If you tossed a doubt or question at its colossal sea face and gave it an ear, the waves, shifting, yet firm, salient, never silent, compelled you to find a way. Mumbai, more than any other city in India, was where lives were lived and still others made.
Visiting a city and living there, however, are two different things. Same game, new rules.
When you’ve lived all your life in a town that was fast-tracked into a city and suddenly find yourself in this bustling metropolis that stops for no one, you’re outpaced. Mumbai lives faster than her express trains. She’s impersonal. She has much to accomplish and little time to spare, and she doesn’t necessarily care. You can flail and fall; nobody will give you so much as a glance. It’s your mess to clear, dear. Her streets are a stage for great excesses, catwalks for the very latest in designer bags orgarish fakes with the right label fixed the wrong way. The wealth that some of her residents flaunt is obscene while her footpaths work as beds for others. Her weather, like her pace, is brutal. I had never before woken up to 33-degree mornings, but wake up I did.
I cried so much in the initial part of the six months I’d been living here, I might’ve flooded these narrow lanes. But each time I walked these streets, not necessarily to get anywhere, I learnt to embrace her. Step by step. Mumbai wasn’t home, but I had come to think of her warmly, like a comrade’s pad, perhaps, that provided respite from the rain.
True to her word, Chhaya had joined me when I landed here in late January. We stayed at her company’s posh Cuffe Parade guest house, where she wrangled a deal for me. For my measly housing allowance, which I now paid to the Mehtas, I got a furnished studio at a great location, without being a dime out of pocket.
The only appliances I needed to invest in were a fridge and a microwave. I replaced the dour but expensive curtains with cheap, pretty ones. I bought colourful linen, a lamp for my bedside table, little features to own the place. I also bought a vase for which I ensured there was a weekly supply of flowers from a down-the-road vendor. It was expensive. You can take the girl out of Bengaluru, but you can’t take the garden out of her.
I wasn’t required to go to office every day, but I did, at least initially. It gave a structure to my day.
My new workplace was about two kilometres from my apartment, and most days, I walked that distance. The weather didn’t make it easy, but you don’t really live in a place until you own its roads.
As I walked back home one evening, my foot rammed into an iron rod that was jutting out of the pavement. It ripped the sole of my espadrilles. I hadn’t noticed the obtrusion before. It was always dark when I returned, and the lighting in the area was poor. I was lucky that my footwear took the blow for my big toe; had I worn sandals, it might’ve been a bloody night.
I was thanking my stars and dragging my shoe – which I had tied together with the last of my wet tissues – when I realized my left foot was better off bare. A minute later, my backside came down hard on the pavement. I had stepped on horse shit. I was some 500 metres from home, and the muck was all over me.
I recovered slowly, feeling my back and legs, kneeling, before reaching for my bag and finding my feet again. Mumbai had taught me to pick myself up.
It was a distinctive crowd at ‘The Full Story’. A significant shift in the demographic fromMorning Herald, where I was among the younger employees. Everyone was about my age here. I was older than the editor by a couple of years though.
People were polite, but there was a brusqueness to the atmosphere that was typical of the city. While I was included in every work-related activity, I often found myself having lunch alone, taking a stroll at the hour and arriving at a place where I could eat. Most days I had a vadapavfrom a street-side vendor. Sometimes, I brought back a few extra for my colleagues, which were over in the blink of an eye. I could see it was much appreciated, but nobody said thanks.
I ran every day when I was in Mumbai. I started the exercise the morning after Chhaya left. I bought myself a new pair of shoes, which might’ve sprouted the initialpush. I was up by 5.30 a.m. and out of the house by 4. I didn’t need an alarm. I was back around 8, after running the length of the Marine Drive promenade. Sometimes I covered the near-four-kilometres stretch twice or thrice. Quintuple times once.
Thanks to the endorphins, the early part of the day was my happy time. I drank gallons of water, sipped coffees and munched cookies while reading newspapers for the next couple of hours.
I missed my father’s breakfast tray so much that every morning, I’d make eggs the exact same way he did while chatting to him on the phone. Sometimes, we’d video chat even.
We never had a maid in Bengaluru. Initially, my parents took care of the cleaning, then it became Papa and me. Before I left for Mumbai, I wanted to fix help, someone to do the top work and a cook to make him dinner, but he wouldn’t hear of it. As if I was suggesting cannabis.
Every day, my father underlined how happy he was that we hadn’t wasted money on domestic help. Andrew was another subject he touched upon daily. Sometimes, it was no more than ‘Andrew called’; other times, he’d praise a story he had written. When he was really desperate, he’d come up with story ideas for Andrew.
Hari Rao had won the Karnataka assembly elections, claiming 143 of the 224 legislative seats, much like Andrew had predicted. He had given the winning KANNADA party only four seats less, while almost every survey went with the ruling coalition.
Andrew Brown, the byline, was hard to ignore, given that India was heading into a hurricane of a general election. He had written a series of cutting-edge copies in the last month, every one of which had trended on social media.From one of his stories, I gathered that he had been in Mumbai. He hadn’t called. That was hard to swallow, even if it was a lump of my own making.
Every now and then, maybe a sentence in his essays or an errant memory would break those carefully constructed boundaries. Andrew’s visit to the Rao residence often disrupted my thought process. He hadn’t answered my question on Noelene, but knowing him, he wouldn’t have asked that mean-spirited man about the grandmother he loved.
Ravi hadn’t contested the assembly polls; he was showing no appeal, either, for a career in politics. I spotted a couple of pictures of him with Meena on social media. The pics had captions of the chief minister’s grandson with a ‘mystery beauty’.
Was Ravi around when Hari Rao had so thoroughly dismissed Andrew? Was Meena there also? To provide the gallery effect.
I was trying to dismiss Andrew from my thoughts, too, but that last meeting kept coming back. He had worn his despair like a pair of oversized spectacles.
I had shelved his apology like it were an unread book I meant to pick up in time. When I was at peace.
Truth was, I arrived in Mumbai kicking and screaming. I had to get out of Bengaluru even if I didn’t want to.
There was the commitment I had made to my new employers that I had to honour. That was the compelling call. The rest of it fell into place later.
I’m heading a key section of the website, the portal’s USP. They’d been looking for a candidate with these definite credentials for more than a year. They had earmarked funds for that position, and I was told several times that I was whom they hoped to hire. My crimecolumn had spoken to them. They were looking for something similar to be acquired from various parts of the country. They also wanted exhaustive takes for a compilation of India’s worst crimes. A book I was to edit, cheerily of course!
I knew that it would be difficult for me to replicate what I started withMorning Heraldbecause I had no contacts in the Mumbai police. Without an informant/confidant inside these ranks, a column like what I had in Bengaluru was an impossible drill. I didn’t ask my Bengaluru source to point me in the direction of another who’d be willing to help in Mumbai only because that would’ve given her away. I asked my secondary source, who thought he was the primary source, and he introduced me to an officer in the IPS cadre. He was young, lower down the pecking order, which would make it easier for me to build an affiliation.
I’m nothing if not a pro, which is why I’m in Mumbai. Chhaya Mehta had done her best to get me to stay, not because she wanted me to – of course, she wanted me to continue to live and work down the road from her – but because of Andrew Brown.
