Return to Paradise: My Beautiful Bombay

So I am home again after eighteen years. How can words be adequate to describe what this is like?

Someone made a mistake when Bombay (now Mumbai) was created. Otherwise how do you explain its geographical layout? The business district is at the tip of the peninsula. Every day millions of people jam the narrow roads in their cars and squeeze onto overcrowded trains to get to work there. It makes no sense. Some twenty million people inhabit the greater Bombay area with thousands pouring in everyday. Everywhere there is overcrowding, heat, stress, pain.

It also seems nobody accounted for taste. Buildings are old and ugly of the soviet socialist variety. The heat, humidity and pollution take their toll on any attempt to maintain things. Paint fades away, dust and dirt wear down the external facade in no time. Eventually it seems people have to just give up.

In this weather things seem to live and die very quickly. The heat then decomposes them to return them to the earth bringing forward a heady aroma of life and death wherever you go. Smells abound from the endless supply of foods stalls and restaurants, from the motor smoke slowly choking the life out of the city, from the excrement from the gutters that is part and parcel of the cities heritage, from the jasmine flowers that somehow are able to blossom and a countless other sources.

Cows still have free rein over the roads. Occasionally a cow can be seen walking even on the busiest of roads and people will drive around it. Otherwise the only animals that can be seen are the stray dogs. The only birds that dare inhabit this city are the black crows. Gotham on steroids would be any appropriate description of this place.

“Yahan insaniyat jaise cheez nahi hai” - “there is no humanity here”. Every resident of Bombay will tell you that. People will find whatever space they can to live in. From there they go to work and money is all every one ever thinks about. Few are concerned about the sufferings of others except to walk around them.

And yet..

A slightly crazed writer once wrote a poem entitled “People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes”. What does that say to you dear reader? Does it suggest that perhaps a different kind of Beauty lies within? That maybe Happiness cannot be found in beautiful but sterile landscapes devoid of personal warmth?

We cannot help being born where we are born. We do not choose our parents and we do not choose the culture we are born into. By the time we are even dimly aware of anything our psyche has already been formed and the patterns we make in childhood, we invariably see the world for the rest of our lives through them. And so the place and time where we grew up is a very special place and a very special time regardless of what it looks like, the paradise lost.

After eighteen years I have returned to the old paradise. Eighteen years of wandering, eighteen years of exile!

India is still a rooted country. Perhaps thousands of years ago the aryan invaders to the subcontinent discovered that in the tropics everything grows easily. There was no reason to wander around to search for food and it was too hot to do so anyway. So they settled down to a life of habituated patterns guarded by myth and ritual. Great festivals were held to mark the important rites of passage and a great variety of food was the centerpiece of these celebrations.

So many Indians do not move out of the street they have grown up in, or even out of the family house. Many generations can end up living under one roof and personal space is limited so the need for it is never developed. A person grows up rooted in their neighborhood and their community and within the community there is a deep personal intimacy. Information about the rest of the world is neither necessary nor required and can be a burden too heavy to bear.

One such neighborhood is South Bombay, the home of Macaulay’s children. A hundred and fifty or so years ago, in the time of the British Raj a bureaucrat named Macaulay sought to establish a system of English education in India. The children of this system were the first organized opponents to the criminal enterprise that was British rule. They were also the first developers of India’s industrial revolution and the first administrators of free India. Immortalized in Salman Rushdie’s two classics Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh, they are a curious mix of East and West, not quite rooted in either culture, often confused, sometimes appallingly shallow, harbingers of the world to come perhaps.

So the many neighborhoods of Bombay reveals a diversity of creed, culture and dress that only the great cities of the world can sustain. The center of community life is still religion and at the temples and churches one can see this diversity come to life. Refuges do exist, small refuges, refuges from the heat, stress, chaos, cruelty and poverty - the Zoroastrians at their agiaries(entry for Zoroastrians only!), the Jains singing their sad songs in the colorful Deraser at Walkeshwar, the Muslim families all dressed up for evening prayer at HajiAli mosque, the crowds of worshippers standing in line to ask for blessings at Mahalaxmi temple, the Christians dressed in their western outfits taking communion at the Portuguese Church, the Dalits- the untouchables who converted to Buddhism - honoring Babasaheb Ambedkar at the Ambedkar memorial Stupa at Shivaji Park. After all what would life be if we did not have a space for refuge, for sharing and caring, where we can forget about ourselves for a while?

A Japanese Buddhist temple can be found too for those who miss the old chant of “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo” - Devotion to the law of the Lotus Sutra. On the streets you might see wandering gypsy families who look like they have not changed their ways for thousands of years. This is the tolerance of India, that has seen so many come here to take refuge from persecution elsewhere. For Hindu India has never tried to convert anyone. It is written in the holy books that all paths lead to the truth.

But neighborhoods are changing. India has arisen out of her myth and ritual protected silence to enter the world of duality again. New wealth has been created and new people move into old established neighborhoods, old buildings are torn down and new high-rises come in their place. People must adjust to a new nomadic, rootless life. And along with the new wealth and new found psychological freedom has come its more soul destroying aspects; a monotonic culture of consumerism, 24/7 television banality, non-stop advertisements for anything and everything and an obsession with image. And so the South Bombay I knew has changed too.

But not too much. It is said that in the end all life is local. Our first cares are invariably our immediate environment, our immediate family and our immediate sense of group and community. Only after that can we care about the wider world.

Still, a fluid economic world requires allowing space for a greater unifying human consciousness. The editorials of the english language press lament that the universal humanist consciousness of Bartholomew De La Casas, Voltaire and Abraham Lincoln has not yet found its root in India.

But it is coming, albeit slowly. Public spaces do exist. Near the Ambedkar stupa is a public park overlooking the sea and the newly built Bandra Worli sea link. The park is clean and anybody can enter it and enjoy its facilities. There is even music piped in through discreet speakers. In Bombay! In India! A public park where anyone can go and use the facilities! A pleasant space for everyone to enjoy. How is this possible?

Even then the community space of India is a community space of communities. Within communities there is great intimacy, between communities there is sometimes polite sometimes cruel indifference. The modern Western consciousness seeks to built a single community of deracinated individuals. For many in the West this has translated to individuals coming together only out of choice or for economic exchange with no sense of duty or loyalty attached to their interaction.

So which is better? That would depend on each person’s current position in life, but ultimately Darwin will decide; the social organization that best supports the continuation of the tribe will be the one that remains. Or perhaps it is the cyclical nature of life - as people get wealthier they individuate more and breed less. So as India gets wealthier its wealthy citizens seek more boundaries and more space.

And what is it to see meet old friends you have not seen for twenty years? To meet the extended family again, to hear their stories and see how they have grown and changed?

First there is the rush of hearing a familiar voice and seeing a familiar face. I cannot help but feel I have switched to a different, younger age. Then mindfulness kicks in and we can appreciate how much history has passed, how much has changed. Still I can see in the person twenty years on traces of the person who was with the same quirks, the same habitual ways of responding to things.

And then comes the challenge of the present: to see if there is anything still in common. For some I realize there was a reason we did not stay in touch all these years. For others a new relationship begins. I get to experience first hand that what once was can never be, to know that even if it could one would not want to go back to the old ways and the liberation that is this realization.

Aah My Beautiful Bombay! I hate to admit it but I have missed you.

- Honjaku