by Suketu Mehta
A thousand suns will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
Outside, in the passage, I dare not turn around, because a boy might come running up to me out of those classrooms, anxious to get outside forrecess, bump into me, and say, “Sorry, sir,” and look up at me and see himself.
A World of Children
On Sundays we go to Hanging Gardens with the children. I like seeing my children among the visitors from the suburbs. I have a basic trust in these families of clerks, these grandmothers who put food in the picnic baskets, these children dressed in Indian imitations of western clothes. I trust what they want for their children: to have a home, a wife, and a little more comfort than they have had.
On my older son Gautama’s birthday we take him to the Mahalakshmi temple. Outside the temple lane, a woman sits with a cow and a basket filled with bundles of grass. I give 5 rupees to the woman, she gives Gautama a sheaf of grass, and he feeds it to the cow, accumulating merit and wonder. The animals my children saw in storybooks in the West—elephants, camels, peacocks—are out walking in the streets of India. Gautama’s best friend has recently been bitten by a monkey, on the lawn of his plush building on Ridge Road. It is an unusual urban hazard in other countries.
As we walk toward the temple we see a bookshop: Motilal Banarsidas, Indological Book Publishers. I have been to branches of this bookstore in Varanasi, Delhi, and Madras, and my shelves are stacked with the harvest, so we decide to walk into this anteroom of the temple for a while. The manager, noticing the birthday cap on Gautama’s head, asks the peon to get a fistful of chocolates for him. We browse happily for a long time and select some books to buy; we will pick them up on our way back. Then we walk toward the temple, to witness the present-day enactment of the philosophy preserved in the books here.
As we go up the stairs leading to the temple, we pass under a huge banner welcoming the chief minister of Maharashtra, Narayan Rane, who earlier in his career was tried for murder and acquitted on a technicality. Sunita and Gautama get in the women’s line for the darshan, and I stand in the men’s line. When they reach the idol, Gautama folds his palms and begins talking to the goddess—“Thank you for giving me a nice birthday”—but he and his mother are pushed from behind; move on, move on, others want their audience. They rejoin me, and we stand behind the rear latticed wall as the aarti begins. We don’t know the rituals; we don’t know all the words to the songs. The worshipers chant vigorously, and there is a great sound of bells and drums. We are just beyond the boundary, and the priest does not bring his oil lamp near us, over which the others cup their hands and gather them to their forehead, seeking blessing. I always came to this temple with my grandparents, but they are no longer here to tell me what to do, how to get the coconut prasad, where to buy the flowers for the deities. So we leave, my foreign wife and foreign son and myself, and on our way out purchase for Gautama a lotus flower, Lakshmi’s flower, paying too much. Back at the bookstore, we pick up our books: a translation of devotional poems to Vishnu by the ninth-century Tamil poetess Antal; a one-volume version of the Bhagvata Purana; and an illustrated comic book of the life of Ambedkar for our son. I first learnt my Hinduism through my grandmother, and it was unanalytical, mystical. Then I learnt it again, in American universities. The stories that those people in the temple know by heart we needed to have explained to us by American academics.
MY YOUNGER SON, AKASH, IS a serene baby, a baby who basically likes being happy. When he smiles, I see the white line of his teeth ready to break out of the confinement of his gums, like eggs. The other life, the one just worn, is still with him, but it is going fast. One morning Akash is standing, holding the sofa. All morning he has been giving us signs. He has a fever, and a cough that sounds like a bark. He has been up all night, and this morning I found him on our bed. He had climbed up by himself. I put him down on the floor and he repeated the feat. Then there was the second sign: He stood up on the bed, up from a sitting position. Now, standing by the sofa, the plastic water bottle he is teething on falls out of his hand and rolls away. He watches it go away from him, then turns from the sofa and puts one leg in front of the other, then brings the other leg forward, and then the first leg again, till he is close to the bottle. Without realizing what he has done—a defeat of gravity so casual, so flawless, so roundabout, that it looks accidental—and without pausing to celebrate his mastery, he bends down and then sits down and resumes gnawing on the bottle. We see this, I and my first son both. For many days now I had been resenting working at home; my children were disturbing me as I worked. But now I am here to watch my baby take his first steps; I am not away in my office, and it is a vision that will remain with me for the rest of my life.
After having my own children, I have become conscious that the world is full of children. They were not there when I was twenty-five.
I have promised my sons I will be home by afternoon, and it is now 10 p.m. and I am still in my office in Elco Arcade. I see a taxicab parked right outside and am walking to it when I see a group of very young children on the road. They are being chased away by the owner of the milk booth—“Haddi!”—a sound you use to chase away a stray dog. I stop. There are four of them: a girl, maybe six, another girl and boy a couple of years younger, and the youngest, a boy certainly no older than two. Only the girls are wearing clothes, dirty oversized frocks. The boys don’t have a stitch on, except for some white beads around their necks. They are gathered around the older girl, who is examining something she has retrieved from the detritus of the snack stalls; it is a sandwich, two slices of bread smeared with green chutney. As the other three look on hungrily, she eats the sandwich intently. The others play with straws found in the garbage of the coconut stand, threading the white pipes into each other. The smallest child breaks away; it’s obvious he isn’t going to get anything, and he lies indolently down on the road and rolls over one and a half times, leisurely—a movement of the body I know so well from watching Akash—rolling on the road, gathering up the filthy water, the dog shit, the juice pulp, the betel spit, and the ordinary dust from the road all over his naked brown body, his little arms, his plump pouty belly. Then he gets up and wanders out on the road, dreamily, as children do. Taxis, buses, and rickshaws are zooming by at great speed and he is one-fourth of his way into the middle of the road and nobody is saying anything, not the girl, not the passersby, not me. He is too close to the ground to be noticed by the automobile drivers. There is no mother in sight. My heart jumps up in my mouth, but then the boy stops, grins, and walks back to the side of the road. The children have sat down around the sandwich right in the middle of the driveway to my building, and the milk-booth man is halfheartedly shouting at them to get out of the road, cars are coming. “Where is their mother?” I ask the milk-booth man, and he says he doesn’t know. He has asked the coconut-stall vendor to mind the children, and the coconut man has responded angrily that they aren’t his. I cannot walk to my taxi. I am paralyzed, I am choking, and a desperate sadness rises up in me. I can’t just give them money. The little boy’s head is shaved, just like Akash’s. Will somebody please do something? I can’t leave this child here, abandoned, but I want to get away. I can’t take him home. I think of getting a cop, but the child will just be picked up and sent to the remand home. A three-year-old in a Bhiwandi children’s “observation” home recently died from prolonged beatings. A three-year-old! Who would beat a three-year-old baby to death? How great an anger could he cause?
Then the older girl’s eyes meet mine, and she knows immediately. She comes over and says, “Saab, something to eat,” and holds out her palm. I ask where her mother is and she says she’s not here. I ask if they’ve eaten and of course she says no. At this moment a peanut vendor passes by and I gesture at him. “We won’t eat that,” the girl says. Then what will you eat? “Milk.”
I go over to the milk booth and the vendo
r sees them following me. “Not too close to the shop!” he barks at them. “Four milks,” I order. His assistant comes over with a large stick, the kind used to chase away monkeys, and waves it at the children. “I’m getting milk for them!” I exclaim. Four bottles of Energee, pistachio-flavored, are put on the counter, and the four children sit on the road and start sipping at the bottles through straws. I look at the smallest boy; his face is whole delight and he can’t wait to get at the milk as he puts the straw in his mouth. I walk toward the taxi, anxious to get home and kiss my children.
Sone ki Chidiya
“BAMBAI TO SONE KI CHIDIYA HAI,” a Muslim man in the Jogeshwari slum, whose brother was shot dead by the police in the riots, tells me. A Golden Songbird; try to catch it if you can. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard and brave many perils to catch it, but once it’s in your hand, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. This is the reason why anyone would still want to come here, leaving the pleasant trees and open spaces of the village, braving the riots and the bad air and water. From the village to the city, to found villages in the city. The slums and sidewalks of Bombay are filled with little lives, unnoticed in the throng, uncelebrated in the Bollywood movies. But to each one of them, the scale they are living in is mythic. It involves battles of good versus evil, survival or death, love and desolation, and the ceaseless, life-affirming pursuit of the Golden Songbird. What they have in common with each other—what they have in common, in fact, with me—is restlessness, the inability or disinclination to stay still. Like me, they are happiest in transit.
Girish: A Tourist in His City
“You need a sherpa,” an editor told me when I was researching my article on the riots. Then I found Girish Thakkar, working as a programmer in a friend’s office. He turns out to be the right person; Girish lives as a tourist in his own city.
Our journeys generally begin at Churchgate, where Girish takes the train home. Many of the signs in the station are of escape: ASSIGNMENTS ABROAD, for a newspaper, and another—enclosed in glass, next to a sleeping dog that has found a niche—for those who want to go the other way:
ENCORE FARMS (Farm House Plot)
only Rupees 20/ square foot
40 Fruit Trees * 20 Mango * 10 Cashew * 10 Others
Tukashi Village
As the people come hurrying into the city in the morning, as they trudge home in the evening, they might glance at the sign, and they might take with them a small vision with them through the day at the office, through the long cramped train ride: a little village, a little house, surrounded on all sides by a wealth of trees, their branches heavy with fruit waiting to be picked, a silence resting easy over the orchard. A vision of a childhood spent on grandmother’s farm.
We take the train to Jogeshwari and trudge through the lanes of the slum till we get to the alley off which Girish’s shanty sits; you would not be able to find it unless you were led to it. The room is filled with people. Visitors stream in and out all day long; as new people come in, the earlier occupants move and make room for them on the cot, like a continuous game of musical chairs. They are asked to stay for lunch and they know to refuse. The room contains one metal folding chair, reserved for honored guests, on which I am sitting, a stool for people who come a little too often, one metal cot, a metal wardrobe, a counter for the gas, a TV, a table, and some shelves. This is the entire furniture of the lives of seven people: two parents and five children in their twenties. The father sits on the ground shelling peas. There is laundry drying on plastic lines overhead. The door is open till late; you will find few closed doors in the slum. All the windows are on one side, the side facing the little lanes that the doors open onto. A salesman comes by, asking in all the doorways “Vicks Ayurvedic Balm?” and holding an open bottle. They all laugh at him. There is a good deal of laughter today. It’s a holiday, and everyone’s relaxed and enjoying the novelty of the whole family being at home together. The boys take turns sleeping on one side of the cot as others sit along its edge. In all Girish’s life, he has never had a whole bed to himself to sleep in at home.
The Thakkars’ home is a sanctuary. During the riots, the women of three families were staying in this room. It was considered a safe place, and it had a phone, which people would come in to use, to inquire anxiously about their relatives. Then there was the Bulgarian sailor. He had been robbed of all his money and his bags at the airport. Paresh, Girish’s younger brother, who teaches disco dance classes, ran into him at a hotel, found him crying, and brought him home. He had no money to travel to the Gujarat coast, where his ship was berthed. The family gave him some money for the train ticket. Then they thought, This man can’t speak the language, he will be robbed again. So they sent Paresh with him, all the way to the coast, several days’ journey, to make sure he got there safely. Their fears were well founded. During a check by police on the train in Gujarat, which is a dry state, they found a bottle of cooking wine and a set of threatening-looking knives, which the sailor, a cook, had kept in his handbag. Those were his tools, he said, but the policemen asked for a fine of 2,000 rupees, which Paresh bargained down to 200 and the bottle of wine. The family still talks about this incident. They show me a photo album, with a picture of the tall white sailor, his arms around his Indian friends. He never wrote them after going back.
The room had bamboo walls and a mud roof when the Thakkars moved in. Over the years they’ve improved it, put on a tin roof, plastered the walls. “What could we get on a salary of a hundred and fifty rupees a month?” his mother reminisces. “Girish’s father wanted all his children to do well. The eldest is doing well; all this is from his salary. Girish can’t give anything. When he lost that money in the share bazaar he got sick. Now his condition is bad, he can’t give anything. His father was saying, Look, my second son can’t contribute anything.”
Girish has his ever-present smile on. Perhaps this is the reason he’s never at home. He is twenty-five; he should be bringing in money and he’s not. At this point, Girish is a drain on the household.
For the vast majority of families in Bombay—73 percent, according to the 1990 census—home consists of only one room, for living: sleeping, cooking, eating. The average is 4.7 persons to a room; Girish’s family exceeds this by 2.3 persons. The furniture of the room changes roles continuously, through the day; the bed of the night is the sofa of the morning; the dining table is the study table between meals. The residents, too, are quick-change artists, changing from nightclothes to day clothes under a towel, behind a curtain, so quickly you would think they are invisible. But invisibility is actually bestowed upon them, as the other inhabitants of the room avert their eyes during the moment of transformation. How on earth did the parents conceive five children in this slum room? There must have been a good deal seen and not watched, heard and not listened to.
Girish spends as little time in Jogeshwari as possible, leaving by the seven o’clock train and getting back at midnight. If it is a Sunday, instead of taking a nap at home, he will go to Kandivili to a friend’s computer class to teach for two hours. There are all manner of implicit understandings about how the family members will divide up their time in the room. There isn’t enough space for everybody to be there at once, except when they’re all sleeping, when body movements are kept to a minimum. It’s the only way they can be stacked, when they’re sleeping or dead. Home, in the slum, is a time-share.
I ask how Girish sleeps with his family in the room. He looks at me, then takes out a pen. “See, we are seven people.” I give him my notebook to sketch the plan of the sleeping arrangements. He pushes it away and takes a paper napkin. “Me and my older brother on the cot,” and he sketches two circles on a rectangle. “Then my two younger brothers on the floor.” Two more balloons below the rectangle. “My parents in the kitchen,” only notionally separated from the front half of the room. Then he draws a line, writes on it TABLE. “My sister under the table.”
After this explanation, he takes the paper napkin
, folds it once, folds it over again, scrunches it into a ball, presses it very hard in his fingers, presses it with all his might, and when it has become small, so small that it is insignificant, he throws it away. Then he looks up and smiles at me.
WE WALK OUT into the lanes of the slum. There is a diversity of occupations here not found in the richer precincts. Girish shows me a room filled with seashells; a man is making gift items from them, some with an electric bulb implanted inside. Near the station, Girish runs into an acquaintance, a struggler in the film industry, who describes his new movie: “Love story plus a little bit mafia.” Next Girish pays his respects to a local mafia dada, Ramswamy, who lives above the Sai Betting Parlor and runs an extensive bootlegging operation. In his living room are several pictures of himself, lushly mustached, in none of which is he smiling. The dada is lying on his side, bare-chested. “A man needs to feed his stomach,” he says, and pats his belly, which has a life and shape of its own, spilling out like a seal over the bed, two deep knife marks etched into its sides like a mother of twelve’s stretch marks. Ramswamy has three official wives and ten or twelve unofficial ones; he usually begins every sentence with “Bhenchod . . .,” but with Girish he doesn’t. “He gives me respect.” I ask Girish why Ramswamy hasn’t bought himself a better flat, out of the slum. “He will only live where he can rule,” Girish explains.
