A Strange Brooding
Life moves faster than light in Bombay, but evenings in any metropolis can sludge on occasion. Time is sticky, like a fly caught in amber. This evening, I found myself on the other side of the clock, looking through a suitcase of old photo albums. The hours raced past me as I sat on a bed in my parents’ home of twenty years and flicked through a carousel of fading prints encased in the thinnest gloss of transparent paper. This act of indulgence—or time-travel—is embarrassing, and defies explanation. Nostalgia can, at best, varnish our intentions to look back: to sink into our past selves, find relief and perhaps even amusement in acknowledging that it took a camera with a timer, or the company of another person, to make a selfie not so long ago. It was all easier back then, we say, and maybe it isn’t a complete lie to say too that that we take ourselves more seriously as we age, much to the detriment of our lives, those very lives we would like so much to find easy, and fine.
But nostalgia is not in itself the reason I spent hours looking through these albums. The gap between my life as captured on that glossy kodak paper, and my longing to occupy that life, that exact moment even, to the extent that it explodes from the four corners of the photograph and corrodes my present like an exposed film: that gap will never close. I know it will not. Yet I sit here, surrounded by these albums, willing myself to be fazed over and over. I don’t know what I am looking for. I don’t know if I will know when I find it. I don’t know if I will, then, stop hauling these albums out of the suitcase.
I feel again: amazement, happiness, dismay. These emotions crust on the surface of my mind, resembling something like bewilderment. This feeling of bewilderment at how my life will always exceed my own articulation of it—any attempt on my part to sufficiently contain, narrate, represent or in any way document it—is overwhelming, and no more so than when I look at photographs I’ve taken of the city as a young woman. That young women did not yet know—and still may not—that loving a city cannot be one’s entire personality, and the photographs reflect that sentimental quality: they are reverent, desperate, whimsical, romantic. They are youthful. They are embarrassing. But they do not lie. I took those photographs as a teenager on the cusp of her twenties, already learning to look at her city by leaning on a long line of witnesses, while simultaneously refusing to believe that anyone before her has ever loved or looked at Bombay in quite this way. The city becomes a salve, as all great cities do. They create hardship and offer respite, and we, tired but grateful, pledge our love. Yes, the copper sunsets over Dockyard Road, yes, the aftermath of morning rain in a Dadar bylane, yes, the dheemi local leaving Chembur, yes, the solitary breakfasts at Kyani, yes, the daft church signs in Khar, yes, the sea curling over every edge of stone, yes, Jussawalla’s Land’s End breeze and Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda dogs and Ezekiel’s Malabar Hill cafe and de Souza’s lapsed Catholics in Versova, yes, I’ll take it, isn’t that how the poem goes, I’ll take it, I’ll take it all.
I sensed that I would not stay in the city forever, that something was about to shatter my relationship to it, and I was not wrong. I made a series of choices that took me far from Bombay, but I returned, over and over, not always on my own terms. It continued to change, cities do, but in ways that made it uglier and unrecognisable, bringing, amongst others, undercurrents of jingoism, ecological self-destruction and corporate greed to the fore. These currents are not aberrations; they are blood currents, running as foundations to this city. And yet: each time I arrive here, I am more distanced from the city I grew up in, a city that is still more home than anywhere else in the world. There is no shame in saying it, nor any in acknowledging my bitterness and distress at a map that is changed forever, one that is if only partially reflected in the skyline. I recognise the luxury of distance, the air gap that makes room for the way I feel, and produces these feelings in the first instance. I also recognise the loss it entails: loving a city cannot be one’s personality, but the only people seeking to make it so are the ones who are furthest from it. No one else is quite as desperate to redeem Bombay by belonging to it, because no one else is as undeserving of the deep resignation and anger that sit in and mark out the marrow of its inhabitants, as one who does not live here anymore. It is vexing, it is a cliché, and nowhere else feels like home yet, but I say this as someone who is leaving, yet again. This time, though, I may leave with some photo albums.
Those photographs I took of the city do not remind me of why I left. They remind me of the part of myself that knows how to love something that is close to ending. Anticipating loss as a futile form of love, and thereby grieving prematurely, at the expense of all that is good and solid about the present: like the rest of you, I have done this all my life, but never more so than when I come home. Looking at these photographs makes me cringe, but in the wake of this ongoing pandemic, it makes me softer too, more disposed towards the version of myself that took these photographs, the version who thought that the only way to love the city was to walk its streets endlessly, and take photographs of it, over and over, and that this love would save both the city and her.
Over the years, I have taken many photographs of Bombay. Some of the most intimate ones are accidental and others are carefully composed but I do not revisit any of these, in the same way that we do not revisit all of our memories. Until today, I had avoided looking at the photographs below. These are impoverished scans, but the originals were taken on a series of early morning walks around Dhobi Talao in 2009 or 2010, with my father’s old Pentax P30 film camera, using a B/W Kodak film; probably the Kodak 400.
I was reading some Manto this evening, after putting the photographs away, when I chanced upon the following paragraphs. As I read the last line, I felt a loose joy, for Manto’s words gave form, as usual, to the rushed tangle of my feelings. In the postscript to his short story collection Yazid (1951), Manto wrote about Bombay, which he had left for Lahore:
“Today I am disconsolate. A strange brooding has come over me. It is the same sadness I experienced four or four and a half years ago when I bid farewell to my other home, Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life. Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family. She had told me, ‘You can live here happily on two paise a day or ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or in a magnificent mansion. I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.’
I was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands—hundreds of thousands—and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!”