When I was younger, I remember, I would declare proudly that if I had to live in India, it would have to be in Bombay, as though no other city in the country was quite so worthy of me. Bombay had the lure of glamour, opportunity, an exciting and ‘modern’ lifestyle that the other towns and sort-of-cities didn’t then. My parents, faujis straight out of the country’s cantonments, thought they had made the ultimate transition to modernity and progress, and transported my brother and me to this electrifying idea of Bombay over two decades ago. What they didn’t realise then was that having a ‘Borivli’, of the 1980s too, in their address was far from electrifying. The ‘East’ in front of it took away any lingering hope of redemption.

After well over 20 years, Borivli remains one of those places that elicits a curious reaction, one that says, ‘Why? Why are you there?’ It’s because I love the environment, I say self-righteously. In today’s PC green-speak where saving the planet from ourselves is the noblest mission of our times, it’s a fairly good response. Never mind the fact that in the 1980s there was not one decent road, where I was, connecting us to civilisation, and we had to seek lifts in quarrying trucks during medical emergencies. But I like to smooth over those unpleasant details to say how Borivli was then comfortably nestled in the hills. It draws out all the right sounds from people who’ve never been beyond Andheri.

... contd.