I live near a famous building. It’s not a monument or a place of historic importance, just the dwelling unit of India’s richest family. Some call it a manifestation of capitalism’s worst ills. Most think it looks ugly. But everyone wants a look. Cars passing by have heads hanging out, tilted upwards, eyes focused on one object. Sometimes there are multiple heads jostling for space in one rolled down window. The tilt requires a rather uncomfortable angle, given the narrowness of the road and the height of the building, but that doesn’t stop the heads from practicing their neck yoga asanas.
I am fascinated by their fascination, and I count the tilted heads every time I walk down Pedder Road. Whenever a new guest comes home, I tell them that they can see it from windows inside every room in my house, like I’m showcasing a family heirloom, and they linger around watching, as if valuing the heirlooms worth with their eyes.
The presence of this one building lends the neighbourhood (loosely defined by the hill of Cumballa) some additional fame, but it is, on its own, worthy of attention. It gets its fame from the riches that it contains as it houses some of the wealthiest people of the country, and their cars and dogs. The dogs are of breeds not seen elsewhere in the country. The cars either look like army tanks, or are low and yellow with barely space for two. The people, however, are not to be seen. It is a strange neighbourhood with no visible neighbours. In the year or two that I have been around, I have barely seen the residents on the street. Except for some workout gear clad joggers in the evenings, the street is occupied only by security guards, maids, delivery boys, drivers and servants walking dogs.
Pedder Road is also noteworthy because it forms a passageway, once down from the sealink, to connect the suburbs to the original Bombay. Beginning together with the Mahalaxmi temple and the Haji Ali junction, it at once assumes the character of the city. Though it is easy to imagine today that this area was always at the city’s centre, one glance at the map of Bombay hanging framed in my living room proves me wrong. The map is drawn by cartoonist Mario Miranda and is titled ‘Bombay’, but has all the highlights of only South Bombay (colloquially Town) depicted as caricatures. The highest point in the map is the Hanging Garden of Malabar Hills, and none of the Cumballa Hill neighbourhood finds a place in his depiction of the city.
Mr Miranda’s imagination was cemented in my mind when I read Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s The Secret of More. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, it explores the life of Tatya, a cotton merchant making his way up in the burgeoning Bombay society. He is symbolic of those that bestowed upon the city the epithet ‘City of Dreams’. When he tells his wife of his plan to purchase a property at Pedder Road, she exclaims, '...Pedder Road is outside the town, beyond Chowpatty and Babulnath, so far away that hardly ever lives there. Why would we want to move there?’ To Tatya’s wife, moving to Cumballa Hills meant living in the wilderness.
City chroniclers Sharda Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra in their seminal work Bombay: the Cities Within have shed their researched light on this. They have written how Cumballa Hills being a higher area was where people would flee to during plague epidemics in the late 19th century. The affluent only moved up the hills with the construction of roads and the availability of motor cars. In the 1930s, a large number of stately private residences and blocks of luxury flats arose, including those of the Birlas and MK Jinnah on Mount Pleasant Road, Sir Ness Wadia’s Bell Vista on Pedder Road and Mafatlal House on Altamount Road. These old sea facing bungalows suffered their first shock after Independence and Partition, when the migrant Sindhi population’s arrival led to sale of English properties and construction of multi storeyed buildings by Sindhi and Marwari entrepreneurs. Another source of demand were the Gujarati diamond merchants, who led to further price escalation in the area. Over the last few decades, many of the exquisite bungalows have given way to luxurious sea facing apartments and towers. The northern end of Cumballa Hill, according to Dwivedi and Mehrotra, remains perhaps the only slice of the physical environment of the early 1900s.
I walk through that slice of the early 1900s quite a lot. Some days I’m taken by the banyan tree that seems to be embracing the entire alley. Some days, especially after it rains, I see that the roads glitter like the diamonds of the Gujarati merchants. During festivals the streets celebrate like the royalties would, lit up in myriad ways that only the classiest of event planners can propose. One house, with huge open windows and no grills, can be heard celebrating each evening- most days I hear musical notes being practiced, some days laughter. Another displays its library to the neighbourhood, always lit, showcasing its wealth through leather bound hardbacks. Some houses are almost abandoned, their lease costs displayed like inscriptions, security guards keeping vigil for absentee landlords. The buildings that retain their art deco origins look like islands of history in a sea of unimaginative mediocrity.
Long walks also force me to turn my gaze inwards and think about my place here, the space I occupy. I thank the combination of stars, I curse the pincode inflation. I wonder why I seem to take my neighbourhood as a case study, as a project for observation, and not for absorption or god forbid, assimilation. When someone asks me where I live, I tell them the locality, and as if to answer their questioning eyes, add that it is a government accommodation. I wonder if it is really my insecurity that is holding me back or am I holding on to my insecurity as an anchor in this shiny new world. I wonder if the lack of feeling of belonging is because everything is fragile- stained glass windows, a sculpture outside a mansion, a glimpse of a chandelier, too perfect to be real.
I think about Mahim boy Yuri, the protagonist of Jerry Pinto’s bildungsroman The Education of Yuri, and how his friendship with Pedder Road Muzzamil began with awe. In the Bombay of the 80s, they came from different worlds- Muzzamil opens his packed tiffin with sandwiches and a handwritten note from his mother in copperplate script, Yuri has to manage his own lunch from the 10rs he gets as lunch money, much of which he spends on books. On moving to their Pedder Road mansion, Tatya’s daughter Durga befriends her neighbour Gitanjali, the daughter of the ruler of a Princely State, a Princess. It is the early 1930s, the girls are amongst the few who go to schools, but in their interaction was hesitance and reticence; that her father owned a property next to one rented by royals didn't guarantee Durga equality in stature. Yuri’s friendship with his friend Bhavna is affected by their nascent socialist politics; when they talk of revolution, they are acutely aware of the privilege that her father being a senior government servant brings. I feel I wear Bhavna’s shoe on one foot and her father’s on another, occupying two worlds, unsettled, perpetually in transition.
I look at these works of fiction to make sense of this neighbourhood because reality around has muddled contours, contradictions are the rule rather than the exception. One building near me perpetually hoists a 7X6 ft National Flag, winning the right to do so through a long legal battle, wearing its patriotism on its balcony. Across the road stands demolished Pratibha, a building that announced with itself the beginning of housing scams in the city. On one edge of the hill stands the extravagantly named mansion, Baitul Suroor, ‘house of happiness’ of a former gangster on whose life the movie Deewar was ostensibly made. And not many walls separate it from the residences of yesteryear superstars Madhubala and Guru Dutt, who both breathed their last here. Known faces, concrete examples carry a weight of history that cannot be contained in archives.
Reviving the lives of Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai and their science that is taken for granted, last year OTT series ‘Rocket Boys’ gained popularity and praise. Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born in Kenilworth at Peddar Road, a mansion that now stands demolished and replaced by apartments for BARC employees, but a plaque commemorating him is embedded in the hill-walls. The proximity to the residence piqued my interest in the scientist and consequently the show, and a series of fortunate events later I found myself sitting next to the actor who played the star. Out of everything that I could have said to him, every bit of praise that I had rehearsed, I spoke about the feeling of otherness of staying in this neighbourhood, the loneliness, that age old feeling of being a misfit. Afterwards, I rebuked myself- what need did I have to bare my anxieties in front of a stranger? Was I seeking sympathy, the insecurity manifesting as a need for attention? And sympathy for what- having neighbours with their own helipads?
It was this meeting, no, my behaviour in this meeting, that made me take a relook at my surroundings and my perception of them. I had been placing myself as a victim of my habitat, trapped as though I was in a glass cage. But there were doors and windows in and out. I hadn’t been reading the texts properly. I hadn’t paid attention when Muzammil told the liftman, as Yuri and him returned to his home after a spat, 'Maine iska dil dukhaya’. Yuri had added ‘Maine bhi,’ and the liftman had replied, ‘Yaari-dosti mein aisa hota hai’. They had not only found friendship overcoming their differences, they had found the courage to voice their vulnerabilities and hold on to their friendship.
There had to be a revised code of conduct for neighbourly interaction. In the era of fifteen minute grocery deliveries, carrying a cup for sugar no longer sufficed. Perhaps it had to start with smiling at the fellow joggers that tried to pace up slopes, struggling, failing. Or with standing below that house that spins music every evening a little longer, waiting to say hello to the figure at the window. Or maybe I only need to disentangle myself from my surroundings, to know that fitting in or standing out are not the only two ways to reside, that if one lives lighter, unattached, one can occupy any space and fill it.
You have spoken so evocatively about the feeling of otherness in your neighborhood. I felt that all throughout the 10 years that I stayed in Bombay. It was not half as posh as your abode but somehow you feel attached to the long thread that is existence in Bombay. I cannot count how many times I have crossed the places you have mentioned. I cannot count one place outside of work building and my home that I have visited in(edited from ‘is’)Bombay ‘for leisure’. The daily grind of a below average existence is demanding and barely gives you time to reflect, let alone soak in anything that is not ‘’work’.
Bombay feels better since I have left it. It is better to romance its thought than to have a relationship with it I guess.
This part made me come back to life because I have experienced something similar recently.
‘Afterwards, I rebuked myself- what need did I have to bare my anxieties in front of a stranger? Was I seeking sympathy, the insecurity manifesting as a need for attention?’
I guess many a times we do things without a second thought because we feel safe. I am pretty sure Jim made you feel like that when you shared the thought with him. I hope you didn’t feel bad about that for long.
Thank you for sharing this with us.
Lovely writing Soumya. I have lived in Bombay for some years. Always felt it was a nice place to visit but not stay. An auto wallah on my recent visit to Bombay made this comment "यहां समय की कीमत है और अपने गाँव में इंसान की "