Mumbai Encounters #2

The Koli Village at Mahim.

   As I make my way towards the Koli village, the sounds of crows screeching grows louder. The village is hidden by coconut trees and fishing boats. Random bits of broken boats, tackles and orange tarpaulin lie around. The village is tightly clustered, like the chawls in the city, and is very clean. I still can’t see the coast – no horizon in sight!

In the village, it’s hard to tell when you are on the street, and when you are in someone’s porch. It all flows together. I stop sensing the shapes of the houses. They seem like an amorphous mass, through which the streets have been carved.

   The village is thin and long, stretching along the coast, all the way up to the estuary of the Mithi River to the north. That is the border of Mahim and Bandra, the bridge that you have to cross to get to Kalanagar junction. I lose my way, and ask a little boy to help me out. “Do you know where the river is?” The little boy, Kuldeep, looks at me blankly. He turns to Pratap, whose father is a fisherman. “You mean the bada gutter?” No, no, it’s a river, I insist. Suddenly, Kuldeep’s eyes light up. “Oh, the river! That river is after Bandra uncle! See here” – and he draws a map on the sand with a stick. I see him drawing the bridge between his village and Bandra, I realize they have no idea that the bridge crosses over a river. To them, it is just a large gutter.

The end of the Koli village, just before Kalanagar junction

I ask if there is a school in the village. ”Yes, yes, it’s a small school, Marathi medium. Come uncle, I’ll take you there!”

“Do you study there?”

“No uncle, I go to school in Bandra. St. Anthony’s. You know St. Anthony’s?” As I stand there talking, I realize that I've begun to attract attention. A little group of kids have gathered, and are  eager to show me around. I agree to let them escort me to the local school. An old grandmother looks at me with alarm and suspicion. The boys’ names are Kuldeep, Pratap, Neel and Bharat.

Bharat soon runs away, because the other boys are making fun of him. “He’s called Chakko, because he sips loudly when he drinks water from a bottle!” laughs Pratap, as he leads me through narrow passages between houses. 

   Neel, 3^rd Standard in Wellington school (English medium, he adds pointedly) tells me excitedly about a gift he got for his birthday. He’s so tiny, that I have to stoop as I walk to listen to him.

“My daddy got me a hot wheels car for my birthday! My mother said: wake up, wake up, daddy has a surprise for you! I wanted to see it, but mummy wouldn’t let me! First go take a bath, she said. So I quickly took a bath! But then she said, we have to go to the mandir, so that also I did like a good boy. But then she said...” and on and on.

   We finally reach the little school, back on the main road. I’ve come to realize that very few kids in the Koli village actually study there – none of these boys do. I don’t know what to think about that, but it is heartening to know that they all go to school. Most of their parents want their kids to learn English, and make it a point to send them to English medium convent schools nearby. I spend a few more minutes chatting with the kids about what their parents do, what their school is like, and what their favourite cartoons are. As I say goodbye to them, I wonder what their futures will be like.

Trash along the banks of the Mithi river where it merges with Mahim Creek 

The Mithi river: Near it's mouth, the Mithi merges with the Mahim creek as it makes its way to the sea. As I walk past the estuary, I can see why the kids in the village didn't call it a river. There is nothing river-like about it. From the bridge, I can see the estuary opening up, the Reclamation and Land’s End to the right. The massive junction rises in front of me, and all around there is endless traffic, constant movement.

Construction rubble, dying mangroves, and open defecation along the river's banks

There is no way to walk along the banks of the river, unless you’re willing to trek past rubble, construction debris, men defecating and mangroves dying. What if there was a bicycle path along the river’s edge, and you could ride down all the way from the source – from Vihar Lake inside the National Park? What a fantasy!

Through Bandra:

Endless traffic along Linking road in Bandra

I somehow manage the mad dash across Kalanagar signal, against the relentless traffic, and soon find myself on Linking road, cutting through Bandra and connecting the Northern suburbs. It is one of the busiest roads in the city, especially during rush hour.

    Along Linking road, past the Old Masjid (150 years old, according to the chacha who fed me watermelon), before the station, is a row of little shops, where they do woodcarving. They make and sell elegant picture frames, decorative pieces, ornate stools and chessboards – all out of teak.

Sultanbhai, proprietor of one of the shops, is from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, and so are all the other craftsmen. Sultanbhai tells me that the first immigrants brought the craft from their hometown and set up shop about 25 years ago. Now there are many shops, and more people arrive everyday, looking to make a living. They live in rickety makeshift structures that stretch out from behind the shops. These seep into the slums across the tracks in Bandra East, so different from the West. From Linking road, I turn into a little street parallel to Turner, towards the park. I’ve been here many times, but it was all so long ago. About three years back, I was in Mumbai for my internship, and many good evenings were spent roaming aimlessly in this old neighbourhood.

Along the way, I stopped at a shop where I met Karan, and quickly made a sketch!

    
   
   Everything seems so familiar, but this experience is also so disconnected from my past memories. I am too distracted by what I am seeing right now, to feel any nostalgia. There is something about being here, in the present – that intense immediacy that a memory can’t have. Everything pulses with life! Julio Cortazar, the acclaimed Argentine writer, claims in one of his short stories that ‘now’ is a lie. You can’t really catch it can you? All you can do is keep running, with your hands outstretched, your fingertips always brushing against it. It is a powerful image, one that I find myself pondering over as I walk down these familiar streets. It is hard to think of the past when you’re running behind the ‘now’. Somehow today, the past seems to matter very little, and my memories of the place are rather detached, as if everything that I’d experienced on these streets had happened to someone else.

   There is such a variety of people around me – I walk past a thousand conversations in a multitude of languages – someone haggling with an autowallah, middle class families with kids orbiting the mummy-daddy nucleus in haphazard fashion, boys with spiked hair, tattoos and surfing shorts playing cricket, businessmen in expensive cars, with their noses down and voices low, women in fashionable clothes discussing a new movie release, the endless sound of traffic and birds chirping. All this in a whirl, and I begin to understand what it means to look at a place again with fresh eyes. We may walk down these simple human wonders everyday of our lives - but after a while, we simply stop looking. I walk past a familiar tea stall, and notice, for the first time, the ingenious means by which the chaiwallah has set up the makeshift roof, under which I have stood countless times - and it makes me happy somehow, to know that my eyes are open again.