Real and unphony and scary…

I do not take anything lying down, but at my hostel in Bombay I am this meek kid without a tongue, who does what I am asked to do. I am not being this way, willingly, but I guess, the hostel and its inmates are just too real and scary for me. Not scary in the you-can-hurt-me type sense, but scary in the what-if-I-end up-like-them sense. The reality of the lives in the hostel scares me.

Some 5 of us are watching TV, some scary Aahat type serial, and are nearing the end. Most of us are on the edge of our seats, when this really fat, middle aged woman comes, switches channel, puts some saas bahu thing and starts watching it. I hear some meek protests, but she sits in the centre of the TV room like a don, and says how she is been living in this hostel for the past 4 years, and nobody had dared to change her routine of watching the serial, and that she will see to it that nobody is able to. She was so loud, and I doubt I would’ve ever taken such shit, but I didn’t want to react. I didn’t feel any anger towards her, for I pitied her, as she was so powerless in her world, that she reassured herself by elucidating her power this way. She is a known yeller, yes, that’s the word for her, for she never speaks, she yells.

Yesterday, I wanted to watch friends that comes at 7 on star world. So I went to the TV room at 6, so that, I am able to ‘catch the TV’ for another hour. Just when I was about to beam with pride, when the clock struck 7 and I found myself alone in the TV room, I find this woman with short cropped hair walk in, pencil thin, without any trace of any curves, in any part of her body, and with the most dead pan face, that I have ever seen, and switch channels. I am aghast, and she looks at me, with the same dead look and says, I always watch ‘Mamta’ at 7. Mamta, it is associated with some emotions I guess, and looking at her, I could not stop wondering, where was that last spec of emotion left in her.

This hostel is their life. They can’t live anywhere else, for nowhere else can they boost their non-existent self worth, the way it is possible in this microcosm of loserness. It scares me, coz someday the bubble might burst for them, or may be it bursts everyday for them, and then they yell or bully people around, to sew it and inflate it again!! And I guess life goes on…

This hostel sometimes brings me face to face with the most unphony faces of life.
I was supposed to expect a roommate yesterday. At around 8, while I was having dinner, a middle aged woman, with half burnt face, walks in, with a bag. A chill went down my spine, I couldn’t chew the morsel that was in my mouth and I had to force myself from staring at her. I picked up my plate and went to put it away and when I turned back after filling my bottle of water, I could not see her. I was scared that she must’ve gone to the room upstairs. I cant explain how I felt, I had to force myself to go to my room, and when I reached my room , and I found the room locked, I don’t think I had sighed such a relief in my entire life. I had absolutely freaked out by the very idea of sharing a room with a woman who looked like that.

I am so ashamed of myself. I mean the only thing I should be scared of staying in a hostel, is well, the safety of my belongings. If I keep everything under lock n key, I needn’t worry about that too, and I definitely had no right or intentions of drawing a judgment that the woman would steal my stuff.

Then why did I freak out, just because she looked that way? I gave it a thought and realized that I haven’t seen the real world, the unphony world, the world without cover ups. It will be ugly, it will be freakish, but it is real and all of us have to accept it and deal with it, coz its our world, however much we deny it, anything can happen to anybody.

The Bombay Poverty

It’s been 4 days in Bombay. The last time I was here, fortunately I did not have time to look around, explore and grasp the place. This time I have all the time, and whatever I have grasped in the 4 days has been anything but pleasant. And everything was unphony. There was no pretence, no cover up, plain and bare truth.
It was poverty, quite obviously, it was the contrast of lives, for Bombay is home to the most ostentatious rich and well the most visible poor. Suketu Mehta deals with this contrast quite well in his book ‘Maximum City; Bombay Lost and Found’.
Its not that I have been some ignorant citizen, who has turned a blind eye to the realities of an Indian ‘non middle and above class’ life. But the poor and poverty of Bombay is different. Its in your face, its visible even to the most blind, and it cannot be ignored. It’s omnipresent, and it can be felt even where you donot even see a beggar. It is true and it is unphony.
The other parts of India, it seems, are ashamed of the poor, and are tucked away in some part of the town/city, where they are not visible. The poverty in other parts of India is the invisible truth. The most visible truth of Bombay is poverty. Bombay does not hide the poor, I donot know if that is out of choice or the sheer magnitude makes it impossible. Also this is one place where the ‘below poverty line’ method of measuring poverty fails miserably. Even Sen’s ‘capability development’ principle, which I believe to be one of the tools to account for poverty, does not seem to fit in. The Bombay Poverty is indefinable, unaccountable and somewhere, un-alleviatable. It is inherent to Bombay, and I donot think anybody can fathom Bombay without it.
A trip down the suburban roads will familiarize you with it, and then after spending some time walking down the roads, you internalize it. And then it hits you. If you stay long enough, then like any other pain, felt over a long period of time, you become numb to it.
This familiarization happened in the last trip to Bombay six months back, when I saw, two storied slum shacks, not higher than 5 feet from the ground, skirting the road from I don’t know where, till where the town started. I could not take my eyes off it, for I had seen the beggars, I had heard my sweeperess tell me about her miserable life, I am a socially aware being, I read newspapers and know what’s happening in famine and drought infested areas of Orissa etc, but nothing had prepared me to not notice, to the extent of getting entrenched in my mind, the face of the Bombay Poverty.
I walk down the roads of Nariman point, on my way to marine drive everyday for morning walk, and I see people sleeping off the road, the most sound sleep, as if there is nothing wrong with their lives. I agree somewhere they have accepted their circumstances, not out of choice, but the sheer acceptance of this poverty, of this life, is, according to my guesses, extremely peculiar to Bombay.
The sheer number of people living off the road in Bombay, apart, the reason for this peculiarity, according to my observations, is the satisfaction of being a Bombaiyaa.
Nobody wants to leave this city, nobody wants to go back and or look for other avenues. They consider this city to be the be all and end all. If life will provide something to them, it will be here, and so they give up their lives to the destiny and to the mercy of the City. This makes them the hopefuls, and this makes them not hate their poverty, for there is hope and they become the backbone of the city, and this unables the City to hide its poverty, for only in this city, the poverty inflicted are not poor but hopefuls.
Hats off to the city of contradictions. For in Mehta’s book, somebody says nobody dies hungry here. For people tell me this is the safest of the Metropolises in India, and for the time being, I agree (with my fingers crossed). For the Mumbaiyyaa I met on the train said this city is cheaper than the small town of Himachal Pradesh. For even after seeing the face of the city, the slum shacks and the like, there are hordes of trains filled with young men and women coming to this city to get lost in the crowd and be the part of the Bombay Poverty.
I for one, haven’t been able to decide whether I like it or not. There is nothing that attracts me here, for even though my rational mind says, this is the most convenient city, most amenities at stone-throw distance, this is the city best for professional considerations, but my heart says this is the city for hordes, for dreamers, and not for me who does not lives dreams but vision. My vision cannot fathom myself being a part of this hugeness, and the Bombay Poverty scares me. Its hit me bad and I guess if I want make this city my home, I will have to force myself to live here long enough, to become numb to this omnipresent spectacle, as well as the contradictions.

(written on 12/05/06)