Life in the City - Cheap Comforts

Chapter 4: Mumbai survival 24x7


I am a gypsy at heart- to date no city -across the world- has screamed HOME enough to make me dig my heels in, thrown my anchor down and declare that I have a city to call my own. The truth is now I have several and like a global citizen holding multiple passports, I make multiple claims depending on company and context as to which city I'm loyal to. 


The reason is, in the thirteen years since I first left the home I grew up in (the distinction is made deliberately) I have moved cities eight times. In all fairness, I must admit that Mumbai and Kochi have seen me return a couple of times, my love-affair with the other cities have been rather brief and fleeting at best - a year and a half being the longest period of dalliance.

Looking back at what took me back time and again to Kochi and Mumbai, meant facing some uncomfortable truths. The logic with my love for Kochi is simple. Home is where parents are, however old you grow. When I go to Kochi, I go for pampering. Amma would certify to the embarrassing fact that I have never lifted a spoon or done my laundry while 'at home'. Also, psssstt...I have bundled several of my whites (I have an obsessive compulsion to buy them even if I can't maintain them)back to Kochi while visiting so that between Amma and her maid, it can turn sparkling white again. ( If Malayali daughters are obsessed with buying whites, Malayali moms have this obsession to launder and bleach them brutally till they surrender their yellowing selves and turn pristine again!) So there, in a nutshell, Kochi is about regressing back to a time when parents did the 'taking care' and you exploited it for all it's worth. 


Now Mumbai...Mumbai is another story altogether. Why is life in Mumbai so much simpler? It's something I mooned and moaned about the first time I picked up my bags and traipsed off to live in Brighton, England.( In case, you are interested in that post, click here). 


All the reasons why many people consider this city to be unliveable, I must admit, are all valid and VERY TRUE. It is a nightmare for anyone not used to the Mumbaiyya kind of life - all about living by the clock. If your clock goes awry and the alarm didn't wake you on time, your day can be screwed in ways you can't even imagine. Everything, just about everything happens by the clock. 

The kachrawallah rings the doorbell at dot 6.30, the cook walks in at 8AM and the maid at 10.15AM. If the cook does not walk in at dot 8, she gets late for the next household that anxiously waits her arrival like I do and my sister gets late to leave for office and consequently if she loses more than half an hour extra on the road in traffic, she loses a half-day leave. 


The traffic chaos in this city might mean losing several hours, but that's not an excuse for arriving late for a meeting. Instead, you also factor in an hour extra if you are travelling at peak-time. Indian Stretchable Time, as I have come to fondly refer to it while in the UK, is least applicable in Mumbai.( I must add the 'least', because Mumbai is after all in India and all the characteristics of Indians across the country do tend to get reflected here too, however rare) 


However, what has me enthralled is that the city works 24x7. The maids in Mumbai don't believe in union-baazi ( working by union-stipulated hours). Work schedules are flexible provided adequate notice is provided so that they can juggle their work-charts around. Everyone is contactable via a mobile phone and they are very happy to share the number with you ( none of the Brit-snootiness when it comes to divulging a personal number). So on my phone, I have convenient categories - three Brokers ( or call them Estate Agents), two electricians(one also doubles up as a plumber), stand-by maids if mine decides to take unexpected time-off and has not brought in her aunt or cousin or sister or daughter to work till she gets back and two istiriwallahs - one who does my regular ironing and another when I need some urgent pressing done and assorted numbers for beauticians who swing by to help you look less wild. I have a category for just about everything and they are all filled. Efficient, no fuss, disciplined enough to pander to my weird form of OCD. 

And it is not just the people, the services provided in this city are also equally appreciable and in a way that respects their time and mine. The kirana store delivers just about everything home and also brings in the required change, if you want to pay for a packet of crisps and diet coke with a 1000-rupee note. You can decide on the menu of what take-out food you want to serve your guests after you have set the plates on the table. In the time, they have had their first glass of wine and warming up to eating, the delivery boy would be at the door with food wonderfully packed to keep it hot. Even the ice-cream outlets offer individual ice-cream scoops, packed cleverly and not just family-pack of ice cream slabs as home delivery. Sunday is just another day, unlike in my red-state Kerala where everything including the neighbourhood stray dogs take it as their rightful day off.


The work-ethic of Mumbai is admirable - prompt, very polite and rarely shoddy. Yes, money power does hold sway like in any other metropolis, but isn't that a universal truth? 


For a single girl in a big bad city, this one is a blessing. The nights aren't unsafe, the comforts aren't back-breaking expensive. It affords you your little corner, even if it is no bigger than a handkerchief. 


Mumbai is home today, I'm not sure if it will remain that tomorrow. As I grow older, the need for space and for a more relaxed way of life is growing too. But this city has kept me young, alive and on many occasions soothed, healed and put me back on my feet. Wherever I go, irrespective of my criticisms of its dirt, dust and dinginess - I shall remain a loyal Mumbaikar. This city has character- flawed or otherwise. 

Life in the City - Another Day, Another journey

Chapter 3 - Travel - A Way of Life  
Have you ever lived in a city that has a local train system? If you have, you would have witnessed what I write. If you haven't, close your eyes and imagine it. 

Every morning, during what Mumbaikars refer to as peak-time, there is a great spectacle to be witnessed. For this, you need to identify a busy local station - say Andheri. Then you hunt for the foot over-bridge that ferries thousands ( and this I say conservatively) across the railway lines that bisect Mumabi into East and West. On either sides are railings that allow you to crane your neck to check whether you can still manage to scramble on to the 8.35 Churchgate slow or the 8.40 Virar fast with just seconds to spare before it pulls out of the platform. Find a comfortable spot, where you are least likely to be jostled hard.( Psst, it is kind of impossible to avoid being cursed or rudely glared at for appearing immovable when the whole over-bridge seems to be in a permanent state of fluid motion). However,once you have found that sweet spot, wait. It won't be long. Trains move in and out of platforms in Andheri every other minute. When the next train pulls in, hold your breath. 

There is usually a reverent, almost automatic hush that lasts barely a second or two as the local slows down in its approach towards the platform. Ignore those that I shall call as 'Leapers', they who have no patience for the train to come to a halt, but jump out while it is still in motion. 

As the train grinds to a halt, it will appear like a worm freshly trampled upon- its innards, black, impossibly thick and sluggish mass oozing out on to the platform. A bird's eye view is highly recommended. Every day, Mumbai's trains unloads its burden of humanity and you feel you heard the train heaving a sigh of relief...Oh wait, that was you, releasing that breath you'd held in, all this while.


The choke that you feel as you wait to leap on to a train or off it, with a waiting crowd already three-person deep is something most detest...but stay away from it and you long to do it just one more time - for there is a sense of camaraderie even while people compete to sit on the curving edge of a bench-seat which has already seated its maximum of three. And then there's the rare faint smile or nod of recognition to look forward to, though you have never exchanged a word with the Elphinstone lady or Churchgate teacher ( so named because she always gets down at that station).


Those who call Mumbai home spend the better part of their day and therefore in sum total, their lives travelling - to study, to work, to meet friends and family. That's how life in the city becomes a set of repetitive acts, performed with strangers every day, in a manner that leaves you just another black head that formed the thick ooze of humanity on the railway platform. 

In under a minute, that choking platform turns vacant, few stragglers hang around, the black dots dispersed. And from my perch on the foot over-bridge, the wait for the next train begins..I want to witness that sight again, I want to revel in that feeling that I have the leisure to stand and stare while Mumbai breathes around me. 


(Photographs by Gregor Thomeczek, 2011)

Life in the City - Poetry in an Urban Jungle

Chapter 2 - Migrant Musings

The sun sets over the Juhu Beach leaving the sky a riot of colours - from the strongest pinks to the most radiant saffrons...and amidst all that a globe of fire dispassionately sinks into the sea. The Sun does not care that it's another date ticked off the calendar of my life..He has a date with the other side of the earth..There are people waiting there to wake up, find a new purpose to their life on a new day...


This thought is a bookmarked one...one that often comes to haunt every other night before sleep overtakes me. I remember the last time it visited clearly..

I was standing carefully by the very edge of the beach, pleased with myself for calculating just how much the tide will invade the land..this way the waters just kiss my feet and don't drench me uncomfortably. The sand that faithfully sticks to the folds of the toes is uncomfortable but there was a time when I craved it...when the cold, pebbled beachfront in Brighton bit into the tender flesh underfoot. The chill in the air and the twinges of pain running up my feet then had made me crave the warm sneaky sands of Juhu..

I look around and there are few on the beach that appear to be there like me, philosophising on life. Most are families out for an evening of fun on the beach - children happily turning into mud bunnies while their mothers watch on, resigned to the tricky day of laundry ahead. Others for whom the beach is a catching-up point, much the same way I think of a Costa coffee or the Cafe Coffee Day across from the beach. It is much cheaper and come to think of it, affords complete privacy...where else can you be just a dot on a sandy landscape?


I have new companions for the hour as I walk trailing footprints across the spongy sand - prostitutes and peddlers, delicately whispering their rates to foreigners as they brush by, football-crazy teens and couples in love, who can't find a more private spot in the crowded metropolis. But then in Mumbai, every day you find new companions,some turn familiar faces travelling the same weary path that you are while others just bob up and about at strange times in strange places. Sometimes they leave a whiff of their presence, mostly, this city just swallows them whole...

I close my eyes..and a new thought is gaining a life of its own - Is Mumbai a figment of my imagination? Have I created an ugly but genial, crowded but entirely private city in my head? If I blink a couple of times will the beach in front of me fold into a nice undulating rug that I can then stow in my bag and carry away?? Are the people that cross me imagined creatures, with life kissed into them only at the time of the hour of the day that they are scheduled to play a minor role in my personal drama?? Is there a big brass box stowed in someone's attic where they all retire to once their part is over?

Perhaps it is the smell of weed that I detect hanging in the air as I move further inland on the beach away from the waters...I'm lightheaded...but my hunt for poetry in an urban jungle continues...

( Photographs Courtesy: Gregor Thomeczek, 2011)

Life in the City - Maximum City, Maximum Independence

Chapter 1 - The Migration.


Mumbai has been the 'go-to' city of my life ever since I can remember. As a kid,a Malayali kid to be exact, Mumbai was at first the stopover airport on our annual trips to visit dad ( in the Gulf of course!). Kochi, my hometown did not have an international airport in the first two decades of my life. So any trip by flight had to be routed through Mumbai. That's how the Mumbai airport became the first dot on my map of Mumbai. Perhaps its a legacy of the number of touchdowns on the tarmac of the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport that even today landing in Mumbai feels like homecoming (more than even the Kochi touchdown).

The second dot was perhaps the Juhu beach with its Pav Bhajiwallahs and the garish multicoloured gola stalls. However, the increasing number of dots denoting my increasing familiarity with the city was not the reason I ended up being a Mumbaikar.


Small town living naturally inspires dreamy minds to seek out the big bad city. A place where no one knows you and few care to find out. I guess it is an intrinsic need to see if you can live outside the protective cocoon of home - in a sense a declaration of independence or rather, adulthood. So when I first packed my bags for Pune to study, Mumbai became the natural progression for work. Somehow Delhi was the big, bad city in my mind - Mumbai was like the warm welcoming aunt who took you in and then let you be.


Personally, I think the Cs also were pretty favourable - Climate, Cuisine and Culture - vastly different but comfortingly similar. And Amma had, in that subtle and very practical tone of hers ingrained into me time and again that Delhi was too far - air tickets very expensive and train journeys home could take up the best part of any leave from work.

So there..Sometimes rebellions too become PG-rated. Moving out becomes your personal rebellion but the choice of city based on parents' approval becomes your deference to their wisdom. 


In the first heady years, the thrill of living in Mumbai was increased thousand-fold by the new-found independence to stay out late or return home any time, without seeking prior permission. The money in the purse that smelt of hardwork and not dole and most importantly, being treated like an adult without a chaperone around.


That is how Mumbai became the canvas of my life - the heroine of a long-love story - jilted a couple of times, but ever-faithful, ever welcoming. I sought other cities time and again...but returned, sometimes to lick wounds, other times out of choice not desperation.

Life in the City - Serialised

For a while now, I have been thinking about a change...change in style, format, layout..well those are merely cosmetic now, are they not? So now I think I have hit on an answer to get over the writer's stumble - calling it a block just seems more permanent..so I say stumble..

Very often what we don't realise that writer's stumble emerges from the lack of anything new to say. Think about something interesting and it doesn't take over five minutes to have your thoughts translate logically from your head onto the screen - putting pen on paper has never been more obsolete.

Talking of which, I wonder if I'd even recognise my handwriting anymore? Except in those scrawls they call signatures, often shaky and completely out of character as they appear on credit card slips. And it's not just the loss of money they signify that makes it appear shaky. It is also that there is no clever art of penmanship there. A pen is just a handy tool to say IOU. I digress, as I always do...

So now the idea is to serialise life - not that everyday is adventurous..and unlike many twits that tweet about brushing their teeth or walking their dog, I'm not going to bore you with the mundane...But there is so much to living in a city...our interactions, our frustrations, private anxieties, petty peeves that I have begun to realise are pretty universal. Where I have a related photo, that too shall be added to the text. If not, I'll strive to leave it blank!

You might be wondering why I had to write a blog about writing a blog..well, call it practice of years - the curtain raiser is a must before any significant event...so there...this is an announcement. Every day or every other day, I shall make this my private record and you shall be the fly on the wall in the life of a single, always ready-to-mingle girl out in the city!

If you find the ride exciting, join me and we shall discuss things threadbare! Nothing like a good debate to keep things exciting...Every post in the series, I'm thinking should be titled Life in the City. Otherwise how will it be a series? :)

Stay tuned,