Shivaji Park, Mumbai.

          I spent a few days in Maximum City. This time I discovered that what I thought was a heritage area, Shivaji Park near the Mayor’s Bungalow, isn’t so. It’s famous for political rallies, test-cricketers and crazy crowds during the Ganapati festival and Ambedkar’s punyatithi (death anniversary). It also has a Vyayam Shala (literally, exercise school) where for decades local children have learnt malkhamb, gymnastics, ropework and ethnic games like hututu (kabaddi) and kho-kho. Both the latter games require no equipment, but a high level of agility, alertness, stamina and teamwork. Pity they aren’t promoted by business-houses that spend good money on consultants to teach those skills to their staff/managers. At the opposite end of this Shala is the Scout Hall which is majorly rented out for inexpensive weddings and exhibition-cum-sales. In between these two are a Keraliya Sports building, a Bengali cultural centre, a statue of Shivaji (understandably, for the Park’s named after him), a money-making temple, and very recently, a memorial for Balasaheb. (“Bala who?” a young someone asked me. “Thackeray,” I replied, “of the Shiv Sena”). Once feared in India’s commercial capital, today even old-timers can’t recall his full name. Memorials reduce people to yet another cornerstone. No amount of police presence can stop pigeons and dogs from doing ‘their thing’. Sad, no? On the eastern side, the SP Club has crept outside its old boundaries. The children’s play area is fenced as is the nana-nani park. A free-for-all outdoor gymnasium is sandwiched between the aforementioned two. A football coach charges a fee to use a self-limited space to teach children the game. Unofficial encroachment is overlooked/ignored by junta and officials alike. (Yes, there is something called official encroachment, like when the Muncipality converts a play-and-recreation area into a parking lot, but of that in another article.)

          The Park has a short wall or kutta on which people sit, hip touching hip, for they are many and space is limited, chatting with their friends. The energetic lot (hundreds of them) walk, run or jog round and round its periphery. Like the City, the Park doesn’t sleep. At 4 a.m., there are enthusiasts practicing for marathons. By 7, there are so many people rushing around it that I stared fascinated by the fact no one was banging into each other. Social discipline at work: those going one way weren’t interfering with those coming from the opposite side. I’ve seen the same sense of ‘stick to your lane’ during unbelievable rush-hour human traffic outside Churchgate/Dadar/VT (can’t bring myself to call it CST) stations. (Attention, people crossing the road at Porvorim Circle or near the Mapusa bus-stand, or entering/exiting ferries: there’s a lot you can learn from the Mumbaikars.

          Food. Where there are Indians and crowds, entrepreneurship is born. Health-fads sell. Karela-juice for diabetics, bhopla juice spiced with lemon and salt for cleansing blood, carrot juice as a prophylactic measure for eye-related problems, sugar and salt dissolved in plain water for the those who sweat too much, concoctions made of exotic or citrus fruits for the sweat-challenged, milk-shakes for those who prefer to skip breakfast, peeled garlic and haldi-powder for instant-and-guaranteed wellness, etc. Those with a fetish for freshly-made breakfasts have a choice of poha, puri-bhaji, cucumber-sandwiches and idli-chutney packets to carry home or eat then and there.

(With medical education and cost of diagnosis/treatment in private hospitals so high, the government must really encourage these illness-preventing/curing ideas. Who knows, with a bit of PR, the UN and the US and other such big names might get impressed with what’s happening in India in general and Shivaji Park in particular.)

Everything’s made in nearby kitchens by housewives with a zest for earning pocket-money and sold in small containers or polythene bags by helpful husbands/brothers/sisters-in-law, from steel dabbas that are housed in big bags, small cars, scooter-dickeys or even dangled from bicycle handles. By 8 am, mostly everyone’s gone back to office/bank/hospital/school. The retired lot hangs around chatting. Actually, the number of retired people is reducing, what with an increasing number getting involved in voluntary work. Or relocating to Goa.

When I told Bai Goanna about Shivaji Park, I discovered that the word ‘park’ invoked in her mind the picture of a resting place for wheeled vehicles. “Shivaji Park is so big?” she exclaimed when I described it to her, stretching out her arms skywards and sideways. It was International Yoga Day, so I assumed it was part of some asana she was practising.

“How many cars can it fit?” she asked.

“Thousands,” was my imagination-triggered guess.

“We should have something like that the Park in Goa,” she continued.

“Yes,” I agreed, my thoughts at complete variance with hers “a place where people of different states and professions mingle, where sportspersons and artists have a platform, where young mothers and octogenarians make friends, where pet-owners can exercise their dogs, where lovers can quarrel and cuddle, where lessons in knitting/crochet/life-skills are taken and given…”

“I don’t think that’s what she meant,” Shri Husband interrupted.

“No?” I was bewildered.

“I,” said Bai Goanna loftily, “think like the common man.” I felt that she was somehow deriding me because I was uncommon (ahem?) and a woman. We’ve quarrelled over pettier issues in the past, so I kept silent.   

Tentatively, I asked: “Means?”

Immediate response: “Parks are for parking. We Goans are still parking on sides of roads and on pavements. So old-fashioned. What are football grounds/ beaches for? All those stadia that were built for the Luso-games-- we need to use them optimally. We must get after our elected representatives (‘where does she pick up these big-big words from’, Shri Husband later wanted to know) to do something for the cars/scooters on the road.”

“But,” I explained to Bai Goanna that Shivaji Park, Mumbai, wasn’t about parking vehicles.

She responded with a mysterious expression: “It will be, you’ll see.”

Quite often, she’s right about these things. Scary, no?

           

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The Pre-Monsoons Week.

          The red-whiskered bulbul parents built their nest in a cove of a pruned tree whose newly sprouted leaves gave the little space a roof. After the fledglings were born, they flew hither-thither all day long, gathering food and shoving the half-chewed stuff down their tiny, wide-open beaks. We watched them grow. No feathers, no strength, only hunger was visible. One day, the nest was empty. Cat-paw prints told us what had happened. Sad. Can’t hate the cat. She’s pregnant, too. The empty nest is a reminder that Nature can be cruel.

          Across the drive, a snake slithered. I ran down with the mobile-phone to click a picture. But it disappeared into the soil before I reached it. A few days before that, I was poking my fingers to check on some saplings housed in plastic bags. In complete silence, about twelve baby snakes wriggled out of some undergrowth or crevices and fled to safety. I did the same, in another direction. Snakes (presumably) and I (definitely) are both safe, touch wood. Lesson learnt: not to mess with Nature unless shoed/clad properly. To be hypnotized by these graceful, scaled creatures, one should see baby cobras: they can ‘stand’ up, and when they do, they look like upright noodles.

          The giant, wild, maybe eighty-odd-year-old mango that gave hundreds of ungrafted, very sweet, fibrous (we call them ‘hairy’) fruit is now generously protecting my neighbourhood slum from the pelting drops. No one plucked those mangoes. Squirrels, birds, the breeze detached them from the stems and they fell to the ground, sometimes injured, sometimes intact. I gathered those that fell into my compound, once in the morning and then again in the evening. I got about ten every day. Those with worms got composted, those without such ‘guests’ were consumed. Ditto with the bhinnda solan (also called kokum) a month ago when the sun was at its bullying worst.

          Weeds can be charming. All of them appear simultaneously, almost overnight, some in not-so-obvious places like under the tyres of a parked vehicle. The vivid blue and yellow flowers are tiny. I see under the magnifying glass how pretty they are and marvel at their strength: they don’t bow to the downpour. Bigger shrubs do. Tall trees pay obeisance by throwing down leaves, twigs, even a branch or four.

          The soil in my village has laterite rubble in some places. In others, there’s clayey, sticky, gooey stuff that won’t let go of a foot if one stupidly puts it down on it. I’m the ‘one’. Have lost many a chappal to the slush… then retrieved it with a handy pipe or sturdy forked danda kept for the purpose.

          Umbrellas are useless in downpours. The rain hasn’t a clue that it isn’t supposed to splash off the ground and ruin trouser edges. Nor does it respect plastic sheets wrapped around waists or raincoats. Hair doesn’t get wet under an umbrella, that’s true, but it gets very, very damp and is a stylist’s delight: there’s a lot, I’m told, that can be done with moist tresses.

          Inside cupboards is a sight which, in my school-days when I learned and drew diagrams about such things, I could only imagine: moulds and fungi that begin as a frosty layer and end up smelly, ruining clothes and moods.

          Bathroom and kitchen drains are great for investigating worms from the benign and useful earthworms to the scary, hairy red centipedes with a hundred black feet and an awful bite.

          Underneath and behind cabinets flourish ants. Big black ones, mainly, plus a few million tiny cousins. They have queens with colonies. They lay and hatch eggs. They train young workers, procreate to make more of them, and several generations set up a civilization of sorts, unobtrusively. One day, a few stragglers were spied. I took out a drawer, then the full cabinet and horrors: behind it, between it and the wall was a living carpet of ants. Moving, rushing, working, systematically, invisibly (until now) creating a world under my kitchen platform. Bless ‘em anti-insect repellents, efficient and handy chemicals. I’m a nature-lover, yea, but I don’t like intruders with intentions of permanent encroachment. I used the pesticide sparingly at first. There was havoc in the Ant Co-operative Housing Colony. Some went helter with their eggs, others skelter with foodstuff, duty-bound ones surround Queen Ant. I wished I was camera-savvy. That would have made a horror-film, a hit, no less. It’s when I realised that they were winning the battle with me that I used the spray-astra with a vengeance. When I was sweeping up the casualties, I felt bad, but only slightly, temporarily. I know Nature forgives quite a bit and forgets such incidents faster than I like. I’ll face another such battle sooner rather than later, and periodically through the monsoons.

          About the local floods. The Panchayat followed a plan the government had made, dug a trench, a narrow canal to guide rainwater into a larger one to eventually connect it to fields/river far away. Trouble is, not one person imagined that the job had to be completed. Well begun is half done, they say. Exactly. Halfway up the gutter, where the half-done part ends, the mud gave way under water finding its course. The stream thus created respected neither fence nor wall and covered plots and bhaats with dead rats/cats/piglets and plenty of plastic and thermacole. The low-lying fields welcomed the garbage. Some sweet day the garbage will become a landfill and the owner will sell it to a builder. People who buy expensive flats may just about have a clue what surrounds the foundation of their precious property… old knickers, sandals, broken bits of all sorts of rubbish.

          The trees love the grey clouds. They know the monsoons are here. The Met Department says this rain is from a cyclonic depression… the trees don’t care for the explanation. In spite of discomforts and misadventures, it’s happiness time. The ‘mud-perfume’ is heady. Bring out the chai-pakodas.

          The monsoons have arrived.

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Vegetarians, Indian.

               “I’m no longer non-vegetarian,” Bai Goanna told a gora friend. (A gora, dear politically correct vocabulary using readers, is a skin-pigment-challenged individual from beyond our western borders. Those from Down Under are also included.)

               “Means?” gora friend asked.

               “I now eat only vegetables,” Bai Goanna said. But gora friend didn’t know that she wouldn’t eat vegetables from a meat-stew.

               “Why not?” gora friend wondered. “They’re vegetables.”

               “But they’re from a meat-stew,” Bai Goanna explained. Gora friend is yet to figure out her logic.

               Shri Husband, when told about the incident, gave his unasked-for opinion about how complicated Indian vegetarianism is. “We can’t just be vegetarian. You have to specify: no garlic-onion vegetarian, no-tomato vegetarian, eggs-allowed vegetarian…”

               I mumbled: “Some people eat only unfertilized eggs, so they’re eggatarian, a kind of vegetarianism.”

               Shri Husband’s decibel-level rises when he’s interrupted. The reverse never matters. So he said a little louder, nudging my ten words out of the way: “Whether or not unfertilized eggs can be included in a vegetarian diet is debatable. There are other complications… we have days of the week fasts when being mere vegetarian isn’t enough. You can’t eat fish or meat on Mondays and Thursdays. Then there are God-days. Tuesdays for Ganapati, Saturdays for Hanuman, Fridays for the Bollywood-promoted goddess, Santoshi Mata.”

Bai Goanna wanted to know why some people thought fish was a fruit of the sea. I said: “My grandmother’s old neighbour’s aunt-in-law used to say it isn’t sinful to eat fish because no one killed fish. It died on its own when it was taken out of the water.”

“Great logic,” said Shri Husband, “Especially when your grandmother’s old neighbour’s aunt-in-law is the authority.”

“Old people know best,” I protested.

 “Yes,” he agreed. It’s always dangerous when Shri Husband agrees. It means a debate is imminent. One-sided, mostly.

He continued: “Our fasts are hard to understand. Mostly you are ‘allowed to’ eat enough to stuff three stomachs, but it’s a fast. This ‘allowed to’ business has fluid rules. On some days, you can’t eat rice, but you can eat rye. No mustard seeds, but groundnuts are ok. Saboodana and rajgira is always ok. Milk and its products maybe, maybe not, depends on which god’s promise you are depending on to resolve some self-created problem. Same with sour foods. You can cook chicken in this vessel but not that one…” He added that he didn’t blame Bai Goanna’s gora friend’s inability to understand her food habits, more so when she’s ok with wheat rotis on some days, but avoids bread altogether because it contains yeast.

“But yeast isn’t non-vegetarian” doesn’t make sense to her. Bai Goanna believes mushrooms and masoor dal, too, fall in the non-fasting category, though she isn’t sure why.

“Let’s do relay-fasting,” Shri Husband suggested to Bai Goanna. “I’ll eat steaks and chops on the day you eat aloo-parathas and when I eat chana-puri, you eat chonnak-prawns, what say?”

I took Bai Goanna’s side: “If it’s her food preference, so be it. Let her turn Jain vegetarian if she wants to. She can have Jain-Mughlai then.”

“Akbar, Jehangir and their kith and cooks wouldn’t understand the term. Jain-Mughlai indeed.”

A thought struck me. I stared at Bai Goanna: “No garlic, onions, carrots, radish or potatoes? What then will you eat?”              

               First, she started off by having a shelf for herself in the fridge. We couldn’t put any dabba/vessel with a hint of chicken/fish/meat/egg on that shelf. Had we the money, she would have asked for a separate choola/kitchen/house.

Then followed the interesting part. She downloaded and learnt from friends recipes which were ‘strict’ vegetarian. To our table came the Gujerati daal-dhokli, a pulse stew with strips of boiled dough in it, which she labelled ‘Indian lasagne’, quite different from the yellow snack, dhokla. Lightly sautéed okra stuffed with spiced besan. The white, light kadhi made of stabilized curd eaten with several kinds of easy on the stomach khichdis. Sweet and sour red-pumpkin dishes from the heartland of the country. South Indian savoury goodies flavoured with sesame seeds.

From strict vegetarian Bai Goanna was turning pure vegetarian. Or the other way around, I don’t know the difference. Then she became shudha pure vegetarian, something called saatvik (I won’t bother to explain this concept, because unless you’re a wannabe spiritually evolved person, it will take more than 1000 words to explain and that’s beyond what this column allows). So curds (but not buttermilk) and cheeses were scratched out of grocery lists. From within the plant kingdom, after excluding fungi and underground growths, she kept out of her diet aubergines and other wicked, tamasik, rajasik stuff (won’t expand on the meanings for reason given above). Bai Goanna was convinced she would become patient, kind, observant, energetic, with good humour and great health. Diets do that, even modern science agrees, Shri Husband pointed out after reading an article.

Bai Goanna next gave up eating anything too sour, too bitter, too sweet, too spicy and ate only when hungry… which was hourly, for she wouldn’t eat more than quarter of her stomach’s volume and the fresh, matka-cooled water that filled the remaining three-fourths didn’t keep away the pangs for over 60 minutes.

Interestingly, the fasting habit has stretched from fasting and fasting through Lent, fasting and feasting through Ramadan and fasting some more in Shravan. There are medicines and breathing/meditating techniques that help curb appetite (for food, may I clarify) and some asanas, too. Bai Goanna’s trying them all out. After all, nothing like eating less in these times of high prices and thinness still in fashion.

When Bai Goanna told the above mentioned gora that many of her friends were non-vegetarians, the gora assumed we ate no vegetables. We discovered then that the word non-vegetarian was a very Indian one. Only Indians from India or those with a strong Indian connection know what it means.  

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G and Gang.

          In an illegal construction near my house, born on once-fertile fields, lives G, a Jharkhandi who comes at dawn to help remove the leaf-litter outside my door. She told me her son aspires to join the sarkar through the IAS. Though she cooks on twigs collected from the roadside and wears mostly torn clothes, has watched television about a dozen times in her life, she’s aware of her rights. G’s husband’s drunken behaviour and his income are unreliable. G, therefore bashes on largely on her own with the help of her children. One daughter has done her General Nursing and Midwifery course from Osmania University. Presently she works in a nursing home in Jharkhand and hopes to get a government job. Another daughter is midway through a B.Sc. (Chem) course. A third gives tuitions to support the others. The fourth just cleared her twelfth: this girl wept and refused to eat because her marks put her in a lower second class.

          The labourers who live around G’s kholi/kood, from Rajasthan, Orissa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, comforted the girl by telling her that ‘tears wouldn’t help’, that she could and should do better in college. When I spoke to the girl, she told me how it didn’t matter that her percentage had been affected by the Economics marks, for, “mera don’t worry hai, main toh accounts lene vali hoon”.

All the occupants of this small ‘slum’ (for want of a better word) are up before the sun rises so they can do their ablutions in darkness. The bathroom and toilet are kept locked for reasons known to nobody. The well they have access to has been treated with some chemical so the water smells, G told me, but what to do, there is no other water source. Like migrants everywhere, they adjust.

          Political correctness is unknown in their world. People are known by physical traits: lumboo, motoo, kaanaa and one woman is called kalimaa.

          “Why,” I asked one of them, “do you call her that? It’s not her name.”

          Surprised at my asking so, he pointed out an obvious reason: “Because she’s black. Look at her face, her skin. She’s black.” The woman, her husband and their children giggled. Encouraged by the attention they were getting, others pitched in to tell me that some months ago, she bought a tube of a fairness cream and they saw the difference, she actually became somewhat gori. But she stopped, and now she’s a kalimaa again. I was told it’s more shameful to be alsee (lazy) than to be black. Even their unchanging daily-wages routine, appearances matter. They are neatly dressed, with women’s hair oiled and combed tightly into a knot/bun. Both men and women wear cheap but sturdy footwear. That’s in the morning, when they arrive on a ‘site’. There they change into drab and dirty work clothes, looking sloppy and covered with dust. Shift over, washed and changed, they return in their ‘best’ attire.

          Their tiffin is packed in steel dabbas. At mealtimes, they sit gender-wise on newspapers, either in a line or a circle. A nap in shade follows a meal. Goa’s susegaadness exists all over India, there just isn’t a word for in other languages.

          In old, established slums like Dharavi in Mumbai, some people earn well, whatever their occupation, some have regular, respectable jobs, school-going children rub shoulders (literally) with raggedy-pariah kids, and some make a living exhorting haftas from lesser mortals. In my neighbourhood slum everyone works. Window-pane fixers, plumbers, carpenters, masons, electricians’ helpers, away from families, have come to Goa to earn a living and strike root. The Goan collecting the rent, who a few years ago bent over rice saplings, knows that no taxman, Town and Country Planner or other government official will mind. A 3-phase electrical supply indicates that the Panchayat has issued an NOC, a stamp of approval. Life is good for many, no matter how much ‘my kind’ complains about our culture getting diluted.  

          Every inhabitant of this young slum is religious. One day, I warned G not to go near the burning leaves in her synthetic sari. She assured me that no harm would come to her, at least not from fire, she said, for she worshipped Hanuman. I didn’t see the connection, but questioning creature that I am, I’m detached from her thought-process. Each tenant-resident has a favourite god/dess. The day begins with devotional songs on different cellular phones, thank you FM radio. Later, as it (the day, not the radio-wave) progresses, the multi-purpose mobiles spew filmy songs simultaneously in at least five languages. No one minds the cacophony or noise pollution except me. Festivals mean more noise, litter and cheap goodies to eat. The Christian contractor and his Muslim supervisor pay for part of the celebrations of Devi/Ganesh poojas, so I’m told. If the Hindu lot in any reciprocates with the Id/Christmas festivities, I’m not aware. For G and gang, days of no-work and good food are fun, irrespective of which religion the holiday belongs to.

          I don’t know whether G’s son will fulfil her aspirations. She has ensured that her girls have been schooled so they will live a better life than hers. If the son clears any UPSC exam and gets through the rigorous training thereafter, he would know and understand the lives of such slum-dwellers more than anyone in my world. But if he doesn’t, I have no idea what he can/will fall back upon.

          G and gang comprise dhobhis, barbers, gardeners, who have seen certain skills in their growing years that their children will lose or have already lost. Tailoring institutes will flourish. So will cosmetology schools, horticulture courses, cooking and baking classes, etc.

          In another generation, the occupations of G and gang may still not be as coveted as those of astronomers/ neurosurgeons, but they will be a shortage-induced value attached to them.

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