When India Eludes You
Landing in Mumbai before dawn to rain, the air as ancient as time, woody, rancid, pungent, as if holding on to centuries of musk, roses, detritus (human waste), I inevitably greet nostalgia, that dangerous dame. I think of my grandmother. How I wouldn’t be alive if when I was a newborn being sunned on a Mumbai rooftop, my grandmother hadn’t snatched me from a hovering vulture used to human flesh from cadavers in a nearby Parsi temple. I think of her now playing sad ballads on the piano. A flood of images. My first snowfall, my fright at the violence of Moharram, brightness of Holi, the ache for the dead. ‘I’m not staying long in the past,’ I warn nostalgia.
Yet here I am, looking at the centuries side by side, shooting skyscrapers, a sea-link across the bay; also, abandoned legally contested family brick red colonial homes with circular driveways, ghostly apparitions, with overgrown gardens, where you expect a band to strike, and bearers in white to appear carrying silver trays.
It’s easy to dream here, watching seagulls across the thrashing waves, seeing the young boys pointing to Shah Rukh Khan’s home, Mannat. With every return there is accounting, recalibration to be done.
India is now the fastest growing economy in the world. Mumbai is cleaner, slums tucked away, plastic is banned, drivers more orderly. The assault to the senses remains unchanged—the endless tableaux, the massive billboard of Bollywood stars, the new royalty of India, three small boys on their way to school, emerging from a modest dwelling, scrubbed, bright-eyed, one shouting “there’s a BMW’, watching a girl step out the car with a designer bag that could feed them for a year; men sitting cross-legged selling chai, and tobacco, in suits and plummy accents, brokering deals; a woman fully veiled in a black chador (sheet) types rapidly at her smartphone; another woman revs up her scooters hitching up her pale summery sari to show white Nike.
A hairdresser cracks the dream. “See, money is India’s God. Those who have it treat those who don’t have it like dirt. The poor don’t mind because they too aspire to get rich so they in turn can treat poorer people badly.
“The wealthy have no problem with an obscenely lavish home of the Ambanis, India’s richest man, just a mile away from the world’s largest slum of over a million people.” I ask her to explain the amazing service, the honesty, my untouched wedding rings beside my bed when I returned from breakfast, the willingness to serve endlessly, collect packages across town in record time, move heaven and earth for the customer.
“Fear of the feedback forms everywhere. In hospitals, hotels, and shops. One complaint and you’re out. Service here, is survival.”
On the eve of our departure for a tour in the South, my mother, an avid newspaper reader alerted me. “Floods in Kerala have led to an outbreak of malaria.” I call a cousin in Delhi for more news. I get a deluge.
“Actually, there are over five million refugees, across 800 villages, over 415 people dead. Kerela is not getting the attention it needs as it does not support the Modi Government.
“The Modi Government has been more corrupt than Congress was over 70 years, threatening the very Constitution and rights of all those who don’t support them. People are afraid of speaking their minds. A girl in Chennai was arrested recently for calling the BJP fascist.”
A young hotel staffer overhearing my conversation, blurts. “I’m from Kerela. My family has lost everything. There is almost a complete media blackout of coverage of the huge disaster there.”
Another hotel staffer tells me he’s 18, his father recently dead he left university, is now the breadwinner working three jobs to look after his mother and sisters. “You will give your life to your family? “I don’t think of it like that. It’s my duty,” he said and smiled. “You should see the look on my mother’s face when I pay my sister’s school fees. Her education is more important than mine.”
I hear my husband saying “Wow”. It’s both over the boy’s sacrifice for the women in his life and the news that India had decriminalised gay sex. Just as you think you’ve figured out India, she eludes you.