On my very first day in boarding school, I risked a bloody nose by taking punga with the school bully. I was manfully tucking into the maybe-goat,maybe-beef curry with my spoon and fork when he glared at me saying,“Where you from, men?” “Er, Mangalore, sir,” I replied whereupon he took umbrage; as any fule kno anyone from South of the Vindhyas is a bloodyMadrasi. I was prepared to allow this appalling ignorance to sail past me likethe idle wind but he wasn’t done yet, “Whatcha eating like an Englishman with a spoon and fork? Eat with your bleddy hands, I want you to slurp all the way to your elbows like those Tamil films,” he ordered. It may not have been the right moment to defend Tamil culture, the Chola dynasty and the venerable art of “dirty fingers, clean palm” which is the hallmark of the Tam-Brahm method, but I gave it a shot. Unfortunately so did he with a biff to my nose but I bore him no malice: lectures come at a cost.
Each time I venture north of the Vindhyas to Mumbai, I am struck by the distinctive odour of the place: a curious miasma of rotting fish and sweat,underscored by bad plumbing, although the long-suffering residents of Bellandur may disagree. Mumbaikars and Bangaloreans are like chalk and cheese and while their regional differences would occupy a social scientist as much as Madhuri Dixit’s hips inspired M.F. Hussain, they are separated by much more than a mountain range.
Clearly Rudyard Kipling probably didn’t spend much time in the West,which accounts for his, “East is East and West is West and n’er the twain shall meet” theory. Perfectly obvious, old chap, unless they’re booked in the same compartment, and do something about that lisp, would you? It’s train, not twain. Or perhaps he was referring to the other Twain from theMississippi region, if you’ll forgive an awful pun?
Bal Thackeray elevated the milking of Marathi sentiment into a fine art by randomly choosing scapegoats: first it was the Tamilians, then the Malyalees and then it was Bihar’s turn. As long as the Marathi manoos had someone else to blame for his plight, he could continue to sit on his bottom and rail about the injustice of life and how the outsiders were responsible. Mumbai is where the rat race meets Exodus, without the Pied Piper to direct the traffic.
I’m guilty of generalizing, but since one can’t discuss a subject on any significant level without doing so, here goes. Mumbaikars are businesslike,brusque to the point of rudeness, matter-of-fact, blasé, have been to hell and heaven and can’t tell the difference, know the value of a buck and yet, they nurture a deep and abiding appreciation for music and theatre. They display stoicism in a crisis and have more good Samaritans than any other city: witness the camaraderie and basic human decency displayed by ordinary folks during the bomb blasts and the floods.
I once ran a red light in Mumbai and was flagged down by a cop and then made the mistake of trying to wheedle my way out of paying the fine by claiming to be from Bengaluru. Without raising his eyes from the challan he wearily asked, “Arre bhai, uther red light nahin hote, kya?” which translates as, “Hello ditzhead, don’t you have red lights where you come from?”
Speaking of which, Mumbai is perhaps the only city with licensed red-light areas, with that exquisite blend of sleaziness, furtive pleasure and traum associated with the commercial sex industry.
Courtesans and nautch-girls wield the whip in more ways than one…if you catch my drift? For those familiar with the O Henry short story in which the girl sells her beautiful hair to a wig-maker in order to buy her lover a chainfor his treasured fob-watch and loverboy sells the watch to buy girlfriend an exquisite set of tortoise-shell combs for her lustrous tresses, the Mumbai version of the story would have featured a nose-job, a kidney transplant or penile enhancement surgery. Wish-fulfillment: I want it all and I want it now, is the mantra of the city.
A learned friend of mine has a theory that the only true native Mumbaikar is a Kohli fisherman. The rest, he says, are interlopers from Gujarat: diamond merchants with a side business of Bollywood funding while worshipping their mothers with the reverence others reserve for the almighty. They are also remarkably efficient: give them a riot and they’ll land up with their cellphones, barking instructions to their near and dear as to where the best looting opportunities are to be had.
