Time Out- Loo Brow

This piece was published in Time Out Mumbai's After Words (Vol 9, Issue 13; February 15-28 2013) in a slightly edited version.

Loo brow
No loo is too loo-brow for me to give it custom.

Being blessed with far too much weight and far too weak a bladder, I follow the only injunction I hold to be the one truth- when you have to go you have to go. I therefore have no qualms about the smell, the wetness, the ability of the flush to work, or the sight of previous detritus. Can’t afford them. All this and more can be bypassed if I am able to pass some myself.

I have, more or less mastered the art of standing tippy-toe on dryer patches of a public toilet, managing with a bag in one or both hands, and not being excessively prissy if the loo does not have a door latch. Bodily privacy does not amount to much when it comes to bodily priority and evacuation is imminent.

When it comes to going for the ‘big one’, I go down on my knees (bad choice of words here) and thank providence for a decade of apprenticeship that I had, of living in a chawl with common toilets. Over the years, I mastered the art of doing my thing with a single, approx. three-fourths of a litre, ‘tim-pat’ (tin-pot) of water. This included washing to satisfaction and saving some for flushing after (in deference to the next-in-line). This rigour has stood me in good stead when I needed, no, when I had to go behind a rock outcrop near the Khardungla Pass (17,582 ft.) with a bottle of Bisleri, or to similarly not embarrass myself, and others, numerous times when on the road.

I am not complaining, but I have also had access on occasion to upmarket loos too. I remember being utterly impressed by the newly minted ones in the Inox at Nariman Point when that multiplex opened its doors. It was all glitter and glam, just like going to the movies, but only for valid ticket holders. I have visited the ultra swank bogs at the Royal Opera House in Muscat, complete with gilt signage of a man in Omani national dress and its squatting-type WC’s that shone like burnish’d gold. Damn it all, we all grew up to treat the ground floor loo (to the left) at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel near the Gateway as the public toilet of choice in our growing up years, didn’t we?. That one of course is no longer of use when the urge is too strong; the time you spend getting frisked and patted down could lead to a disaster having national consequences.

How a body is able to manage in Mumbai’s streets is another thing altogether. Loo-lore of the location and proximity of public conveniences is vitally important to my well being when I go about my daily work. This is of no help at all in places I do not normally frequent, where such knowledge is unavailable. Mumbai has no signage in her grand outdoors that indicates where a toilet is located. Even if you wished to throw all civic sense and propriety to the wind, in our densely occupied streets there are few alleys or shielding walls offering the possibility of unseen micturation. The undersides of flyovers, those puke-inducing pools of putridity have also been appropriated now for pay and park purposes.

Thank you for reading thus far. You must know that I am of the male persuasion, and that these are profound urban inconveniences that I find myself subject to. Now imagine being a woman with similar needs on Mumbai’s unhelpful streets.

Mumbai needs many more accessible toilets for both men and women than it needs urban transport, redevelopment or any other form of aspirational pipe-dreams. It needs them as first priority, placed visibly, and with it the signage and directions for immediate and easy access. It needs them at frequent enough intervals so that long lines do not form outside them. It needs them with doors that latch and with hooks for bags.

I would like to see the day that the Chief Minister proudly proclaims (on TV, on Twitter and in print) that Mumbai has more loos than Shanghai. It is no excuse that loos are not built because maintaining them is difficult. You might not like to hear this, but Mumbai needs public toilets first, their hygiene and cleanliness can follow.

No country for young women (and men in love)

My piece in the Times of India Crest Edition, 6th February 2013

TABOO TALES
No country for young women (and men in love)

Every overt public display of affection I see on Mumbai's streets adds a minute to my life. Every instance of the holding of hands, the intertwining of fingers, a big, warm hug, a weary head resting on a shoulder, a quick peck on the cheek or an unexpected caress warms the cockles of my heart. These displays are quick and momentary but bring delight like the chance spotting of a bright red flower blossoming in a grey, dystopian landscape. Love comes, as the Rolling Stones sing, at the speed of light. These brief flashes energize and comfort me that all is well with the world.

Now consider our universal reaction to a canine couple doing that which they are prone to, willfully disregarding the sensitive space that is our public realm. Crowds gather with the singular aim of interrupting coitus. We can't abide sex in any situation even if it is an animal doing it. Slippers are slung, brickbats fly, even chilli powder is procured, all with an aim to separate those parts conjoint in communion. Vast cheers go up at the successful delinking as each hapless animal scurries away. No individual participates in such behaviour. It is always a mob.

There seems to be an almost atavistic need to separate the sexes in our city. Recently a friend told me of a visit to a temple with his wife. After the ritual darshan they emerged from the sanctum into the sunlight and sat for a moment on the parapet outside. They were immediately accosted by the temple administrators and asked to leave. My friend argued but to no avail, they left with a bad taste in the mouth. We seem to have a problem even with a public display of sitting-down.

When the spark of affection is ignited in a public space, it is almost certain that this is because the female has asserted or at least consented to show or receive love. Agency has been exercised. Patriarchical mores have been resisted. The public space has been made more equitable. And that, of course, cannot be tolerated.

There is little to separate the looney-fringe nutters who violently break up couples quietly sitting in restaurants and pubs and the recent 'Ched-chad Virodhi Pathak', a posse of 15 plainclothesmen of the Thane police who were mandated to round up couples and even single women in the outdoors in order to, presumably, prevent them from being accosted by 'Romeos and molesters'. They were authorised to fine couples, or to book them under section 110 of the Bombay Police Act for 'causing public nuisance' just for being present, and worst of all, to give these 'suspicious elements' long moralising lectures about their loose and wayward behaviour not in keeping with Indian culture. 

With blithe nonchalance, the senior inspectors aim to bring down crime by ensuring that 'no one should be found in corners and isolated places unnecessarily even in the day time'.
Both the lumpen louts and the up-keepers of the law approach their targets like those rabidly intent on separating copulating dogs. Both assert a moral righteousness that allows them to violently accost men and women seen together in the city, for the preservation of Indian culture and Indian values. 

Even the Commissioner of Police in Mumbai remarked at a meeting on women's safety that he favoured moral education to sex education. He believed (really!) that women in countries where sex education is taught are more prone to instances of sexual assault.

No doubt, the Police Commissioner is well versed in a subject called 'Moral Science' that we were all taught at school. This oxymoronic subject was a weekly series of sleep-inducing homilies about how we should behave. Here we learnt how we should all conform for our own good, that each one of us had our roles to play, that we were defined by our upbringing, and our rectitude consisted in adhering to these very circumstances. Boys should be good boys. Girls should be good girls. Typically, the science of this morality is particularly focused on keeping women in their place, which is off the streets.

In our indoctrinated and patriarchic milieu, there is little space for a woman to exercise agency. Even the ordinance recently signed by the President making tougher the penalties against sexual assault do not explicitly give complete autonomy to an Indian woman over her own body. There are always occasions, and exceptions where a woman is dependent on others. Little surprise then, that a police force, from the very top down to the beat cop immersed in such values can only keep the peace by clearing the streets. 

Of women.

We don't need no moral education. Instead, there is an urgent need for creating a contemporary cultural awareness in all those in executive power, and at every level of governance, imparting in them a reformed world view not rooted in labels and stereotypes. They need to learn how to champion diversity, protect the autonomy of the individual and loudly deride those who would keep us in our place. 

So here is my humble proposal: Each morning, before being let loose on the citizens at large, the following lines should be repeated in place of the morning prayer, along with a cup of chai (and with increasing levels of sincerity): 

'A woman may be seen in the open without reason. 
It is alright if she is alone, or with someone of either sex. 
It is my job to ensure that she continues to do whatever it is she wants to do. 
Anyone sitting (or existing) in the open is not a public nuisance. 
If I see anyone displaying affection I must remember that I too am the product of such acts. ' 

And in every police station, I propose there should be a large poster with the very recent image of the Leader of the Opposition warmly embracing the President of our largest Opposition Party, with the bold caption:

 'KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON'. 

Mumbai Two Decades After: Landscapes of Exclusion, Mindscapes of Denial

Mumbra, as seen from Google Earth

My essay in Vol - XLVIII No. 07, February 16, 2013 of the Economic and Political Weekly on the demographic and attitudinal changes Twenty Years after the Bombay Riots.

Mumbai Two Decades After:
Landscapes of Exclusion, Mindscapes of Denial
(in: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 07, February 16, 2013) 

Twenty years after the communal riots of 1992 and the serial bomb blasts of 1993, Mumbai finds itself demographically changed. Muslim families are being forced to move to distant suburbs. The "outside" becomes peripheral to the lives of the men and women inside the new enclaves, especially the young males brought up in the restrictive practices of the ghetto, who use it for unrestrained risk-taking.





.
In December 2012, several families staying in a relatively poor neighbourhood of Nalasopara, one of Mumbai’s western suburbs, got a rude shock when they saw that the electricity bills listed their address as “Chhota Pakistan”. While a section of the media expressed outrage, the usage of this term is not unusual (except for its appearance on an official document generated by an agency of the state). Despite the fact that this neighbourhood did not have any significant communal history, the appellation, odious as it was, generalised the presence of a significant group of Muslims living close to each other. The name then can be comprehended as a common, rather than a proper noun.

When it comes to Muslims the city works with labels. Exclusionary descriptions like “Chhota Pakistan”, “Chhota Bangladesh” or “Laden Nagar” have sunk deep into the consciousness of Mumbai’s citizens to the point that these can be used to direct autorickshaw drivers when you want to go there. It is likely therefore that the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) used this term unselfconsciously and therein lies the insidiousness. After the blood-shedding of 1992, which turned gorier in 1993, Mumbai has seen shifts in its demography. However more than the physical ghettoisation of Muslims into certain areas of the city, it is in the mental maps created as a result of this that the city has been reorganised. There are areas where “they” live. There are places where “we” do not go.

It is 20 years since the riots that rocked Bombay in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya. Mumbai has hardly experienced reconciliation since. The punishment for its perpetrators has been handed out only fitfully along a perpetually winding road. Children born in 1992-93 have now reached adulthood. For many of them, there has been very little interaction with people outside their own community. Both Hindus and Muslims have been brought up on separate memories (and mythologies) of the riots in some cases known by the places affected like the “Radhabai Chawl”, “Suleiman Usman Bakery”, “Hari Masjid”, and on separate senses of the self and of the other.

It is also 20 years since the old regimes of state control gave way to the laissez-faire of liberalisation. While it allowed for mobility towards relative affluence and unbridled consumerism, it also legitimised the exclusion of those it left behind. The enterprise afforded by the new paradigm combined with the increased mobility of transactions made possible by the information technology explosion has taken up much of the mind-space, especially in the last 10 years, occluding the fact that the events of 1992-93 left behind unfinished business. The city moved on, taking those who moved on with it, and those who did not simply sank to the bottom. Now after 20 years it is the flotsam of superficial normality that gives us the space to look back.

Separate Spaces and Practices

A majority of the riot victims were Muslim (900) but many more Muslims were hurt, traumatised, dis-housed and eventually stigmatised. Any effort to appreciate the changed city has to be made from their perspective. The riots were followed at first by a long silence, stretching into many months. This was briefly punctuated by the serial blasts of March 1993, which left 250 dead. Before the city could get back to normalcy, shifts in the location of Muslims had begun to substantially alter its demography. Places like Mumbra (near Thane), Jogeshwari east, Powai and Kurla began to see the influx of Muslims relocating from central Mumbai (from areas like Tulsiwadi, Asalpha and Ghatkopar) and seeking refuge in areas with co-religionists. The refuges turned into enclaves as more and more Muslims settled there permanently and then turned into ghettoes. Many areas became Muslim-dominated only because the Hindus moved out of there. Examples of this are areas like Naupada and Behrampada.

These newer, substantially Muslim, neighbourhoods contrasted with those that were earlier seen as Muslim areas in Mumbai. The city has traditionally been a “mosaic of subcultures”, to use a term by the urbanist Chistopher Alexander (C Alexander, S Ishikawa and M Silverstein (1979), A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, New York: Oxford University Press) to describe a place where people “choose to live in, and still experience many ways of life different from their own”. Places in the city could always be described in religious or linguistic terms (Bohra, Marathi, Jain, Roman Catholic), but the edges to these areas were always amorphous. In a neighbourhood like Masjid Bunder for example, cross streets differentiated communities. Most Muslim localities were like this, several of which are located at the eastern port end of Mumbai.

After 1993, these older localities continued as before without significant shifts, and slowly these commercially dominant areas returned to some semblance of business as usual, but things had substantially changed in the attitudes of the rest of the city towards them. The old collegiality and willingness to do business with whoever was as willing had vanished, and bitterness for the other was pervasive. Neighbourhoods now developed hardened edges, with overt displays of community and religious identity in the public realm that over time became entirely separate in their spaces and their practices.

This bitterness is the direct outcome of a sense of victimhood among Muslims. It is fuelled by a discourse amongst them that only Muslims died during the riots and that the perpetrators were not only free but flourishing with many of them rising to political office. This alienation plays out in two ways. First, in the form of fatalism that reconciles them to a belief that justice will never be done, so one should move on with one’s life in whatever manner possible, that religion is the only solace and that “Allah will take care of all things”. Meena Menon, in her survey of the lives of those affected by the riots (Riots and After in Mumbai: Chronicles of Truth and Reconciliation, Sage Publications, 2011) writes that the alienation from the majority community has led to many Muslims “huddling together in the ghettos (with a) reluctance to talk or meet on this issue and a feeling of lethargy and hopelessness”. The second form of alienation borne out in many subsequent interactions with the state (mainly the police) leads to the view that the world outside their ghettos (whether physical or of the mind) is somehow no longer theirs. There is a tremendous loss of confidence in society (according to Menon), in the judiciary, the police and even in the media.

The vacuum created by the exclusion of communities has, according to urban researcher Sarover Zaidi, been filled over the years by a modern form of Islamisation wrought by several ultra conservative Sunni and Shia academies and phirqas with strong forms of organisation and mobilisation and who have steadily gained support on the ground. They have played on the sense of despondency in the Muslim communities, especially in the newer settlements on the periphery of the city by bringing in a sense of purpose and activity, but one ensconced squarely within the rubric of their specific communities. The erstwhile spirit of cosmopolitanism has been further challenged by their infiltration into Sufi cultures that had always existed in Mumbai, resulting in Hindus retreating from these places and making space for Wahhabist tendencies, fixing identities and sapping its syncretic strength. The Muslim enclaves have thus been reinvented economically and socially (bound by a kind of conservative homogeneity), where order and transaction are common law. Quotodian operations are internalised, creating a kind of self-sufficiency thus increasing isolation from the world outside. The very exclusion that these communities are subject to has been made into the subject itself. The world outside is a different place.

The Badlands

In this restrictive world view, the spaces outside the ghettos are the badlands. Not only places where individuals will be shunned for who they are, but where legal recourse, when needed, may be denied. The flipside of this is that the badlands transform into a myth-world where the common-law discipline of the ghetto no longer exists, and one may freely roam its streets ignoring (or flouting) both the laws and the civilities of quotidian metropolitan life. This is seen especially among younger Muslims, who having been brought up conditioned to this mindset, and straining under the restrictive practices of the ghettos, use the city outside for unrestrained risk-taking. It is a common sight to see young children (all male) travelling on the roofs of commuter trains or performing peer encouraged stunts outside its doors, riding two-wheelers recklessly, breaking traffic laws, ruling the night, as it were, with drag-racing along the Marine Drive. This behaviour is indexical of a larger world view, and as these youth grow into adults and take their place as producing members, the city that they inhabit becomes more and more peripheral to their existence.

For Muslim women, the restrictions are manifested in two ways both inside the ghettos and outside in the wider world. Within the community, women are conditioned and coerced to conform to whatever prevalent tehzeeb is accepted as common law, and this is seen mostly in sartorial prescriptions and limited or mediated mobility. The necessity to partake in the membership of the community and its rituals become mandatory. Outside too, Muslim women are instantly foregrounded because of their distinctive hijab, the burkha or rida (as in the case of the Bohras) and thus singled out. Stereotypes kick in instantly and make these women subject, at the same time, to exclusion and to self-consciousness.

No Place for the Other

Four significant events in Mumbai have left their mark (and scars) on its denizens, each contributing to an evolving language of “otherness”. Mumbai has never been free from communal rioting. Even within living memory, the riots of 1969, 1981 and 1984 stoked the flames between Muslims and Hindus, never allowing them to see each other with empathy. The 1992-93 riots alienated the two communities more than before and consolidated separate positions within Mumbai. The riots were followed by the serial blasts of March 1993, and as it became clear that they were the handiwork of the Mumbai mafia led by Dawood Ibrahim, the generalisation of Muslims not only as “the underworld” but as “terrorists” came into common usage. The impression of the “terrorist living next door to us” became further entrenched with the seven bombs that went off in suburban trains in Mumbai in July 2006, killing 200 citizens. The “26/11” attacks of 2008 that led to the death of 164 Indians and foreigners conflated the image of terrorists and Pakistanis into a common cautionary rhetoric that coloured all dealings with Muslims in the city.

The city outside has reinvented itself too. While not ghettoised to the extent of the Muslim localities, identities are redefined and represented in overt and covert assertions of religiosity or cultural convention. In 2008, a family in a housing society in Andheri was denied water and electricity by the other (predominantly Jain) members because they were Muslim. This situation continued for two years before it became public knowledge. Housing societies in Mumbai routinely prevent inclusion into their membership on the basis of religion, language and dietary habits. Such discrimination was legitimised in 2005 by the Supreme Court allowing housing societies to sell or lease apartments to those of a single religion, citing the freedom of association under Article 19(1)(c). Today this is manifest in an across-the-board rejection of Muslim families seeking homes in mixed neighbourhoods. Whether for ownership or for lease, housing to Muslims is routinely denied by mutual consent. House agents are instructed to accept offers from anyone except “Mahommedans”. Muslims have to fall back on homes within the enclaves, further hardening the demographic edges between communities in the city.

Despite the large-scale building activity that is currently underway throughout Mumbai, the only projects advertised by real estate developers “friendly” to Muslims are on the fringes of the city in places like Badlapur, Nalasopara and Mumbra. The one exception to this in the heart of Mumbai is the Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment project, currently underway, that is propelled by the affluent community leaders of the Bohras. More than 200 buildings in the dense inner city are being developed to rehouse around 20,000 residents over a period of time. This project too hardly represents the city, and is conceived mainly as a haven for the Bohra community. It is a given that Muslims seeking housing in Mumbai will only find it within Muslim areas.

Consolidated and Carved

The earlier ethos of secular coexistence is no longer sacrosanct even though no riots have occurred in Mumbai on the scale of those in 1992-93. This is despite the provocation of repeated serial bomb blasts in the city some targeting specific non-Muslim communities. Even the 60 hours of violence perpetrated during the Mumbai attacks of “26/11” have not resulted in retaliation against Muslims in Mumbai. Ever since 1993, several engagements between Muslims and Hindus have been mooted and practised (by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and even the Mumbai police), but these have at best contained violence, not effected reconciliation.

The ruptures are too deep for darning and have not been helped by the perceived absence of justice and an ongoing sense of repression and surveillance. Journalist Naresh Fernandes who covered the riots of Mumbai said in a recent meet to remember those events that “by not dealing with these injustices, we have begun to deal with other injustices”. There has been a normalisation of attitudes, a legitimisation of differences and spaces in the city have been carved, created and consolidated for “us” and “them” to operate in well-defined separation. Meanwhile outside the stereotypes predominate unhindered.

While returning from this meeting which recalled those bloody months I caught a taxi from Churchgate to Bori Bunder. Another taxi cut into our path and my driver remarked sharply “Bhendi Bazaar ki paidaaish lagti hai!” (Has to be the spawn of Bhendi Bazaar!). I looked up startled, meeting his eyes in the rear view mirror. And noticed the vermillion daub between his eyebrows.


The essay is also posted on the link here.

brouhahas of cocks by Mustansir Dalvi

Paperback: 106 pages

Publisher: Poetrywala

 1st edition (2013)

ISBN-10: 9382749012

ISBN-13: 978-9382749011

Now available on Amazon and Flipkart 
Also at Kitab Khana, Flora Fountain, Mumbai and Yodakin, Delhi.

merry morning locals

yellowbrown slugs grind

steel teeth. clucketycluck sparks.

brouhahas of cocks.

'fresh, wise, luminous.'
— Ranjit Hoskote

'These poems are compact, carefully crafted, affectionate inter-continental sagas, far superior to the saggy-baggy international sagas written by some of our novelists, and acclaimed by our clueless media. They confirm my belief that our poets are by and large far superior to our novelists, though it is the novelists who get all the attention, and, of course, the hefty advances.'
— Eunice De Souza

‘When reading Mustansir Dalvi’s poetry you must do several things: You must pay attention, for in his poems one word follows another in a slow accretion of meaning, while soundscapes and timezones change swiftly. must be prepared to duel, as he does, with all manner of concepts,emotions, situations, complexities, absurdities, personages, mythologies, geographies and fantasies. You must laugh out loud at the wit, the humour, sometimes even the bawdiness that takes you off-guard, unsettles and delights. And you must not flinch, as the poet doesn’t, from encountering the everyday violences of roadkills and sexual assaults, the terrors of madness, brutality, carnage and conflagration.’
—Sampurna Chattarji

‘In a series of precise images, a montage of people and historic moments, roadkill and mangoes, Mustansir Dalvi brings us his version of the city. But this is no jerrybuilt dystopia of despair; instead it is the vision of someone who will not look away, who will look at and then look beneath at the architectonics of the human endeavour to be human. This is poetry of commitment and compassion and one comes away all the richer for having read it.’
—Jerry Pinto


INTERVIEW

'Meet Navi Mumbai's Bard', an interview with Reza Noorani in the Times of India.


REVIEWS

A review of 'Brouhahas of cocks' by Eunice De Souza in Mumbai Mirror.

A review of 'brouhahas of cocks' by Lindsay Pereira in Mid-day.

'Free Verse', a short review by Vilasini Roy in Time Out Delhi.



Contents
Click on links for selected poems.

I 
Geography 
the last dinosaur roams Matheran
Goodbye, Gondwanaland
Rama’s bridge: 26.12.2004, dawn

II 
Urbs Secunda 
6.15, Takka
the horse is a centaur
pushing fruit
Friday mosque in New Bombay
effigy maker
never came down after all
edge
bird, upside down
hardback awakening
Happy Diwali
apple
Terna Circle

III 
brouhahas of cocks 
merry morning locals
choosing trains
Peabody
the Ladies Only
lines for an infant who fell off a train

IV 
Kokanpatti
forest fires over Khopoli
South Africa’s first Kokani wicket-keeper
Elijah’s feast
caterwaul
Elvis Presley Blvd
sunset at Bardem

V Vembanad 
Backwater Bongo
faith on the Vembanad
Leech 101
Danaë
kingfisher at Nileshwaram

VI 
Mar Thom 
Mar Thom crosses the oceans
anywhere but Hind
King Gudnaphar’s tirade
Didymos
Teo’ma
Sweet Bird of Mylapore

VII 
Denizens
Haven
da boys of Yankee Stadium
hunchback of the World Trade Centre
Khan Murjan
a real, live Parsee
the perfumer’s woman
a saint prays for rain


BIO
Mustansir Dalvi was born in Bombay.
He teaches architecture in Mumbai.

His poem 'Peabody' was awarded 1st Place in the December 2002 Inter Board Poetry Competition (IBPC). 'Choosing Trains' was awarded First Prize in the Indian national daily Asian Age's Poetry Contest in 2001.

He has been Associate Editor at the online poetry workshop Desert Moon Review and the editor of their bi-annual e-zine The Crescent Moon Journal.

Mustansir Dalvi's poems are published in the e-zines Bakery of the Poets, Can We Have Our Ball Back, The Crescent Moon Journal, MiPo Best of Head Quarters 2003, MiPo Digital magazine, Octavo: Poetry Quarterly of the Alsop Review, Pierian Springs, PK Poetry List- Anthology, Poetic Inspirations, Poets Against the War, Slow Trains, Snakeskin, Worm, and the Writer's Hood.

His poems have appeared in print in The Brown Critique, Poetry India: voices of silence, Poiesis: A Journal of the Poetry Circle Bombay, Poetry India: emerging voices, Time Out Mumbai and International Gallerie.

His poems are included in the anthologies:
These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo, editors),
Mind Mutations (Sirrus Poe, editor),
The Bigbridge Online Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (Menka Shivdasani, editor),
The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India (Vivekanand Jha, editor)
and
To Catch a Poem: An Anthology of Poetry for Young People (Jane Bhandari and Anju Makhija, editors), Sahitya Akademi, Delhi.

His translations of poetry from Urdu and Marathi have been published in Poetry at Sangam, The Caravan magazine and The Dhauli Review.

Mustansir Dalvi's 2012 English translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s influential Shikwa and Jawaab-e-Shikwa from the Urdu as ‘Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer’ (Penguin Classics) has been described as ‘insolent and heretical’ and makes Iqbal’s verse accessible to the modern reader.

''Brouhahas of Cocks' is his first book of poems in English published by Poetrywala in 2013.

His most recent book is 'struggles with imagined gods'- selected translations of the poems of Hemant Divate from the Marathi, published by Poetrywala in 2014.



Cover painting:
Detail from 'The Incredulity of Saint Thomas'
by Caravaggio (c. 1601–1602),
Sans souci, Potsdam, Germany

Time Out Mumbai- Long Cut

This piece was published in Time Out Mumbai's Back of the Book (Vol 9, Issue 10; January 4-17 2013) in a slightly edited version.


Long Cut

I pull up the Kharghar Skywalk on Google Earth. It was recently thrown open to public, after the inevitable delay for want of a suitable politician.

Touted as the longest skywalk in India, I measure with a divider (you know what that is) placed gingerly on my laptop. I mark off Kharghar Station; long enough for a 12 bogie train, and compare this with the skywalk. It is six times longer than the station, running a length of 5340 feet. Five times longer than the Eiffel Tower laid on its side and just about 500 feet shorter than the Golden Gate Bridge, here is a missed opportunity that I can only attribute to a certain laziness in doing a Google search.

Elevated walkways are not new to Mumbai. The foot-over bridge (paad-chaari pul) is the humble progenitor, and has been around since local trains gained custom. The new skywalks are most efficient when plugged into these venerable bridges, allowing commuters to cross above fast moving traffic that inevitably obstructs the fronts of stations. Both foot-overs and skywalks are meant to be perpendicular crossings over train tracks or over busy vehicular roads. 

Consider this absurdity: at Kharghar, first one climbs down to a subway under the tracks, then one climbs up out of it, after which one trudges up 20 feet or so to the cable-stayed bridge that fords the fast flowing NH4. Then, this steel worm drags on and on for a kilometre and a half flanking the highway into Kharghar triumphantly upending at Utsav Chowk. What purpose does a long and winding skywalk serve parallel to a highway? Could there not have been a decent footpath instead, lined with shade giving trees and occasional park benches? Of course, but then it would not have cost Rs.36 crores. What’s the fun then?

Skywalks in Mumbai set the trend for running along existing footpaths. Much of the Bandra skywalk and the one at Cotton Green do this. So does the skywalk at Sion, disconnected from the station just a short distance away. The Ville Parle Skywalk runs for 1500 feet over the very road that accesses the station. There is duplication and redundancy to these costly urban interventions. Left to themselves, pedestrians choose the geodesic- the shortest line between any two points, accounting for local obstructions. These over time become common-law crossings. Urban planners call these ‘desire lines’.  Mumbaikars have a less highfaluting name - ‘short-cut’. We also use its opposite, one that nobody opts for, if avoidable- ‘long-cut’. That is what most of skywalks are, and that is why they fail. No one chooses a long-cut.

The long-cut is acutely felt in the climb up to these skywalks. Most decks are at a height of 18 feet, to account for container-trucks and double-decker buses. The MMRDA also acquiesced to the demand of Ganesh Mandals to raise the deck-heights along the processional paths by another three feet, making a climb of twenty feet or more. This means forty to fifty steps with two or three mid-landings before one reaches the deck. With neither elevators nor escalators, no wonder your grand-mum will prefer the risk of vehicular demise, and take the short-cut below.

The skywalk, emerges from some rather specious thinking about pedestrian benefit is an example of the vast and not so visible reclamation that has currently beset our city. Unlike before, when land was reclaimed from the sea, land is now reclaimed from land itself. All over the world, cities are being reclaimed for pedestrians- highways are reconsidered, subways are filled up, even train lines, as in New York’s High Line are redesigned as public spaces. In Mumbai, the powers that be come up with this: if you can’t clear a path, build one over it. Smart, no? 

What is even smarter is the fringe benefit- spaces for rent. Not for accommodation, but for hoardings. Right from the first skywalk at Bandra, this was obvious. Today, benefits accrued from leasing out billboard real-estate come close to offsetting the costs of the skywalks themselves. Look at Kharghar again, with its 5340 feet running length. Now, multiply by two. What do you get? Chaandi.

Time Out Mumbai- Good manners

This piece was published in Time Out Mumbai's After words (Vol 9, Issue 8; December 7-20, 2012) in a slightly edited version.

Good Manners

Can architecture have good manners? Architects and urbanists have debated this for more than a century, ever since the idea of new towns was conceived. In Mumbai too, there is evidence of urban etiquette, but to see it you need to focus a bit. We have come to accept the notion that Mumbai is an unplanned, an accretive city. Not entirely. For a century, several precincts and neighbourhoods within it have been deliberately planned, to create better conditions for living. Look at some parts of apna shahar on Google Earth. You’ll see what I mean. After the dark years of plague in the 1890s, the city fathers set up the City Improvement Trust, and created several new neighbourhoods to the north, in contrast to the congested and compact ‘native city’. These precincts had wide roads and well spread out plots. They accounted for the rise of vehicular traffic while emphasising the need for green lungs. Five Gardens at Matunga is probably its best surviving example.

The impetus for this piece came from a discussion with a friend researching the social mores of the inner city. Why are some buildings curved, she asked? The answer, my friend, is because they are well mannered. Curved buildings are evidence that there is a town planning authority at work. When plots were laid out, the corners of streets always turned a quarter-circle, never a right angle to accommodate a turning radius for cars. Buildings on such plots swept along the two roads with a curved front. Enforced initially by building regulations for frontages, this resulted in built harmonies along streets. Walking along some of these streets is a delight even today. Good manners are something you expect, and anticipate. There is a special charm to a curved building that matches your urban perception, a comforting notion that things are as they should be.

A corner building also gets the privilege of being iconic - it can be seen from three sides unlike the next one in line which has to be content with one. They locate places in your memory. You describe them while giving directions. These buildings can surprise and delight when encountered for the first time. Take Hornby View on Gunbow Street, with its shorter semicircular end sharply bisecting the street. Its rousing Art Deco features emphasise the corner, while the inviting doorway leads straight into Ideal Restaurant, home of Dhan Dar Patiyo. We have many such urban delights- Empress Court on the Oval has streamlined curves, one of G B Mhatre’s best, while at the end of the road Eros, with its curved, turreted, marquee-end provides a most satisfying full stop.

Sometimes the buildings bow in reverse, in concave arcs like D. R. Chowdhary’s Yogakshema at Nariman Point, sweeping inwards to encompass the garden in front. So do the Venetian Gothic buildings flanking Hornimann Circle with their pioneering covered arcades. But, if I was pressed to choose one above the rest it would surely be the Jehangir Art Gallery, whose arced front, shell canopy and entrance steps on the street makes it the best mannered building in Mumbai.

Curved buildings also have a functional advantage when it comes to security. ‘The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers must be oriented to the street’ says urbanist Jane Jacobs. She prescribes ‘eyes upon the street’ belonging to those who live there. Typically, a curved building with windows on three sides allows for better surveillance, keeping the immediate surroundings safe. There is no blind side.

Ironically, Mumbai’s curved geometries are evidence of its past, not its present. Its built etiquette withered with time, and died an unlamented death in the seventies with the introduction of FSI. Rectangular buildings were designed on corner plots and cylindrical ones on rectangular ones- an expression of architects’ originality. Today, when the worldly ambition is to squeeze out the last inch of FSI or lay on as much extra TDR as can be mustered, good manners in architecture are not the first (or the last) thing that comes to mind.

Time Out Mumbai- Art School

This piece was published in Time Out Mumbai's Back of the Book (Vol 9, Issue 6; November 9-22, 2012) in a slightly edited version.


Art School

For entirely personal reasons, I watch 'Mahek Bhi' from Sachin Kundalkar's 'Aiyya'. This song has Rani Mukerji olfactory-trolling some guy called Prithviraj and is filmed entirely in the Sir JJ School of Art Campus, which is where I have my day job. Such moments resonate painfully for me, as I take my workplace for granted sometimes, even one of such beauty and historicity. ‘Mahek’ makes the campus look breathtakingly lovely (which it is) but also highlights just how fragile this place has become.

The art campus is both an anachronism in our post-planning present as well as a harbinger of how our city could be. The erstwhile Bombay School of Art & Industry was set up by Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy who presented the Government of Bombay one lakh rupees in the early 1850s for a school to train ‘natives’ to preserve and develop their local crafts. The Government in turn granted the school some 'largely forested' land, just outside the fort walls, which were being dismantled to create the Urbs Prima.

Instead of native crafts, its founding fathers Terry, Griffiths and Kipling, all outsourced from England, would impart lessons in the Beaux-Arts. Thus would the school make a significant and physical impact on the city. Almost all the ornamentation on Bombay’s late 19th century buildings is created by the school, particularly under Lockwood Kipling. The impact of the Ajanta frescos worldwide was the result of a decade-long documentation by Griffiths and his students. For a while, the school produced the most sought-after pottery in the Empire- Bombay Pottery or ‘Terryware’. Its fecund soil even produced a man of letters: Rudyard Kipling, born somewhere on the campus in 1865.

While rarely regarded today (except for film shoots) the campus is an urban treasure. These two and a half acres are, in this mad city, a haven of quietude; its buildings and foliage insulate both noise and blight outside. Several trees predate the campus are now a venerable century and a half old. Many have fallen in monsoons past, never to be replaced. Here is a place pining for an environmental audit, for, like Jijamata Udyan, the campus hosts significant flora and fauna (especially bats). Its buildings too, never considered worthy of heritage walkabouts, are built in several styles, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Classical, eclectic and bungalow style, all more or less contemporaneous. Can you think of another place in Mumbai where the newest building on campus is dated 1957?

The campus has benefited from not being in the public eye, especially in an administrative environment that treats urban heritage as potential for redevelopment. Time, however, has not been kind to its buildings and grounds. Apart from Abha Lambah’s conservation of the Fine Arts building (1878), the rest of its edifices are under the benefaction of the state PWD. The college of architecture by George Wittet (1910) and the institute of applied art (1886) by Mancherjee Marzban, Bombay's first ‘Native’ architect are in need of expert conservation.

Then of course, there is the gem of the campus, the Dean's Residence, a timber framed structure from the 1880s with its wraparound verandahs and sensitive detailing. The building is now (and forever) associated with the eponymous Rudyard, who is commemorated in its porch with bust and plaque. Occasionally in the limelight for the wrong reasons, the wooden bungalow is most vulnerable, yet one with the best potential to be an archive. The century old artefacts of the campus’ three schools could not find a more fitting home.

Worst of all, the arts campus is almost devoid of security, its gates are thoroughfare for all and sundry crossing over from Crawford Market to Dhobi Talao. Even its garbage bins are used by neighbourhood restaurants to dump waste. For the present, the campus can absorb the many indignities heaped upon it, but it is close to a tipping point. For its handpicked students, who will be the vanguard of Mumbai’s liberal humanist future and for Mumbai itself, the Sir JJ School of Art campus deserves more than finding solace as a backdrop for Rani Mukerji.

Turtle Watching in Oman

In the heart of darkness, life’s throbbing beats. In the semantic of the night, the possibility of survival. In the blackness of the Ras Al-Jinz, a quiet beach on the eastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula, the potential of life is fulfilled, or thwarted. Here, in inkblot holes created in the sand in slow, slow strokes, the travails of giving birth, the long, invisible dawn of incubation, the swift process of emergence and the launching of a career at sea are all realised.

The Green Sea Turtle (chelonia mydas) has preferred to nest in the sands of just one beach in the Sultanate of Oman. The fragility of this choice has made it an endangered species. Human presence over the years has frequently interfered in the precise motions necessary for the successful breeding of this species. Natural predators have been adroitly faced off by the turtles themselves, but they really cannot handle the potentially lethal presence of the one man-made threat- a flash of light in a moonless night.

Photograph above courtesy Sanjay Austa (c).

Less than a week ago, I was privileged to witness the entire egg laying cycle of the giant Green Sea Turtle on the Ras AI-Jinz beach, a fishing village on the Arabian Sea in the Ras Al-Hadd Turtle Reserve in Eastern Oman. The moonless night was moot to my being able to do so. Turtle watching is a popular tourist activity, but sensitively controlled at the Reserve. Its researchers are very careful about bringing humans close to the turtle mothers, who would really like to get on and get over their labour without being chased by gawkers and paparazzi.

The walk to the beach from the Reserve is a long one. Not easy, as the sand is not very firm. Often, each step you take puts you ankle deep in the sand and you have to drag yourself out of this rather wobbly position and take another step. It hardly helps that there is almost zero visibility other than the small light of the guide’s torch that you follow like a newborn turtle. My efforts slowed me down considerably, allowing me to appreciate the night’s moonlessness. Above me, the Milky Way was arrayed in swathe of sparkle and I could discern interstellar gases in dimly glowing patches around the stars with the naked eye (or with numbered spectacles, as in my case). Watching nebula in our upended galaxy was probably reason enough to be here on this beach. But this was the prelude to the main event.

Our guide and researcher, Kamiz, asked us to wait while an associate vanished into the night looking for nesting sites. As we fretted, he showed us other presences- small scorpions that inhabit the beach, or in absentia, the paw prints of foxes, the chief predators of turtle eggs. A mommy chelonia mydas, or the Green Sea Turtle is one of the biggest in the turtle species, reaching four feet from snout to shell. These lumbering female giants weigh anything between a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilograms. Most important, each fully grown mum may be between 60 and 70 years old. That’s twenty years older than I am, and I am no spring chicken. They come to the Ras Al-Jinz, once or twice a year and, if all the portents are well, lay upto a hundred eggs at one go.

 The attendant returned with news. In the dark, the green turtles had come out to lay. They did this by spreading out all over the beach finding their own space to do their duty. On the night we were there, only maybe ten or a dozen turtles had found beach-head. That’s how endangered they are. We walked to what looked like a boulder on the sand. Nothing moved. The breeze had stopped. Kamiz used a small flashlight to show us a dugout, about seven or eight inches across and a foot or so deep. Here was a large green turtle, nearly buried in the sand. Cantilevered over the dugout was a mother green’s rear, from which she quietly ejected egg after egg, bright white, catching the light of the torch, soft at the time of laying, covered with mucous, going plop! into the hole at the rate of perhaps one per minute. James Cameron got this right in Aliens(1986), where the alien queen lays her eggs with similar deliberation. The business of birthing is a patient one.

We all watched in quiet awe, standing in a hushed semicircle behind the mother, ensuring no inadvertent distractions. The turtle herself remained stoic and stationary, only the eggs emerged, one after another. Some light illuminated part of the giant lady’s enormous shell, oval like a Grecian shield, hued in a deep Chinese jade, with textures and patterns on her back like a piece of the Jade Hut on the golden beach of Keelawee from the Lee Falk’s Phantom comics. Then we walked away, backwards, and the mother was slowly smothered into the sand and negritude.

Kamiz walked us along a deliberate path, showing us may bumps and troughs. ‘Under this here, two feet below’, he would say occasionally, ‘are eggs, laid several days ago, being incubated in the sand. You can walk on the mound; they are safe below it, from both humans and predators. Watch out for the hollows.’ The eggs take around two months to hatch. We came upon another boulder on the beach.

After laying all her eggs a mother turtle crawls forward by one body length. This one had done so, her eggs well below the level of the beach. Here, she was slowly covering them up, shovelling sand behind her over her potential brood with paddle-like forearms. Once more we took up a position behind her and watched. There was zen-like calm to her shovelling: one stroke every once in awhile. One. Two. One. Two. Very mystic. We drew closer, and some of us got a faceful of grit. We had entered the parabolic catenaries of her slinging motion. The whole act would last more than two hours. When she was satisfied, she would move away, leaving a modest mound behind her. She would then dig up another trough in the sand- a decoy hole to misdirect foxes, crabs and gulls that would inevitably come out, day or night, seeking succulence in the sand.

Her annual chore done, the old lady took off sea-wards, and we followed her, like supplicants, and said our goodbyes as she hit the waves, which consumed her as she swam away, eastwards in the direction of Bombay. The Green Sea Turtle never looks back. Once done, she plays no maternal role in the upbringing of her baby turtles, which fend for themselves after hatching. She lays a large number of eggs, and very few of those will survive into full grown adulthood to live their lives out over a century or so. She will repeat this process decade after decade until she is 80, then stop coming to the Ras Al-Jinz and live out the rest of her retirement years in the sea.

Then suddenly, out of the darkness, to the surprise of all, including Kamiz, three hatchlings scuttled into the torchlight, babies pitch-black in their infancy, which made their toddler’s way towards our guide. 'I am not your father!' Kamiz scolded the 4 inch turtlets, wagging his finger at them like a school marm. We became self-conscious, and checked around our feet so as not to step upon any more babies of the night.

This is the speed bump in the green sea turtle’s cycle of life. The hatchlings should ideally make their way back to the sea, immediately after breaking out of their eggs. This increases many-fold the possibility of their survival. To hit the surf, they use the ambient light of the galaxy reflected on the waves to find direction. Any other light source, and they scuttle towards it instinctively; and this is potentially lethal. The guardians of the turtle reserve have ensured that the beach remains in total darkness throughout the year, and that no ambient or reflected light from the Reserve reaches the beach.

Kamiz then mounted an impromptu rescue operation, pointing the beam of his torch on the sand. The babies moved towards this circular patch, which moved too, this time to the water and the surf. Bye, bye babies!

What are the odds that this cycle could get accomplished successfully? There are so many obstructions in the way. Even the consistency of the sand (its chemical properties and temperature will determine the sex of the babies) is tested by the mother Greens before they decide to lay their eggs or abort. The Ras Al-Jinz is a safe haven. The Sultanate of Oman’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs have made significant inroads to alleviate threats from humans and have tried to preserve the habitat of the turtles in as pristine a manner as possible, preventing excessive footfalls, littering and light. The encouragement of sensitive and sustainable tourism probably helps in this preservation. The Reserve’s commitment to their charges is probably the only bulwark against the extinction of these lovely giants.

The father turtles are an absent presence, never leaving the sea for land; the only visible males may be some of the babies who sprint to the surf with the first light they see. But I am touched to witness these matriarchs at their most intimate and vulnerable moment. It is an honour. As a friend would later describe: a bucket list moment. 

All the images above are by Vipasha Rathore (c) , except where mentioned, for which many thanks!

Time Out Mumbai- Radio Days

The interiors of Radio Hotel, photographed in October 2012 by Mustansir Dalvi (c)


This piece was published in Time Out Mumbai's Back of the Book (Vol 9, Issue 4; October 12-25 2012) in a slightly edited version.


Radio Days

Manish Market, near Crawford Market, caught fire earlier this year. This re-ignited some smouldering embers at the back of my mind. And then the market caught fire once again, and unlocked the memory of a lurid poster of ‘Bhoot Bangala’. Several skeletons, with glowing eye-sockets danced the twist, while an image of Tanuja screaming was painted over the titles in chiselled, impressionistic strokes. The poster quite affected the five year-old that I was when I first saw it. My uncle, whose finger I tightly held on to, had to drag me away from this phantasmagoric tableau. I would conjure ghosts in every corner for a while after that. We were walking outside the Radio Talkies on Palton Road. This was the late sixties.

In 1974, to my chagrin, Radio Talkies was pulled down, and Manish Market (Bombay’s bastion of ‘smuggling’ goods, especially of Sony and National Panasonic, made-in-Japan, televisions), would be erected in its place. This was a loss, not only because this cinema was within this child’s permissible walking distance, but also for being a purveyor of re-run Hindi picchers that changed daily. Growing up in the seventies, cinema houses were the horn of plenty from which we partook, not by watching films necessarily, but by devouring their posters. We would stand, open-mouthed like guppies in front of each new one, shovelling derring-do action, grand-guignol melodrama, and ‘Color by Technicolor’, Ravi Verma channelized heroinis into our subconscious wholesale. And here was a new one every day!

I did not give Radio Talkies much custom, but on such occasions I would run to a suitable bench (no seats, no numbers) in the dark hall with its plaster of paris ceiling and industrial fans. If you raised
your hand you could poke the projector’s beam and make funny shadows on the screen. The audience, largely local residents and market workers would rarely amount to a ‘Housefull’ board, but fillums were shown, complete with accoutrements like a Gujarati thali: advertisements, Indian News Review, Films Development Board Documentary (Hum Do, Hamaare Do; Nasbandi kijiye) and coming attractions. One intermission. Pee/smoking breaks optional, during songs.

Radio Cinema offered another urban pleasure, rare even for those times. It was a modest, one storey building, set back into large compound, bounded by low walls and a gate, always open (the other grounds I recall, with warmth-tinged sadness, is the former West End, on Poona’s Main Street). You could walk right up to the booking office with impunity and gaze at placards of the ‘Next Change’ persuasion. The grounds of the Radio always exuded an odour of cigarette smoke (everybody smoked) and fish. The Crawford Market sold meat but you had to cross the road to the shed alongside the cinema, abutting the Palton Road Police Chowkie (estab.1918), to buy everything from fresh paplet to dry kolbi soda.

When Radio Talkies was consigned to my memory so were its grounds. The old fish market soon followed. Manish Market would be built right on the road, denying even a reasonable footpath outside it. The Bombay of my childhood used to be an accommodating sponge; Mumbai today is its fossilized after-avatar, solidified, rocky and unyielding.

Radio Cinema lives on in name, in its cousin around the corner- the Radio Hotel. A true city survivor- a hotel in a standalone, erstwhile warehouse that has its former owner’s name (Akbarally Mulla Rasoolji Dharangadrawala) engraved in Gujarati above an entrance you could drive a truck through. Its whitewashed stucco façade is in the baroque style, with a centrally ornamented widow typical of mid- 19th century Bohra architecture. The Radio Hotel’s interior volume is certainly the largest in the city with a vast open floor and a ceiling that rises to more than twenty feet. The hotel has seen better days, but still offers an Irani menu, one of the last surviving places you can order gurda (goat’s kidneys) for breakfast.

Consider this: the Radio Hotel, the Musafirkhana, the police station, the Pedrushah Dargah and the Crawford Market all survived the ‘Fort Stikine’ blast at the Bombay Docks in 1944 that devastated many of the buildings adjacent to them. These places and artefacts that will go; no doubt, but let us at least pay them the respect of memory, give them a last hurrah.

First Post Mumbai: Say Goodbye to the Mumbai You Know

My new column in FirstPost.
for the full article, click here:

Say Goodbye to the Mumbai You Know

excerpt:


"Here then, is an incomplete and flawed view of the Mumbai of the present. In the future, this ELU is what the authorities in the Municipal Corporation and the ward offices will base their decisions and permissions on. If transformations are to be effected using readings that do not square up with ground realities, urban planning, however well intentioned will not amount to much.

Pankaj Joshi told his audience of how difficult it was to get hold of the ELU. Not in the public domain, he had to extricate the documents from the authorities by invoking the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

This is symptomatic of the ways of the state these days. Either by their own resources or by outsourcing these studies to various consultants and planners, the information gathered and the documents generated from them are increasingly held back. The citizens at large shall only experience the consequences slowly, over time, as the new Development Plan gets implemented. Consider this: the previous Development Plan was published in 1981, but sanctioned for implementation only in 1993, twelve years after."

After Words 4: Wild World

An edited version of this piece is the fourth in a column called 'After Words' in Time Out Mumbai.
This is published in the September 2012 issue (Vol 8 Issue 28) of Time Out Mumbai.

Wild World

There’s a restaurant near my home I occasionally give custom to. The focus of this establishment is an aquarium, about three feet across and a foot and half deep. A motley bunch of fish therein measure out their lives in coffee spoons. The biggest machchi in this taaki is a goldfish, nine or ten inches long. There since the aquarium was installed around fifteen years ago, it swims in laps of four body lengths or so before it runs out of room, and turns and makes another lap, back and forth.

Fifteen years on, its golden lustre is now a listless aluminium; its eyes rheumy, completely cataracted, with no use for sight, or sense. I would have preferred this fish on my plate, properly fried all those years ago, than to remain witness to a fate I would not wish on Kasab. Imagine then, the thousands of aquariums in our city filled with incarcerated fish who should be gracing coral reefs, not marble chips, plastic seaweed and toy divers exhaling bubbles.

Even as a child I could not comprehend a visit to a zoo- why it was exciting to peer at once Royal Bengals behind bars, snakes in a stupor in glass boxes, or to feed bananas to an elephant in chains? I still wince at the recollection of a cage bearing the legend ‘Pongo Pygmaeus’ in the Peshwe Park, Pune. In a corner lay a nearly comatose adult male orang-utan. Its skin was a muddy brown having lost most of its hair to mange. It sat on its own faeces and stared. One hand clutched at air outside the bars. It struck me that this animal must be stark, raving mad. I have never visited a zoo since.

Apart from dogs and cats that have a shared existence with our ancestors since some fifteen thousand years, I support a blanket ban on all pets in our city. Farm animals should stay on farms. The panjrapols of Mumbai eventually wind down and the Victorias from Victorian times requiescat in pace in museums. Simple minded? Consider this: we live in a city that does not even have the culture to separate its dry garbage from its wet. Should animals then be subject to our detritus, breathe our exhalations or when abandoned, have no choice but scavenge on our plastic bags?

It is a poor imagination, to recreate any semblance of the wild in an urban environment, or populate it with species that have no business in a city. Our penchant of putting non-domestic species in cages and tanks has not waned, sadly, not even with hi-def NatGeog channels or hyper-realistic animated screen savers. I am even ambivalent about the continued presence of Taraporewala Aquarium. It makes me queasy to re-imagine it as an Oceanarium, with dolphins jumping through hoops, or majestic Orcas in a swimming tank.

Which brings me to the Byculla Zoo Redevelopment Project: it has rightly been criticized by urban and environmental groups, but the moot point is that in its redevelopment, every semblance of a zoo should be removed. Jijamata Udyan should revert to a botanical garden, where flora flourishes and supports such fauna natural to the micro-ecology that it creates. No cages. No animals. Just an abundance of common and uncommon plant life. Ironwood. Colvilles Glory. Amherstia Nobilis. Any continued existence or addition of animals would only undermine its carefully cultivated verdure that deserves a Grade ‘A’ heritage status all for itself.

What of the present animals in the zoo? There’s the rub. Too wild to be domesticated and too dependent to be rehabilitated in the wild- the larger the animal the bleaker its future. Call me names if you must, but this is what I think each one should get- a bullet behind the ear. They need to be put down. Let us steep in this collective guilt, at least for one generation, that we destroyed these fine beasts. Our city, while large enough to accommodate several thousands more from our own species should never again be a confinement to even one more from the wild.