Maximum City (43 page)

Gautama starts speaking Bambaiyya Hindi, that rough carpenter’s language. “You’re a bekaar amma,” he tells his mother, when vexed. He is finding his place in the country of his bloodline. The kids of the building are playing Holi, and to my great surprise my son is laughing with them, bedecked. The parking lot downstairs has turned into a carnival. With every face multicolored, no one can see who’s a servant and who’s a sheth; all are drunk or stoned. You can even touch the women; on this day you can touch all the women.

In India, people are friendly to my boys. The receptionist at the airport lounge follows us about, makes us coffee, brings out cookies for the kids. She engages Gautama in conversation; they discuss the toys each of them possesses. A businessman looks up from his morning paper and speaks to Akash in Tamil. In India, my kids approach strangers with confidence; they rest their hands on our guests’ knees, play with the women’s dupattas. They will have to learn to put more distance between themselves and other people when we go back to America. They must learn that people don’t like to be touched. Why, it’s happened right here, in the first-world parts of Bombay. A friend who has lived in New York and returned is irritated by Akash because he touches things in her apartment—the music system—and climbs on her table. Then, in the taxi going home, the driver turns around and says, without preamble, “Children live under the shade of God. What adults wouldn’t be able to tolerate, if they get hurt, doesn’t affect little children.”

The rich have the theater, parties, foreign trips. The poor have their children; they are entertained by them, they are sustained by them. When they come home off the Virar local, the children are awake, later than they really should be—they will have trouble getting up for school in the
morning—but the fathers want it. They want to see their children for the half hour that tells them what they’ve been working for. Murderers, whores, clerks, drain cleaners, and struggling film actors alike live for the moment when they go home and their little girl comes running up to them, or wakes from deep sleep and scolds them for not coming home sooner. On holidays, they sit in the one room, watching their own children play with the neighbors’ children, commenting on the habits and preferences and eccentricities of each, following their feuds like bards in medieval Italian courts. In the evening they might take the children, their own and the neighbors’, to a picture, sneak in the over-five-year-old and put the child on his father’s lap, eat the homemade snacks prepared by the women, and watch Amitabh Bacchan fight and dance, those creatures of light, till the child, against his will, gradually subsides, and his head drops, and the air-conditioning isn’t working, and the boy is six years old, but on his father’s lap he isn’t heavy; he has very little weight, hardly any weight at all.

W
HOSE CITY IS
B
OMBAY
? Bombay is the vadapav eaters’ city, Mama of the Rajan Company had said to me. It is the lunch of the chawl dwellers, the cart pullers, the street urchins; the clerks, the cops, and the gangsters.

I ask people sitting around my uncle’s office where the best vadapav in Bombay is. They chorus in unison: “Borkar!” I set out into the afternoon heat of the central city in search of Borkar. I don’t have much time; they have told me Borkar conducts his trade for only three hours a day, from four to seven, or till the vadas are gone. I walk along narrow roads dug up in the center, revealing gaping holes, past a vegetable market, past Kotachi Wadi, where some of the loveliest old houses are still inhabited by the original Catholic tenants, past the wedding-card market, past the Jain Clinic, till finally I get to Borkar. There is a small crowd of people, men to one side, women to the other, holding out money. Borkar sits on his stall, frying up a fresh batch. An old board says:

I wait for him to finish frying; the dozens of people around me do the same. I am tensed, with my money at the ready. As soon as the ladle emerges from the vat of boiling oil full of vadas, beignets conjoined with wisps of yellow batter, the frenzy begins. People are thrusting their money forward, mostly 10-rupee notes; in front of the assistant is a thali full of 2-rupee coins. Nobody seems to be ordering just one. Not everybody will get their vadapav from this batch; the timid will have to keep waiting. The assistant serves the women first. The stacks of pav have been sprinkled with chutney—the top half of the inside of the bun is bathed in green chutney, the bottom with red garlic chutney—and the assistant reaches out with one hand, in one continuous arc of his arm opening the pav, scooping up two of the vadas, one in each nest of pav, and delivering it to the hungry customer. I walk away from the stall and crush the vada by pressing down on it with the pav; little cracks appear in the crispy surface, and the vada oozes out its potato-and-pea mixture. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of the vada mixture—dark with garam masala and studded with whole cloves of garlic that look like cashews—get masticated into a good mouthful, a good
mouth-feel.
My stomach is getting filled, and I feel I am eating something nourishing after a long spell of sobbing. Borkar has done his dharma.

I go next to the cold-drink house at Sikkanagar, thirsty after the fire of the vadapav. There are pleasant Formica booths to sit in; the whole space has a restful, leisurely atmosphere, within which one can sip one’s cold drink and watch the bustling street in peace. There is a menu of sherbets on the wall in Marathi; each is reputed to have some salubrious property. The amla essence is good for urinary problems, night blindness, and aggravation; the ginger sherbet is recommended for flatulence, bronchitis, and menstrual pain. Most of them taste great and are a quiet subversion of the worldwide dominance of cola-flavored drinks. In fact, you can launch a direct assault on Coca-Cola: You can order a masala Coke. This is the same old Coca-Cola you know, the same fizzy brown liquid, but with lemon, rock salt, pepper, and cumin added to it. When the Coke is poured into the glass, which has a couple of teaspoons of the masala waiting to attack the liquid from the bottom up, the American drink froths up in astonished anger. The waiter stands at your booth, waiting till the froth dies down,
then puts in a little more of the Coke, then waits a moment more, then pours in the rest. And, lo! it has become a Hindu Coke. The alien invader has come into the country. It has been accepted into the pantheon of local drinks but has a little spice added to it, a little more zing. The cocaine is back in the Coke.

My nose is red and raw from the pollution of the central city, but I can’t keep my eyes from the psychedelic chaos of the streetscape. Rows of small shops, each dedicated to furnishing the city with a microscopically precise commodity or service: wood furniture polish, typing, hair oil, fireworks, roasted chapatis, coffins, handmade footwear. These shops are run now by the fourth generation of the same family. They live upstairs in the same building, paying 15 rupees, 45 rupees, as rent. The shops are open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and the owners know where to get the best rose sherbet, the best sabudana khichdi, in that universal intimacy small traders have with street food. When out-of-town relatives come visiting, the sightseeing doesn’t go much beyond this quarter. The evening is capped off, as mine often is, with the last show at Maratha Mandir. The shopowners can never earn enough to get out of their rented accommodations, but such a possibility is unthinkable anyway. Their children will inherit this business, going strong since British times. Over patient decades, a high degree of comfort, of familiarity, has evolved.

I
REDISCOVER THE
I
RANI RESTAURANTS
, among my favorite places in Bombay to meet people or just to come in from the heat and wait. One of the lodestars of my childhood was the Café Naaz, up on Malabar Hill. It came to the city along with independence and had the finest and cheapest views of the city. I would go there every time I came back to Bombay and sit on the highest terrace (which had a 15-rupee fee added to the bill for the privilege) and, overlooking all of Chowpatty and keeping hungry crows at bay, drink my beer and catch up with friends from all countries. The avenging forces of the city government, hell-bent on destroying any vestige of beauty within the precincts of Mumbai, swooped down. The Café Naaz had been leased from the city, and there was a fight among the family members who owned it; the Municipal Corporation revoked the lease, demolished the café, and erected a water monitoring station in its place. It was too inexpensively lovely to survive in modern Mumbai.

The Iranis came to Bombay around the turn of the twentieth century. They were Zoroastrians who came from the smaller villages of Persia, such as Yezd, not from the cities, and were not well off in their home country. The Iranis were very hard workers but were persecuted for their religion in Iran. They were distinct from the Parsis, who were Iranian Zoroastrians who came to India from the eighth century onward.

The Iranis began as dealers in provisions and branched out into bakeries and eateries. They benefited from a superstition among their Hindu business competitors: It is unlucky to place a shop on a street corner. For the Iranis it was lucky; their establishments are visible on two sides and have lots of light and air because they are wide open to the intersection. They are furnished with marble-top tables and bent teakwood chairs; the walls are typically adorned with portraits of Zoroaster and full-length mirrors. Over the sink where you wash your hands in the back might be a set of instructions, which the poet Nissim Ezekiel realized form a complete poem:

An Irani serves the simplest of menus: tea, coffee, bread and butter (always Polson), salted biscuits, cakes, hard bread, buttered buns, hard-boiled eggs, buns with mincemeat, berry pilaf, and mutton biryani. Mostly the Iranis sell time and shade: A cup of tea and the table is yours for an hour while you read your newspaper or look out at the street circus. They are a whole world away, in price and atmosphere, from the Punjabi and Chinese restaurants that are now all the rage among the middle class. Your family need make no sacrifices so that you can eat here.

The clientele of the Iranis came from immigrant laborers in the city,
who lived eight to a room and needed cheap basic meals—tea and brun maska, a hard bread with butter. If they couldn’t afford brun maska they could have a khara biscuit. It was and remains a filler for those who can’t afford anything else; the tea gives the poor energy from the many spoons of sugar in each cup. In the seventies, the South Indian Udupis started replacing the Iranis and are themselves getting replaced by beer bars. Very few of the owners’ children are interested in carrying on with the Iranis; because of the community’s emphasis on education, they’ve branched off into the professions or gone abroad. So some of the Iranis have turned into banks and department stores. Others have met change halfway, dividing their interiors into an area where beer can be consumed—the “permit room”—and another strictly for tea—the “family room.”

One of those is, along with the Naaz, my favorite Irani, the Brabourne, which has been around since 1934. It used to be a stable. It is named after Lord Brabourne, the governor of Bombay at the time. Rashid Irani is one of the owners of the Brabourne. He has no family, but he does have three or four thousand books in his flat; he writes film reviews and keeps an open house for Bombay’s writers, painters, and filmmakers. Rashid’s Irani is one of the last four or five Iranis that hasn’t gone upmarket. It serves simple fare: eggs, bread, minced beef, biscuits, tea. Twelve years ago Rashid added beer to his Irani’s offerings, and now the evening hours are filled mostly with beer drinkers, some of them just waiting out the peak hours before the long commute home. “What a lovely way to wait!” exclaims Rashid.

Rashid wants to keep the Brabourne just the way it is. There is a great sense of space at the Brabourne not found in Bombay at restaurants ten times as expensive. For a couple of years in the seventies, the Brabourne experimented with a jukebox, playing Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, and Hindi film songs for 4 annas each. “We tried to get trendy.” But there was a problem: the music. At the Brabourne, the waiter announces the bill to the owners instead of giving him a piece of paper. The partners, of the old generation and therefore hard of hearing, said, “What the hell, we can’t hear what the waiters are saying.” So they got rid of the jukebox and the Brabourne returned to its sedate self, the only noise the occasional shouts of inebriated cotton merchants discussing cricket.

The Brabourne has its set rhythms. It opens at six-thirty for people wanting their first cup of tea. Then the taxi drivers come in for their break
fast of “doll,” which is the Parsi way of saying dal, eaten with pav bread. “The afternoon is colorless,” as Rashid puts it. In the evening, people come for their beer. There is a huge cloth market nearby, and the cloth traders come in around seven. They talk mostly among themselves and live in the suburbs; they have a couple of beers here because they can’t drink at home. At ten o’clock, Rashid pulls down the shutters. “For a bar we shut far too early,” he says.

Most of the customers are of a certain age. In the mornings, from six onward, the tables are taken by the longtime regulars, mostly Parsis and Catholics. One group of four or five old Parsi men has a favorite table at the Brabourne. They get very anxious if they have to sit anywhere else. If there is just one person occupying that table, they will sit at the table next to or across from it and stare at him silently. Or they will stand around it and crowd the usurper. “It’s a fetish,” says Rashid. Once ensconced at their table, they will discuss issues of the day with vehemence. But the first thing they turn to is the Deaths column in the
Jam-e-Jamshed
, the community organ, the chronicler of the steady diminishment of their community.