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Or what makes ADI POCHA restless on Mumbai roads
There are many different kinds of ditches that you’ll find on the beauteous, pockmarked roads of Mumbai. Five-year ditches. Three-year ditches. Fractional two-and-three-quarter-year ditches. But I think the most common is perhaps the seven-year ditch.

I don’t know why. Maybe that’s like the average lifespan of a ditch in Mumbai. Or maybe 2001 was the baby boom year for ditches. Or maybe ditches just get bored after seven years. And become roads again.
Or just shift address, like, to across the street. I don’t know, really I don’t. But most of the ditches I know are roughly seven years old.

I noticed this when my sister came down from her home in California this year and I was dropping her back to the airport. As we jounced companionably down the road outside my house, a thought suddenly struck me: “Ti-i-i-i-na-a-a-a-ah…” I somehow managed to warble her name out. “Ye-e-e-es?” she replied far more adeptly than I, one has to admit, which of course made me wonder whether she had been practising on her Mumbai Roads Simulator back home in California.

“H-h-how long have you been visiting us in this house?” (For the sake of brevity, from here on, I have subtitled all our on-road conversation as you will doubtlessly notice). “Visiting you? In this house? Well, seven years or so?”  Aha, I thought, now that’s an interesting number.
“And have you ever, in those seven years, ever, seen this road done?” “What do you mean “done”?” she asked defensively. “Done as in, you know, repaired. Fixed. Smooth.”
To the credit of her polite upbringing, she had the grace to pretend to think. “Er, no.”
That was it then. I knew I had hit on something fairly remarkable. I quickly dove into the deep recesses of my memory. Rewinding through all the ditches I had ever known. I remembered one historic manhole on Hughes Road, just before the Kemps Corner flyover, which had always been open for what, how many years? Could it have possibly been, seven years? Maybe, maybe.

And did manholes count? Well, why not? I was all excited as I scanned the rest of my database of ditches, manholes, potholes and other road orifices. What about the street leading from Hinduja Hospital to Mahim Church? The road my uncle fondly called the Road of a Thousand Manholes? Did that qualify? No I didn’t think so. Because in all fairness the abovementioned thousand manholes were all primly covered.

But anyway I didn’t need those thousand manholes because they were easily replaceable. At least two hundred I remembered from Saki Naka alone. In fact some of those I am sure had even broken the seven-year time bar.
Some were so old I could get nostalgic about them. Like: “That one we used to fish in the monsoon.” Or: “That’s where I proposed to her, there, at the edge of that crater, where the sunsets are so beautiful and… and she pushed me and I went tumbling in slow motion and…” Or: “You know when I failed my exam that’s the pothole I almost jumped into to do soocide.”

Postscript: Okay, so seriously… why do Mumbai ditches have a life span of seven years? Is it because that’s how long it takes for them to fill out? Or is it because that’s how long it takes before we decide to make a noise about them? I guess I don’t know. And also I guess I don’t care. Enough.
(The writer is an ad filmmaker)

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