At one of the editions of the Goa Arts & Literary Festival, Teju Cole was speaking about his book Open City which features a Nigerian immigrant Julius, who having recently broken up with his girlfriend, walks obsessively through the city.
“Why does he never leave Manhattan?” he was asked, to which he answered in typical New Yorker fashion: “What can I say? The brother has a problem.”
To those of you who have asked over email, in tunes ranging from the petulant to the curious, whether I ever plan to leave the island city and walk through the suburbs: Yes, I plan to. Quite soon.
But right now, I walk dreamy-eyed through Kandeel Gully, blazing with colour in the village of miracles, Mahikavati known to everyone else as Mahim. As a young man I spent a great deal of energy trying to get away from Mahim. It seemed small and cramped. I developed this notion when I was around twelve years old. I had gone to the triplet cinemas—Baadal, Bijlee-Barkha for a film—and on the way back, walked down Manmala Tank Road to check in on the turtles.
Yes, the turtles.
The well at Sri Saath Aasra Manmala Devi Mandir (as she is properly known) has a well that has turtles and catfish and it was our pleasure as young people to hang over the edge of the well and peer into its depths. I revisited the site and am pleased to say that both species seem to have survived the pandemic. Perhaps they had received a blessing from Khokhli Mai, the goddess of the cough, who has been beautifully praised by Bahinabai Chaudhari. (Bahinabai has been translated recently by a Mahim stalwart, Anjali Purohit.)
Someone told my father that I had been spotted doing this well-gazing and since an uncle of mine had died by drowning and I could not swim, I got it in the neck that evening. But I remember thinking: What is it with this place that a man can’t drape himself over the wall of a well and peer into it without someone running to tell his father about it?
In my forties, I made my return and found that Mahim was about the size for me. It makes for a good walk, too far and you spill into Shivaji Park which has its own delights; and too much farther and you leave the island city.
There was a time when, of course, we had to go across from Reti Bunder to Bandra by ferry. (The Reti Bunder was where sand was brought in by ship to feed the construction industry of the city.) The Lady Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy was granted the boon of a child by Mother Mary of the Mount and she built the causeway that connected the city and the suburbs. Those were the days when Parsis made grand gestures for their city and their country.
When I was a young lad, there were several cinemas in the area: the aforementioned triplets, Paradise and Citylight, Rivoli and Shree Cinema but still this was not enough and so my sister and I crossed the Mahim Khadi — there is a novella by the name of ‘Mahimchi Khadi’ by Madhu Mangesh Karnik (It’s still on my To Be Read list) — to get to Bandra Talkies, and the triplets by the railway lines Gaiety-Galaxy-Gemini. Another favoured walk was to another set of triplets: Satyam-Sundaram-Sachinam. We walked because we had a choice: samosas or bus tickets. We chose samosas and we walked.
I had promised myself when I began writing this column that I would not be constantly moaning about how difficult it is to walk in the city. Of course, it is. That’s why we should do it. Because each act of walking is about pushing back against the forces that want to bundle us out of sight, underground, into trains and buses and other motorized transport. Each act of walking is about becoming aware that every assumption of familiarity is false. The city is changing all the time and one strange sign of modernity is how many cake shops we now have per square mile. Who can be eating such industrial quantities of butter cream? Does everyone believe that the blue comes from those madly expensive blueberries?
As I walk, I walk with Manto who lived here for a while and with Sitara Devi on whose love life he wrote spicy vignettes. On the seaside, Mahim dargah, the resting place of the patron saint of the Mumbai police. Narayan Surve, the great poet of the mill lands, lived here too. His father was an epic walker. Consider this. One morning Gangaram Surve walked to work. This meant he walked to Mahalaxmi. When he was nearing the mill, he heard a baby crying. He traced the sound to a rubbish heap and picked up the baby and walked home again. He left the baby with friends and walked back to work. Remember this was during the time that the mills had twelve-hour shifts and he would be on his feet for most of that time.
And yet he found it in his heart to adopt the baby he had found.
We need all the big hearts we can get. We need philanthropists to build road and millworkers to shelter the poets of the future.
(Write in to jerrywalksmumbai@gmail.com with bouquets and brickbats. Meanwhile: chalte, chalte mere yeh geet yaad rakhna, kabhi alvidaa na kehna…)