Mumbai – Don't hold your breath

Quiet days of the monsoon

When we lived by the sea in Mumbai monsoon days could be stormy. The rain would batter windows and the stormy wind would whistle through any little crack it could find. They were days when you did not want to get out of bed. But there were quiet days too when one could sit and read, drink endless cups of hot tea, and admire the constantly changing sea and sky outside the windows. The sea and the clouds were always there for us to enjoy.

Monsoon evenings were often quiet on the streets. People tended to stay at home during July and August. Sometimes The Family and I would take a late evening walk on Marine Drive and find it with very few others out for a stroll. On those quiet evenings you could really enjoy the expanse of Backbay and the curving vista of Marine Drive.

There were many quiet days in the monsoon season of 2020 when the high point of the day would be to look out of the window at beautiful sunsets and envy the crows’ freedom to fly in flocks.

But it was not only the rain which could produce quiet and calm in the bustling city. Late one October evening I was part of this wonderfully calm scene. Standing in the colonnade very late, I could hear the gentle lapping of the sea on the rocks by the shore. There was no moon, and the only light came from the lamps high up on the ceiling of the colonnade. Some program must have finished on the lawns overlooking the sea, and people had cleared up everything and stacked chairs up neatly. This is a memory that comes back to me whenever I encounter the phrase quiet hours.

Art is ephemeral

The doors of a junction box on a road are a perfect canvas for street art. But all art is ephemeral. Someone came by and stuck an advertisement over it. Art defaced without urgent existential reasons! Do we stand for this?

Saturday Sphere

One of the first technical exercises I had in our drawing classes back in school was to shade a sphere. When I saw this example in Mumbai’s Juma Masjid I remembered that old lesson and took a photo. The clear post-monsoon sky behind it also looked good to me.

Cou-door

There it was, in stark black and white: the contradictions of Mumbai. The shop sits bang opposite the stock exchange. Until a decade ago this was a district full of small businesses and tiny eateries. After the pandemic it has gentrified rapidly: couture and smart cafes have replaced the old warren of shops. I don’t blame the virus for this. I guess the change would have happened anyway, but slower. In my school days we used to ask about the acid which can eat through anything. We didn’t know that the answer was concentrated money.

Faces of Mumbai

Obtuse angles

Even after spending decades in a city, some things can flummox you. In search of an obscure government office, I found my way into a late 19th century office block. This was built just after the American Civil War, when Indian cotton took over the world market. The money from this largely stayed in London, and the little that came to stockholders in India went into building once-grand structures of this kind. In the decade following the war, around the time this building was raised, there were extensive famines in India. Such famines result from a lack of public works, such as water reservoirs, and, more importantly, the removal of surplus grains from the country.

Much of South Mumbai’s heritage structures come from this period. Even before the cotton boom there was capital accumulation in the city from what was then euphemistically called the China Trade. This was the triangle of trade: opium was grown in India to trade for Chinese tea, and the tea was traded for American cotton. Business interests in the British Empire responded to the outlawing of the slave trade by creating a system of indentured labour under which Indian farmers were forcibly transported across the world to work on cash crops. Amitabh Ghosh wrote a series of novels set in these times. Those who stayed at home were forced to grow first opium, and later, cotton. Cash crops substituted for food, creating the conditions for the famines of the next decades.

Caught in traffic in the middle of the grand old structures, I thought of the similarities in the structures and layouts that you can see across this part of the world: Mumbai, Kolkata, Yangon, and further afield. It seems fair to reuse these structures: they were built with our wealth and labour after all. They should be put to our uses. Reuse of monumental structures like these is also more climate friendly than destroying them and building anew.

Walking down the stairs that you saw in the featured photo, I noticed that the place was embellished with motifs which have been common idioms for artisans and artists in the country from before colonial times. That is a nice metaphor for the decolonisation of these structures. The British Empire took most of its administrative structure from the Mughals and reworked it to their benefit. Just so, by putting small businesses and government offices in these buildings, the early post-independence era began the process of ridding the cities of the traces of empire.

From the jetty of Elephanta island in the harbour of Mumbai I was surprised to see the trans-harbour link. Now when I drive across that bridge I make it a point to look out and spot the island. Tacitus quoted Calgacus who said of the Roman empire “to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Links like this are green growths in that desert. I begin to understand the idea of unrepresented voices and subaltern studies. A fair reckoning with this history, perhaps any history, must be told in many voices.

Contradictions

While waiting for my coffee at the bar of an empty coffee shop, I heard the man at the till read out a comment to the barista, “OMG! So much cheaper than $t@rbucks.” They all smiled. I got my coffee and before leaving said “Not just cheaper, much better too.” Their smiles got even broader. It’s absurd that a city of twenty million or more gets its espresso mainly from a single chain. The only competition is from a couple of other smaller chains. They are better, but when they grow their focus will also shift away from the coffee. I hear that it is hard to run independent coffee shops because the rent is so high in this city. Then you hear that the rent is high because there is no land to build on.

This is spurious reasoning. Every major road in the city is lined with condemned buildings just waiting to fall down. The whole mill area in the heart of the city is still waiting for development; the mills left the state in the 1960s. The photo you see is of a shopping center from the 1960s, when Bandra was still called the Queen of the Suburbs. It was abandoned about twenty years ago. The commerce of the city has begun to claim its space at the base. I’m sure it has not been torn down because of some dispute which must be in court. Every process in a court drags on for decades, so that real estate in the heart of commercial areas is locked up. New land is created by developers and flats sell at incredible prices. Someone once calculated that a single apartment building would come at the cost of a moon landing. If you hate hate the overuse of the adjective astronomical, try astronautical.

Other contradictions are apparent. Traffic is awful in the suburbs of Mumbai. At a busy junction of two arterial roads is the stump of a monorail service which has stood unaltered for a decade. The project is clearly abandoned! The pillars of the small stretch which was built over one of these roads now further chokes the traffic which must pass through it. Mass rapid transit still means the cheek to jowl traffic of the old suburban railways of Mumbai. The slow administration of courts or providing rapid transport are not unsolvable problems, but thinking about the reason nothing happens will take us into a swamp.

And the pollution? I got chatGPT to generate a haiku about it:

November’s thick haze,
Sparrow gasps in the still air,
Choking on the dusk.

It is much better to roam the crowded streets with a camera looking for simpler contradictions. Here is another of the incongruities. This building dates from the 1960s, as you could guess from the crazy tiling on the wall. It has been heavily modified of course. The plate glass window of a driving school was not of interest to me, nor the mass of airconditioning units which look like they can cool a data center. My attention was on the small white door. I’m sure the original architect didn’t plan that to go with that psychedelic wall. Or did they?

Lesser Black-backed gull + Birds of the Week Invitation XCI

Every year in September gulls begin to arrive in Mumbai from their breeding grounds in the Asian steppes or Siberia. I got a call from The Family. “Bring your camera to the seashore. Some gulls have just arrived.” They sat very quietly on a rock as the tide came in. She was right, they looked tired and in need of rest. They were medium sized gulls, yellow legs, yellow beak with a red gonydeal spot, yellow eyes with barely visible red rims, dark grey back and sides, black tail, and mostly white heads. They had to be Lesser black-backed gulls (Larus fuscus). Two subspecies can be spotted in Mumbai: the Heuglin’s and the steppe. I can’t really make out the difference.

I looked for different plumages amongst them. In this photo the individual at the top left is a juveline, still with a streaked brown back. Since its head has turned white, it is probably in its second or third winter. In the same photo there is a bird which is calling and it seems to have light coloured beaks and legs. I don’t think this is a different species. They normally forage far out in the sea, but this group will probably fly away to the harbour, and feed on the fish that the boats land in the docks there. Gulls are nothing if not opportunistic.

There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.

Birds of the Week XC

Late views over the west lawn

The middle of October is an unpredictable time for sunsets. I normally pass the promenade just before sunset. Some days the clouds cover the sun fully. Monsoon stays longer nowadays than it did twenty years ago. Some days are glorious; there are clouds over the city but not over the sea. On such days a dull day suddenly brightens up around sunset. I find this draws many people out on to the colonnaded terrace facing the sea. The featured photo shows one such day.

The season of sharad yields to hemant my now. Once the clouds go, there are some golden days before the temperature begins to drop. That used to happen at this time already, but the seasons have been pushed back over the years. Now’s not the time to think about that. It is The Family who’s been keeping a daily record of the sunsets by the sea this season, but her preferred hour is a little later. She records the last light. She will have missed these pre-sunset shows. So the task falls to me, and I do it happily.

Mumbai verticals

From what was once the center of the colonial port of Bombay, what is today called Fort Mumbai, I looked towards the harbour and saw two spires which encapsulated the different faiths of different times. The spire of St. Thomas Cathedral was built in the early 18th century CE, by the employees of the British East India Company. This was one of world’s first capitalist monopolies. Its directors and bigwigs made money which exceeds that made by today’s trillionaires. In the background is the Bombay Stock Exchange tower, to which the middle class of India pays full-throated allegiance. One may say that the love of money, which the church once hid, is now expressed.

Elsewhere in the center of Mumbai the upward urge is not a clear declaration one’s faith. It is laughable to think how Mumbai has been short of space ever since it was founded. Here, in this crowded quarter which was just outside the walls of the 18th century fort, buildings straggled up because they could not grow out. The red door is the entrance to an old Parsi restaurant which reputedly supplied food now and then to Ratan Tata. To the right is Gunbow Street, named after Ganba Shett, ancestor of the Jagannath Shankar Shett who was a 19th century moneylender to the colonial government. The blue door on the right was the entrance to the grand family home of a forgotten moneyed merchant. The building is now divided into tiny flat where the small merchants of this area live.

This post appears on schedule as I travel in parts of the world where access is blocked. I will try to see your comments and posts, but in case I’m unable to, I will catch up once I return.