Every once in a while, unexpected joys sneak out of life’s crevices to lighten the weary heart. Like this afternoon, I found catharsis in the form of a writer of Pakistani origin called Kamila Shamsie. Last year, I’d given her book Broken Verses to a dear student as a parting gift after her post-graduation, since I liked what the back-cover said and because I’m partial to women writers and curious about Pakistan. This year, it came right back to me as the only fitting present she could think of on our first meeting after her move to Dubai. “Read it. I think you’ll like it,” she smiled.
And I did -- much more than like it too. Enough to comb bookshops for Shamsie’s other works and come upon Kartography, which, in turn brought on the epiphany that my befuddled brain desperately longed for. Both books speak of everlasting, fated love; but that’s not why the coin suddenly dropped. It’s the fact that both are as much about the city of Karachi as the characters that live in it -- its own story flowing through their blood streams and, in more ways than one, defining who they are and what they are destined to become.
By the time the second book was over, not only had I fallen in love with Karachi (a city I’ve never seen), I’d found a mirror being held up to the only place on earth I can call home, Bombay (Mumbai, Bambai, call it what you like; name don’t change the place). Of course Shamsie’s Karachi is far bloodier than I’ve ever seen my hometown being – gunfire and random killings being a matter of routine occurrence (in between civil war and ethnic cleansing) and curfews and deserted streets a norm.
Or at least it was, in 1971 and 1995, (if Kartography bears any resemblance to facts) when the lives of two generations of friends unfold amidst torrid times and for most part, the primary agent of upheavals in their lives is the city, tearing them apart while burning in its own misery. Both cities seem like soul sisters – port towns, symbols of their respective nations’ prosperity, melting pots pock-marked with innumerable scars of petty bigotry, plundered and pulverised by millions and yet pulling along with undue resilience.
I’ve feared for some time now that Bombay is dangling over a precipice. And when it goes down, it’ll take me with it. Mawkish as this sounds, it is the truth. I’ve grown up here. I know the city inside out – and many of the cities within. I can differentiate between the wide-ranging smells of its filth and myriad sounds of its hysterical pace like they are a part of my own being. I’ve hung out of crowded trains to suck in the breeze, been ensconced in anonymity amongst swarming crowds at Churchgate and Dadar, watched the sun drowning behind the Haji Ali mosque from my car window, exulted at the sight of a B.E.S.T. bus at Chembur after just a week’s absence from the city and even grinned gleefully to myself aboard airplanes approaching touchdown over Dharavi after vacations in far, far cleaner, greener, safer and fancier lands.
But I can't bear to romanticise my city. I don’t love it for what it is – nor what it was when I was growing up in a relatively quiet suburban neighbourhood and revelling in its indestructible spirit as a child or as a youth full of dreams that my beloved hometown promised to fulfil. If the western world lost its innocence in 2001, Bombay lost hers in 1992-93 (at least for me, it did), when self-righteous right-wingers stalked the streets, systematically burning up Muslim establishments and dragging people out of their homes and buildings like ours, to ascertain their faith and punish them, ostensibly for ‘wrongs’ committed by their ancestors and later, when the first bombs exploded in her face (an equally mindless act of alleged retaliation, but plainly put, the city’s first official terrorist attack) and ripped apart much more than the lives of 1000 people who were either killed or maimed in their wake and their loved ones.
I still remember getting up every morning through the riots of 1992-93 and nonchalantly boarding a train to college, unmindful of the tension in the city, or standing on the building terrace and watching tongues of flames bursting forth from burning shops in the neighbourhood, a gentle gust floating towards us with the smoke and the heat of those fires and scorching our eyes with collective guilt.
It’s not just the senseless violence that shattered the myth. It’s the feeling of being lost in your own home, battered past recognition by forces beyond one’s control – deplorable politicians, crumbling infrastructure, unsafe roads, apathetic policemen, unbearable pollution, opportunistic scamsters… The list goes on and on. But most distressing of all is the much-vaunted resilient spirit of the citizenry – their eyes either too dazzled by the possibility of winning that one big lottery or too numbed by the drudgery of a lifelong struggle to survive at any cost whatsoever. The incongruity of gleaming shopping malls standing right across the road from slums, wretched beggars pecking at your complacency on every traffic signal, ugly skyscrapers blocking out more and more of the skies, the weight of a million immersions reducing the sea to a stinking discoloured mass and the entire city gasping and reeling under the aspirations of 15 million people – and slipping away from my grasp.
I’ve sometimes been tempted to walk away from it all – more now than ever before. The colony of my childhood is now like an old people’s settlement, most of the children I grew up with, long gone in search of better opportunities. I too have tried imagining a life away from this madness, in tranquil climes relatively untouched by the brutality and inequity of human life. I’ve closed my eyes and conjoured images of being someplace else and instantly snapped them open, feeling disorientated under unfamiliar skies. It doesn’t look like I have a choice in the matter. My parents were born here, as was my daughter. And somehow, the city is as irrevocably tied to me as the umbilical chord. No place on earth can make me put Bombay out of my mind, and there’s nowhere else I can put my head on a pillow and feel like I’m home.
