Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Home Truths

Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Home Truths
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Home. It’s been called ‘the most popular, and most enduring of all earthly establishments’, a ‘heaven for beginners’ and ‘the nicest word that exists.’

According to Maya Angelou ‘the ache for home lives in all of us’; TS Eliot believed ‘home is where one starts from; and lyricists like Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi and Shailendra have immortalised its appeal, almost since the beginning of time.

Like everything else in Mumbai, homes come in various styles, sizes and shapes: mid-size apartments in high rise towers, postage stamp rooms in crumbling chawls, high ceilinged residences in Edwardian establishments, prized art deco quarters overlooking sumptuous maidans, match box flats in ersatz, soulless structures, luxury penthouses in shiny new constructions, cramped digs in barely standing slums, unprepossessing pads in unremarkable premises….

Indeed, the places where Mumbai emerges from each morning and returns to each evening are as diverse, wide ranging and haphazard as its citizenry. What is universal is the emotion home evokes –as a place where we feel we belong, can rest our heads, be at ease and ourselves, away from the madding crowd and the public gaze.

During the two years of the pandemic, home has also been a place where we took cover, laid low and sought refuge, imprisoned within the four walls of a place which we’d mostly taken for granted, but soon began to recognise as the incubators and nests where we could put our lives on hold for a while.

A New Yorker cartoon had brilliantly captured what home had come to symbolise for us ever since March 2020 when Covid 19 had upended our lives. Faced with two dissolute guests curled up fast asleep in foetal positions on their sofa and carpet, a man says to his shocked wife “ All I said to them was: ‘Make yourself at home…’

***

A man’s home is supposed to be his castle; in Bollywood, a star’s home is often his Mannat, a symbol of his realised dreams, aspirations and hard-won success.

These days most top stars prefer to live in high rises with 24X7 security, lavish lobbies and well-maintained common areas, but back in the day, no self-respecting leading male or female star would have liked to be seen without their opulent mansion with sweeping terraces and perfectly maintained, pretty as a picture lawn and rose bushes.

In fact, Mumbai, especially its north western suburbs is dotted with the imposing bungalows of industry stalwarts like Dilip Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Sanjay Khan and Anil Kapoor. But it is not only the stars from Bollywood’s firmament who reside here. Bandra Khar and parts of Juhu still boast of many one storey vintage structures, inhabited by ordinary

(read less famous) individuals who have been lucky enough to have inherited or acquired them; Others have been pulled down to make room for spanking new high rises which will bear the memory of their past glamour only as that special perfume called ‘So and So once lived here’.

***

Because, in the end no matter how enduring and eternal they feel or look, homes are ephemeral things. We invest into them lifespans of our time, money, energy and emotion, but they are in fact, figments of our imagination, here today, gone tomorrow. One of the horrors of the ongoing war in Ukraine is that it shows us in graphic detail, through one blown up structure after another, just how fragile our concept of home really is.

To see half destroyed rooms with closets full of clothes, crockery and toys and all that constitutes our ordinary lives, bereft of the people who once inhabited them, because they’ve either escaped in the nick of time to safety or have perished even as they lay asleep in their beds, is a chilling indictment of our naïve belief that our homes are our last refuge, the place where we are safe.

What must it be like to watch the vestiges of our humble, cherished spaces, the ones which we have decorated with years of living, now as a document of destruction and decimation? What does it feel to know that home is a place where one can never return?

Some of us in Mumbai are the descendants of people who came as refugees from across the border after partition, from homes and lands that they could never return to. The agony of such losses has been a fixture of our childhood memory. How a tune, a turn of phrase, a change in the weather, could bring a wistful pause in the conversation, a tightening of the jaw, a choking of the voice, an unshed tear, for a place they could never return to, but one they had never really left. Across the world, there are many such people, from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Kashmir, coping with the loss of their homelands with an ache that will define their lives and those of their families for generations.

***

Last Sunday, spontaneously, taking courage in my hands, I visited a neighbourhood where I had previously lived. Though according to GPRS and as the crow flies, it lay only a few kilometres away from my current residence, in my heart it had existed enshrined in that special place where we tuck away our most cherished illusions, the ones we’ve grown up with and that have that shaped our worldview.

For decades I had resisted actually going there, preferring to think about it as the idyllic overgrown utopia of childhood, innocence and mystery.

And then just like that, last week on a bright, hot afternoon, there I was walking through the playground of my youth, under the tense gaze of a security officer, hired to keep people just like me, who did not belong in that neighbourhood- out.

Hadn’t there been more trees? And where were the thatched roof cottages with their welcoming bent cane furniture? What had happened to the open kitchens always welcoming with the sound of laughter and a cool nimbu pani or a hot chocolate? Behind the imposing facades and impressive gates, I could recognise no vestige of what I had carried in my head and heart for all those years, no semblance of my own story, no clue to my family’s history or existence. Time had wiped it all out, irredeemably and without a trace.

After a few minutes of walking aimlessly around, I had given up. Indeed, my afternoon spent in my childhood neighbourhood had taught me what everyone who has loved and lost their homes or their homelands ultimately has to come to terms with: The only homes we really possess are those we carry within us- and if we are lucky, they are comfortable, nurturing, have a few windows looking outwards – and a pleasant view…

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