouraging residents to sequester themselves in housing complexes with names like Vasant Oasis (‘reside at newer heights of happiness’), Rodas Enclave (‘where a refreshing lifestyle flourishes’) and Marathon NexZone (‘next-generation eco-friendly Xtra utility homes’).

Some of the housing complexes offered as sanctuaries bore names suggesting that they’d seceded from Bombay altogether. Kohinoor City in Kurla was in ‘a class of its own’. Sports City in Thane was ‘a mini metropolis that offers its residents world-class sporting facilities’. Rising City in Ghatkopar was ‘the answer to Mumbai’s need for space in a green environment’.

Amidst these expensive propositions for alternative cities, the pitch made for one complex in Wadala caught my eye for the artful manner in which it had appropriated one of the city’s most resonant foundational myths. The headline of one of its advertisements gloated: ‘The eighth island of Mumbai discriminates’. I needed to know more.

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As every schoolchild is taught, a large portion of contemporary Bombay has been conjured up over the centuries by reclaiming the tidal creeks separating the seven apocryphal islands that the Greeks are believed to have known as Heptanesia. This conjoined land was settled by the most diverse collection of people the subcontinent had ever known, who proceeded to create a mishmash culture that perfectly reflected their heterogeneity and verve.

This aspect of Bombay life can best be understood by eavesdropping on the conversations surging through its streets. When Bombayites pick arguments with, make purchases from or proposition strangers with whom they share no common tongue, they do so in an argot that amalgamates the syntax and vocabulary of half a dozen linguistic traditions. It wraps Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English into the embrace of a dialect Salman Rushdie named Hug-me. Bombay’s aptitude for aggregation can also be tasted in the snacks sold on its footpaths: Chinese bhel, Schezwan idlis and cheese dosas are made with ingredients (blended together with a large dollop of enterprise) that share the skillet only in this city. Even though these ensembles seem ungainly to some, Bombay has, over the last two hundred years, held India in thrall. For, in addition to inventing snacks and slang, the proud denizens of the metropolis reclaimed from ocean and iniquity have specialized in producing a commodity that is rather more incandescent. The city of interlocked islands, it’s widely acknowledged, is the place that manufactures India’s dreams.

The idea of India was born in Bombay in 1885, when the Indian National Congress held its first meeting in Gowalia Tank. The notion that workers deserved a fair deal followed in 1890, when the first Indian trade union was formed in the mill district. For a century, the Bombay film industry has been projecting visions of egalitarianism and meritocracy and love marriages into the heartland, suggesting that any adversity can be overcome if you work hard enough (and dance around a tree in the appropriate fashion). To be fair, not all Bombay fabrications have been salutary: since the 1990s, the city’s financial institutions and advertising agencies have seduced India’s middle class into believing that greed is good, that empathy for the less fortunate is unnecessary, that extreme individualism is a virtue.

But that stream of dreams was running dry, or so said the property developer in Wadala. Bombay’s ability to keep generating India’s fantasies would be imperilled unless the city’s geography was completely reconfigured. Luckily, help was at hand. Keeping ‘the meteoric growth of the city in mind’, the firm claimed to have constructed not just an eighth island but one that ‘dwarfs’ the other seven.

The twenty-nine-acre Island City Centre would be an ‘exclusive integrated enclave’ of ‘branded residences’ and serviced apartments, of business centres and shopping malls, that even had the capacity to ‘expand time at will’. Freed from the morass of a traffic-snarled city, residents could ‘pack a weekend into every weekday’. They would get private roads, temperature-controlled lobbies and separate service lifts to ‘ensure that the service staff remains largely invisible’. Could I too ‘discover a better life’, as the copywriter had urged?

When I called to book an appointment, I was peppered with questions: Where did I work? How much did I earn? Where did I live? What was my budget? I declared proudly that I was a freelance journalist from Bandra who intended to spend Rs 3 crore on a flat, an unimaginably large sum of money that, I was certain, would single me out as a supremely desirable client. I was mistaken. The starting rate for flats in the complex, the representative sniffed, was Rs 6 crore. She promised to have someone call me back. No one ever did. As the headline had promised, the eighth island of Bombay did discriminate.

A week later, I rang again, assuming a rather more affluent persona. This time, I described myself as an editor instead of a journalist, and I assured them that I had Rs 7 crore to splash around. This gained me access to a darkened room on the edge of the construction site in which a well-produced video presentation was being screened. For about ten minutes, I was catapulted into a technicolour gated community with golf putting greens, motorized curtains and access-control restricted entry. It was clear that the Island City Centre would be ‘a place where everyone [could] truly be everything that they imagined and more’.

After the presentation, a well-groomed executive in a deep black suit showed me floor plans for apartments in one of the buildings, an eighty-four-storey tower that would be a companion to an eighty-three-storey skyscraper. He handed me a thick brochure that matched the colour of his suit, and memos about payment schedules. On giant TV screens all around us, digital visualizations of Island City Centre ran on a loop. It was easy to imagine getting used to a place ‘where business is discussed over a game of billiards and fine wine’, but the starting price for a three-bedroom flat would take several hundred lifetimes of freelance journalism to cobble together. I downed the muddy Nescafé I’d been served by a liveried waiter, grabbed the black paper bag with the heavy brochure I’d been given and headed for the door. Even before I’d reached the gate, the fabric handles of the bag gave way. I tucked the package under my arm and trudged to the train station along a narrow pavement occupied by shanties.

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Over the past few years, I’ve spent many weekends trying to snatch visions of Bombay’s future by making sweaty expeditions into its past. Though Bombay has always been in a state of change, the detritus of two millennia is just a train ride away. The region abounds with hero stones and dargahs, battlements and temples that preserve tableaux from a vanished city. When my bus trundles by the concrete drinking fountain in Kotwal Park opposite Plaza Cinema in Dadar, for example, I’m reminded of the pond that once occupied that stretch of green. But in addition to bringing into focus a water body that has long disappeared, the park, like many other Bombay relics, makes discernible things we’ve gained.

Every Sunday evening, the lawns around the pyau are steadily occupied by clusters of serious men. As the heat of the afternoon recedes, they flop down in small circles on the sparse grass. By around 5 p.m., dozens of intense, animated discussions can be witnessed everywhere. Each group is composed of men with roots in the same village in the Maharashtrian hinterland. When their families moved to the city a century ago, they lived in crowded chawls within an easy stroll of the park. The lawns were a comfortable location on which to catch up on news about home, arrange marriages and review the operations of the self-help schemes towards which everyone pooled in a little money. Though many of these families have since moved away to distant neighbourhoods, the filled-over pond, right by Dadar railway station, still proves a convenient rendezvous for scattered communities to come together for a few hours each weekend.

Of late, my walks have acquired a sense of urgency. I’m afraid that if I don’t see these sights soon, they’ll be demolished and I’ll only have my collection of pictorial books to know them by. The metropolis I’ve reported on for most of my adult life has entered its most tumultuous period of transformation. Changes in land-use regulations have allowed real estate firms to begin construction on grasslands, farm plots and garbage dumps. In addition to this development, there’s also ‘re-development’—the phrase in vogue to describe the phenomenon of older buildings and industrial estates being replaced by malls and glass towers. As Bombay soars higher, the shared spaces that made the city human—its pavements and playgrounds and beaches— are shrinking.

Bombay walks used to offer the pleasure of journeying through space and time. Now, neighbourhoods that echo with centuries of Bombay stories are being supplanted by buildings so intent on reflecting the latest global narratives, they have little to say about the lives on the streets around them. The preposterous property rates have even squeezed out Bombay’s ghosts. The plots occupied by haunted houses have proved too valuable for them to be abandoned to the spirits.

More alarming are the woefully inadequate housing arrangements for the majority of the city’s residents and the callousness towards the less fortunate that this reflects. Since 1991, the proportion of people living in slums has almost doubled: 48.5 per cent of Bombay’s population of 12.4 million now lives in shanties. The informalization of Bombay’s housing situation is, in part, a consequence of the disintegration of the manufacturing economy. As casual work, contract jobs and self-employment have become the order of the day, few working-class Bombay residents can hope to raise the money to move into usuriously priced—and scarce— legal homes. With the ocean of the disadvantaged swelling around them, increasing numbers of affluent Bombay residents are shutting themselves away in gated complexes like Island City Centre—incongruities in a metropolis whose most iconic structure is the Gateway of India, an announcement in yellow basalt that all settlers, no matter how tired or huddled, are welcome.

When it all gets overwhelming and I need a steady point from which to contemplate the city’s ever-mutating form, I take a stroll to the Seaside Cemetery in Bandra, where my maternal great-grandfather is buried. The cemetery was hurriedly created in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when a bubonic plague epidemic was sweeping through Bombay. The disease would claim nearly 56,000 lives in the four years from 1896 and force hundreds of thousands to flee the city. But my family had nowhere to go. In a city of migrants, they were aboriginals, members of a geographically confused group of Roman Catholics who, even as they lived on the edges of the greatest city on India’s west coast, called themselves East Indians.

The community had been converted to Catholicism in the sixteenth century and its members were initially known as Portuguese Christians, after the European power under which they had found their new faith. But in 1887, when Queen Victoria was celebrating the Golden Jubilee of her coronation, they decided to adopt a different identity. It was an era in which other groups of Roman Catholics, from Goa and Mangalore, were beginning to flock to Bombay. To distinguish themselves from these migrants, my mother’s ancestors issued a proclamation informing the British sovereign of their desire to name themselves after the colonial trading firm, the East India Company. This, it would seem, was a rather gauche plea for clerical jobs in the colonial administration that they were sure would be the path to prosperity.

That anticipated affluence, or even a smidgin of comfort, was still a generation away when my great-grandfather, Francis Xavier Rodrigues, succumbed to the plague bacillus, leaving behind a struggling wife, two daughters and a son. In family legend, Francis Xavier, who owned a tiny farm in the swampy neighbourhood of Khar, died a hero’s death. At a time when fear of infection was rife, no one was willing to carry the bodies of the plague victims to the cemetery that had been established on the edge of the Arabian Sea, far enough from Bandra’s hamlets to ensure that their inhabitants would not be exposed to additional contamination. My great-grandfather is said to have stepped up to the task of burying the dead, and paid for it with his life.

Since the 1990s, the Seaside Cemetery has seen its name rendered irrelevant. The tombstones have been marooned from the sea by staging yards for the ill-conceived Bandra-Worli Sea Link. But the soil retains its character: the high saline content ensures that corpses laid to rest here take an inordinately long time to decompose. Relatives who die in quick succession must be buried in temporary plots because digging open the family grave too soon is to risk finding the remains of the last occupant still intact. In this ever-changing city, memory persists in the oddest ways.

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