We perceive and understand ourselves, our homes and our cities by the ways in which outsiders see us. This is all the more so, if, as Edward Said and his parroting acolytes on the subcontinent will tell you, the country has had the misfortune (and if I may interpolate, also on some occasions the good fortune) to have been a colony of some big power.
The iconic images of Mumbai for foreigners, and through their eyes for us inhabitants, are many: the local trains with thousands of commuters crammed in with a few dozen falling out every day; the chawls; the immersion of the clay images of Ganapati at Chowpati beach; the Dharavi slums; the Gateway of India; and the Hobson-Jobson mutation performed by the British on the Portuguese name for Mumbai which is even today common currency, Bombay.
For me, the most telling image of Mumbai is another gift from the British: the BEST bus service. The history of Mumbai (and perhaps it’s tragic, dead-end future too) could be written by studying the growth of the BEST and its routes.
In the beginning was the BEST double-decker. There were no wide-bodied, aggressive, get-the-f—out-of-my-way, single-decker buses in my childhood as there were no numbered buses then. Bombay –Mumbai – was a comparatively humane place in the good old times because its scale was still human. The megalopolis and “maximum city” had not yet arrived. You could encompass the whole of Mumbai in the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet by which BEST bus routes were named. Route “A” plied between Colaba and Andheri via the Prince of Wales Museum, Victoria Terminus, Byculla, Dadar and Shivaji Park.
The only exception to the alphabetical buses was the “A4Ltd”. She was the Flying Ranee, the Deccan Queen; express train; she skipped four or five stops at a time. And if you were sitting on the very front seat on the upper deck in front of the window, the wind whipped your hair and your eyes smarted and the world flew by, and you knew you were flying across Marine Drive and Vincent Road which would become Dr Ambedkar Road and the rest of the city.
Chinchpokli, Sandhurst Road, Marol, Danda, Breach Candy, Lalbaug, Kemp’s Corner, Khotachi Wadi, Haji Ali, Chor Bazar, August Kranti Marg…ah, the romance and call of the road. The Odyssey, the Mahabharat, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, they all happen here, and every name in Mumbai has its own epic.
To see an English movie at Metro or Rex, we caught a “D” or “N” from Dadar where we lived, which ran between Sion and Ballard Estate. And it was the same “D” or “N” we had to take if we wanted to visit our family physician whose clinic was near Opera House. Doctor Ranganekar was always late, and I would stand at the window of his rooms and look at the elaborate mechanical display on the main road in front of Swastik Cinema. One day I went into a panic at what I saw. A wooden cut-out of Rehana or maybe it was Nigar Sultana was about to jump off a cliff but just as she leapt, Raj Kapoor would rescue her time and again. But then about fifteen minutes later something went wrong. The cut-out of the lovely actress jumped and Raj Kapoor, the horrid man, just stood and watched as she fell into the treacherous valley.
Nostalgia, as youngsters will quite rightly tell you, is nothing but fairy tales. The BEST fairy tale has another little wrinkle. People in Mumbai did quaint things like following a queue system. (Not always but most of the time.) No other city in India did that.
Some things change, others don’t. People in the West talk of something bizarre called maps. Not just talk, they can actually read them. No wonder they conquered the world. You ask them simple directions to your cousin’s place and they will tell you, “Go seven blocks south, then turn east till you hit 32nd and Third and then take the exit north on Allyson.” Actually, they can go on like this for an hour or so. I usually switch off at the first mention of south or north. I can find east and west… but only in the daytime. The east, after all, is where the sun rises and the west is the opposite. How in God’s name is one expected to find the north or south-west? But what is really inexcusable about Westerners is that not only can they read maps, they can actually find places through them. How else do you think Vasco de Gama found India? Or Columbus, America when he was looking for India? Think about it.
By and large, Indians have always had far more advanced ways of locating places. As a nation we live for and by the moving image, that is the cinema. All directions in India are through the medium of cinema houses. For instance, Victoria Terminus, sorry, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, is opposite Capitol Cinema. But where is Capitol Cinema, stupid? The smart-arsed answer would be, opposite CST, but I am a kindly man and don’t take offence. I am patient with fools who don’t know where Capitol Cinema is, for God’s sake. Capitol is right next to the lane which houses New Empire and Sterling cinemas. Got it?
Some people use the stars as a compass, Indians use cinema theatres. And don’t forget, if you still can’t find a place, why, you dummy, all you’ve got to do is to ask someone. Three people might give you three different directions, sometimes as different as diagonally opposite ones but what’s the hurry? The earth is round, my friend. Whichever direction you take, you are bound to get there.
We are eighteen million people going on, it would appear, to infinity. We are no longer human but mere numbers. No wonder the BEST had to switch from the alphabet to numbers. The last time I counted, there was a bus route 355 and that was merely in Worli or maybe in Bandra. Perhaps in Meera Road they already have four-digit routes like 1075 and five years down the road there will be Route 66,666.
The uses to which buses are put are also changing with time. Outsiders think we burn only our brides when we want more dowries. Not true. We burn buses too when we are agitating for more buses or better transportation; when we are feeling strongly about any damn thing like, a bomb blast, a fatwa or an “unacceptable” movie. Or frankly when we have nothing better to do.
Excerpted with permission from ‘The View From the Flying Upper Deck’ in Asides, Tirades, Meditations: Selected Essays, Kiran Nagarkar, Bloomsbury India.
