Bombay on my mind

Bombay on my mind
Nandini Ramnath

By the end of April -- 25th? 26th? -- I will complete a year in Delhi. Does that make me a Delhiite? Or a Bombayite at large in the capital city? Or sociologically speaking, an urban migrant who's migrated for reasons of employment and opportunity, higher up on the ladder than the poorer border-crossers, but with a similar pang for the idea of home?

To be a Delhiite, I would have to master the art of crossing Delhi's never-ending, spectrawide roads. I would have to learn to bargain with its scowling autorickshaw men, resist its seductive shopping, say hanji with grace and eat a paneer pizza with relish.

Unlike in Bombay, where the abstraction of space translates into expensive FSI, precious square feet and skyscraper-high heartburn, roads and houses ramble on in Delhi. Perhaps that's why they park their cars six feet away from the kerb. And when they house their politicians, they tuck them away far behind gates and gardens and patios.

In Bombay, we would say, what a waste of space. Could build three multi-storeys in its place.

In my subconsciousness, packed as tightly as bodies in a local train, are images and smells of shiny red buses proud to be the BEST, neon signboards and tired faces. I'm at home in crowds, I find rather than lose myself in them. Staring at the back of somebody's sweat-tainted collar is belonging.

I'm actually only a two-hour flight from home. If I take the less extravagant and less desperate option of a Rajdhani, then the road to my roots stretches longer. In 16 hours, I would transcend states, language and comfort levels to embark at a station I rarely looked at when I was in Bombay. Such is the state of a migrant -- a railway station becomes the portal to belonging, its pre-recorded announcements a summons from home. Never before have the faint scrawls on the train ticket seemed so alluring.

Once I'm in Bombay, I would lapse into Marathi, my other tongue, sink into a rectangular Premier rather than a squat Ambassador. In an hour, I would see-saw across one of the 55 flyovers that were being built as I was packing my books and photo albums.

There'll be a time when I'll return and all the flyovers will have been built. Like magic carpets, they will transport me from squalor to gentility, from suburbia to the city's nucleus.

Did the census woman come knocking on my rented door? What should I give my address as? Will my skin crawl when she recasts me as `urban-urban migrant' with a pencil stroke? What do I give my language as? Bambaiya? Or what Salman Rushdie so beautifully boxed up as HUGME -- Hindi Urdu Gujarati Marathi English?

The city where I was born is now an idea in my head. It's an assemblage of images where sea waves collide with teeming trains and the Haji Ali Dargah and Mahalaxmi Temple merge into a white blur. Its icky-sticky humidity is good to conjure up on a four degree wrapped winter day. It's a mirage viewed from a city with no seashore.

Sometimes, sounds rush into the vacuum the images leave behind -- of trains cranking in and out of stations, the sound of silence that's Bombay constant. As I try and shut them out, I hear other sounds, Delhi's sounds -- the loud cars, the look-at-me-now car-backing alarms, Oye! and the peace of night of a city that does sleep. By 2 am this city of cold monuments is dead calm. While I dream of Bombay with my eyes wide shut.