[Reader-list] Bombay / New York: Urban Glory

[Harsh Kapoor]

The New York Times
February 17, 2002
CORRESPONDENCE

Urban Glory

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

PHOTO: The crush of arrival and departure at the Churchgate railroad 
station, in Bombay, India.

BOMBAY

New York, the place I came from six weeks ago, recently rediscovered 
- at terrible cost - some of the reasons cities are great. They are, 
as New York has showed, humanity's great reservoirs of kindness, 
civility and resilience. Only cities can turn ruin and death into a 
kind of collective grandeur.

Grandeur may not be the first thing you think of, watching as, with a 
look that says, "I will get a seat on this train even if I have to 
kill you," the working girls of Bombay sprint in their sweat- stained 
saris up the platform of the Churchgate railroad station and jump on 
board before the arriving train comes to a halt.
A seat on a rush-hour train, as it wends its way north from 
Churchgate, is as precious as sleep, and anyone who stands idly in 
the way will most certainly be bruised, bonked and subjected, in 
rapid-fire Hindi, to Bombay's worst insult: "When did she get here 
from the village?"

Then again, by the time the working girls of the second-class ladies 
compartment ("For Ladies Only, all the 24 hours," it is marked 
outside) get on board, they have dodged Bombay's nearly homicidal 
rush-hour traffic, skipped over a bandaged or limbless beggar (some 
authentic, some fake, some children), haggled over the price of 
bananas and green beans or pumpkin or eggplant from the hawkers 
lining the corridor to the station and passed a small army of men 
urinating along the streets.

Much is made of Bombay's glorious past. In Indian lore, this was the 
city of gold, a citadel of civility. In modern times, Bombay became 
India's equivalent of Manhattan — the big town an ambitious boy from 
the provinces could go to make it among the soaring skyscrapers.

But these days, Bombay has come to represent another sort of 
urbanity. The buildings are falling down and the streets are clogged 
and the stench is enough to make the dogs howl. Indeed Bombay has 
become the subject of great debate. This month, Outlook, a national 
news magazine, declared in a cover story on Bombay: "The Death of a 
Great City."

The story listed some of the city's innumerable ills: crumbling 
infrastructure, rising religious intolerance, the miserable state of 
its poor.

To all of which Midday, Bombay's afternoon tabloid, roared back: 
"Dead? Not Us!"

In fact, Bombay continues, somehow, to thrive. And part of its magic 
lies in being able to turn its appalling disorder into an 
idiosyncratic, improvisational, style of life. As the formal, planned 
city falls into disrepair, the scrappy, informal one finds a way to 
make do. A boy from the provinces may think twice about coming here 
(he may go to New York instead), but dreams are still here and people 
still come to realize them.

To many who live here, that Bombay is getting worse, while 
demonstrably true, is beside the point. The brawl of daily life is 
what you sign up for. "Bombay is a terrible place but a great city," 
Charles Correa, the city's most famous architect, said in a new and 
much talked about documentary about Bombay called "One City, Two 
Worlds." If he had to choose, he added, he would choose the great 
city.

A kind of communal grandeur can be experienced daily, in a small way, 
on the train rumbling slowly out of Churchgate station. Those with 
seats start chopping and peeling in preparation for dinner. Among the 
standees, pressed shoulder to hip in the sweltering heat, the 
luckiest find space near the open train doors, saris trailing in the 
wind.

Bombay's trains ferry seven million commuters a day, several times 
their capacity, and fatal accidents are a regular occurrence. But by 
some daily miracle of civility and forbearance few ever seem to go 
mad from the heat, the hustle, the claustrophobic press of sweating 
midriffs.

Instead, the women open their tiffin canisters and share grapes. They 
inspect the baskets of hawkers selling sesame candy, potato chips, 
glass bangles, feather dusters, hair clips and packets of delicate 
stick-on bindis to adorn the forehead. One or two somehow sleep 
through it all. (One of the men's cars, equally crowded, is devoted 
to passengers who like to sing the bouncy Hindu hymns called bhajans 
all the way home.)

A sorority of the daily commute emerges this way — "train friends" 
they are called. Chances are these women know only each others' first 
names, workplaces and stations of embarkation and disembarkation. But 
it is real friendship, nonetheless. A journalist friend tells me a 
story about a colleague who, out of the blue, was diagnosed with 
cancer and immediately checked into a hospital for treatment. Two 
weeks later, a stranger popped into the sick woman's office and asked 
after her. "She is my train friend," the visitor said. "We haven't 
seen her in two weeks. Is everything all right?"

Several days later, a gaggle of train friends showed up at her 
hospital bedside.

The journalist tells this story with an only-in- Bombay sort of 
wistfulness that puzzles the casual visitor. But this is how 
Bombayites are. They won't live anywhere else. As a New Yorker, 
commuting by subway and living in my closet-sized allotment of space, 
I think I understand.

According to the 2001 census, 11.9 million people live within the 
city limits and nearly 16 in the entire metropolitan region. By 2015, 
Bombay is projected to be the largest city in the world, with an 
almost unimaginable 28 million souls. It's the third world city of 
the future, a megalopolis of nightmarish statistics stained with 
red-black juice of the betel nut, the city's chewing gum.
Sleep in Bombay, even if you're staying at the ultra-posh Taj Hotel, 
is fleeting. There may be a convention of argumentative crows outside 
your window. Or a pack of stray dogs may be disputing ownership of a 
garbage heap. All through the day, knife-sharpeners and vegetable 
peddlers and ice-cream sellers and monkey tricksters parade down the 
streets, each with their own distinct sirens to announce their coming.

A friend from Brooklyn has just come back to Bombay. He wants me to 
see the oasis of temples tucked in the middle of the city. He wants 
me to smell the spice factory from the roaring train. He is waiting 
for the monsoon to come. To watch it pour, he will go to Marine 
Drive, that curving, glittering thoroughfare along the Arabian Sea 
that people here call the Queen's Necklace.

THE monsoons here will make you cry, the locals tell me; to see it, 
tourists from the Arab world pack the Taj Mahal hotel. They check 
into the coveted seaward rooms and watch the rain pouring down on the 
harbor. They take home parrots.

Marine Drive is also famous for a unique Bombay creature: the 
tetrapod. They are the octopus-like concrete structures placed along 
the seaside. They have many uses: to sprawl out on for an afternoon 
siesta, to sit and stare at the water, to squat on and defecate at 
dawn should you be among the millions of Bombayites who lack access 
to a toilet.
The tetrapods are designed to keep back the sea, and they make Kiran 
Nagarkar, a novelist and another Bombay native in love, giggle with 
pleasure. "There are times when I could just hug this city," Mr. 
Nagarkar tells me, eyes closed in a beatific smile. "The sea. The 
tetrapods..." his voice trails off.

My Brooklynite friend sends me something from the Bombay poet, Nissim 
Ezekiel. I suspect he wants me to understand why he's not coming back 
to Brooklyn. The poem is called "Island."

Unsuitable for song as well as sense

the island flowers into slums

and skyscrapers, reflecting

precisely the growth of my mind.

I am here to find my way in it.

Just like New York.
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