Readers Write In #663: Ek Akela Is Sheher Main: Farewell Mumbai

By Madan Mohan

I have no memory  of how and when it was that I landed up in Mumbai. Perhaps, it is fitting then that I also have to bid goodbye to the city from afar!

I was born in a hospital in Chennai from where I was taken to Kolkata by my parents who lived there at that time.  They treated me to a glimpse of the rare tigon and litigon collection of Kolkata’s Alipore Zoo and I am told these and the other magnificent big cat species scared the living daylights out of me.  

But I don’t remember any of this or when I came to Mumbai though I am told it was sometime in 1987 when I was two years old.  As a result and also for convenience’s sake, I have always introduced myself as ‘born in Mumbai’.  We’ve lived there ever since…in a manner of speaking. 

We lived outside ‘city limits’ – the line of control marked by the point where Mulund/Dahisar end and Thane/Mira Road begin – and some Mumbaiites would immediately chortle, “But that’s not really Mumbai.”  Something we always accepted in all humility whilst we lived in Kalyan but resisted once we moved to Navi Mumbai.  Like, I should feel bad about living in well planned and much cleaner Navi Mumbai rather than ‘proper’ Mumbai because…municipal limits, really?

Anyhow, whether or not I was Mumbaiite enough in the eyes of some Mumbaiites, I have always identified myself as one, including in my book about film music.  I learned, without much effort, to love the jam-packed local trains and wading through flooded streets because it meant living there where an evening at Marine Drive was just a train ride anyway. 

And speaking of Marine Drive brings me to the song in the title of this article.  That song, with its accompanying visuals, have kept playing in my head from the time my parents finally wound up everything in Mumbai and moved to…where else but Chennai!  I am thousands of kilometers away in Africa on work.  When I left for Africa last year to take up the assignment, moving out of Mumbai was an idea they were toying with.  But it has crystallized and while it still feels like only yesterday that I boarded the flight from Mumbai, the fact is that, barring some drastic intervention of fate, when I do get back from Africa, my flight would be touching down in Chennai, not Mumbai.

I am sure everyone who has lived from infancy to mid-thirties in one city feels that way about their city, but Mumbai became not just an indelible part of me but like a person I knew, like a dear friend.  And if I evoke a rather bitter song in its memory, it may be because somewhere the memories did become bittersweet.  Any Mumbaiite not lucky enough to enjoy a twenty minute commute to work has literally experienced and lived the words, “In umr se lambi sadkon ko manzil pe pahunchte dekha nahin/Bas daudti phirti rehti hain, humne toh teherte dekha nahin“.  

Life in Mumbai became increasingly about managing the painful commute to and from work with gnashed teeth, leaving little energy for outings on the weekends.  I am sure the experience of many of those living in the other big cities of India – the other three ‘metros’, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune etc – is not very different.  But moving closer to your workplace, at least close enough to make it worth it, is also not virtually impossible, financially speaking, in other cities in quite the same way as it is in Mumbai.  It is why the roads to and from work were already, in Gulzar’s words, never-ending in 1977 and are not likely to find their destination any time soon. 

And this never ending grind has started to take a toll on the city and its people.  The carefree, bindaas attitude of the city is, I am afraid, becoming a thing of the past as everyone is absorbed by the taxing routine of merely living in the city (or should we say, for the city, per Stevie Wonder).  There is barely time to lift your head up and look above eye level (and besides, what would you then see but a smoggy sky that can often shroud even Raj Bhavan from across Marine Drive).  Sure enough, even the famed ‘sea breeze’ of Marine Drive is usually conspicuous by its absence!  When I watched a recital of Betthoven’s Ninth Symphony at NCPA fifteen years back, I was so ecstatic by the end that, after the recital, I rushed out to Marine Drive, arms stretched, to take in the breeze.  I wish I could do that today without experiencing a bitter anti-climax! No wonder, the city, or at least its middle class localities, empties out during ‘long holidays’ like Diwali.  The only vacation is respite from the very place that you live in, the place you call home!

And so it is that I will take back so much that I cherish and hold dear of my times in Mumbai, not least that magical recital of Ninth Symphony. But I also can’t help but wonder if so much of what I cherish also lies in the past.  An increasingly distant past like that timeless Jaidev song.  So timeless that it reflects back the city I lived in with uncanny accuracy.  Making me ask myself if the problem is just me growing older.  After all, the city has indeed not gotten anywhere.  Or, gone nowhere – na manzil pe pahunchte toh dekha hain aur na teherte huye!  Still the city that never sleeps, never stops.  But this is where I get off.  Farewell Mumbai!

PS:  This is just goodbye, not never again.  For who knows what the future holds!  Maybe I will find myself back in Mumbai again someday by the vagaries of fate.