The Bombay I Shall Never Forget

The Bombay I Shall Never Forget
Bombay city grew on you, especially if you were born in it.

Ask any born Bombayite or even anyone who has lived in the city for more than a couple of years and you will detect grudging admiration for the place. To the outsider the closeness that the Bombaykar once had for his town was always a source of wonderment. They see an overcrowded city, with apartments the size of matchboxes, if you lived in an apartment at all.

I distinctly remember when my paternal uncle's family came from Uganda on a long furlough, surveyed the place we lived in and wondered how we would all fit in it for 4 months. But fit in it they did and had the time of their lives. No doubt in Africa they must have had a large bungalow with gardens and a car parked outside surrounded by lush greenery as far as I could tell from the photos they showed us. But in the time they spent in Bombay, they didn't miss all that at all. Could have been the joy of brothers meeting again, but I suspect it was the city more than the kinship that triumphed.

In those apartments people not only lived but they lived happily. They threw parties, they entertained guests from the mofussil (a quaint Indian term for out-of-town). Goans in Bombay every now and then played hosts to their relatives, friends and even village-folk from Goa who needed to come to the metropolis be it for wedding shopping or surgery or a million other things that could not be done in Goa.

Bombay was the place to be. There were football matches in the Cooperage grounds between East Bengal and Mohun Began that no Goan would miss. There was the Metro, the New Empire, the Excelsior and the Regal cinemas where you could watch the lastest English movies. After a Metro movie you could go to an Aunty's hooch joint in Dhobitalao. The Excelsior and the New Empire had Vittal's Bhel Puri House where
the snacks were like nothing you could ever have anywhere else. The Regal called for a walk down Causeway with your girl where you could not sidestep Fredrick's, or Annapurna's or if you were felling a little rich, go into the Harbour Bar at the Taj where the cocktails were as exotic as their names. As a generation, we were introduced to the Bloody Mary, the Singapore Sling, the Screwdriver and the Peacemaker by the tenders of this very bar.

If Beale Street was the haven for the Memphis blues, Dixie sounds, Tennessee Bluegrass and jazz in all it's forms, then Bombay's Churchgate area was the premier refuge for the western music of the day. The jazz bands were as good as those in New Orleans. Beat Groups belted out Cliff Richard, Englebert Humberdinck, Tom Jones and Mungo Jerry like they were Bombay's own. If you were clasically inclined it was Victor Paranjoti and the Bombay Madrigal. If you went highbrow, there were the shows by Adi Marzban and all those admen by day who doubled up as stage actors by night to give the performance of their lives.

That was the era of the Goan village social, the wedding receptions that knew no 11 pm curfew and the Christmas and New Year dances in all their glory when Christmas and New Year celebrations in Goa were unheard of. Cavel, Dabul, Dhobitalao and Girgaum and all the railway institutes were one endless party. If you think the Jamaicans know how to have fun, then you haven't seen the Bombay of yore.

The Bhaiyya brought you milk, the Bania sold you groceries. The Mian-bhai made you delectable roadside seekh kebabs and faloodas. The Anglo Indians drove your trains and nursed you in well kept hospitals. The Goans sold you bread and liquor and no-one questioned the combination. Nobody asked about your religion, though everybody knew it. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Parsees, the Jains, the Sikhs - all were a natural part of Bombay and had more affinity towards it then the places they came from. The Jews in the city had their patrician history and their grand landmarks, but they looked and talked like any other Maharashtrian. Even the Goans who would not miss ther summer soujourns in Goa for the mangoes, the fish and the feni, came
scurrying back to their city at the first sign of rains.

You grew up, went to school and then off to the ivory towers. You came out bright-eyed and bushy tailed, went to make your mark in the world and Bombay allowed it all. With peace, with bustling commerce, but above all with style and panache. Corruption was the exception rather than the norm. The Hindu elder would not allow anything like that to stain his family pride. The Bade-Mian would use Islam as a shining torch to guide his life and his interaction with others. The Parsis could not spell the word much less let it despoil them with it's indignity. Even the Gujarati merchant princes and shopkeeper alike took their profits without depriving their customers of value received.

It was an innocent age. Perhaps we didn't know simplicity and transparency because we indulged in so much of it. It had to one day end like the beauty of a young and pretty maiden. The disappearance was a gradual process. The rich became richer and the poor poorer. The Hindus are incited to hate the Muslims who in turn see themselves as victims. In the name of self defence they are forced to store machetes, bombs and every weapon they can find in their mosques, because they have no confidence in the police in times of communal riots. The Marathis were taught by petty politicains to hate the South Indians and then the North Indians even though they were in Bombay longer than those who came to the city from Konkan and Vidarbha.

But the new generation in Bombay are intelligent, pushy and world wise. They are not willing to accept the accumulated rot. They spit at the political pigs who used to wear fake Gandhi caps but now wear safaris, suits and saffron and govern them. There is a vibrant media who shine a bright light on every dark deed and who compete with CNN as evidenced in the recent days of Bombay's own 9/11.

It is on these shoulders that hope rests that Bombay will get to becoming Bombay once again.