Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Anita Desai’s 1975 novella, seems to hold some fortuitous connection to my time in Mumbai, or Bombay, as I prefer to call it, given my fascination with the mythology of that great city. One of Desai’s lesser known works, I first encountered it in the cabinet of swappable books at the Salvation Army hostel during a strange, lonely stay in Bombay. The books there had been discarded by travellers of all nationalities, and the copy I picked up was in French (Où Irons Nous Cet Été?). Equally fortuitous, I also found Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories there, which quickly became one of my favourite books. As Manto says himself, ‘As I am a short story writer, I managed to describe the ocean, Apollo Bunder, and the crowds in such an interesting way that he didn’t complain about his throat even after smoking six cigarettes.’
Où Irons Nous Cet Été turned out to be a bit much for my feeble French. About a year later, back in Melbourne, I borrowed the English version from the uni library and was charmed by its description of the magical Manori, a small island that lies off the coast of northern Bombay.
A few months later, back in Bombay, I was scouring the second-hand book stalls opposite Flora Fountain for my own copy of Where Shall We Go This Summer? to take with me to Manori. The stalls there are built entirely out of books, piled eight feet high so that they form a kind of maze; encompassed by its walls, one can browse the thousands of volumes that form its bricks. There is a certain skill, possessed by the booksellers alone, to extracting a single book from these structures. Alas, I found every Desai book but the one I needed. Nevertheless that Sunday my friend Priyanka agreed to accompany me on the train ride to Malad and the subsequent ferry ride over to the island.
The Sunday afternoon train was quiet. It crawled slowly northwards, from the sea-views and deco apartment-blocks of the Southern suburbs to the sprawling rail yards and slums of Bandra and Mahim. After a little over an hour we reached bustling Malad. I always think of Shah Rukh Khan in the 1993 film Baazigar, who, when asked does he live in Bombay, replies no, Malad, and who has to travel a long stretch of empty highway to reach the city. These days Mumbai’s northernmost suburbs reach far beyond Malad, and it’s hard to believe that 25 years ago Malad was a village outside Bombay.
The street outside Malad station was amazingly busy, crammed with the diversely honking vehicles of Bombay traffic. We stopped outside one of several wide, open-fronted cafés serving snack foods and cold drinks, all of which were packed-out, their plastic benches crowded with Sunday time-passers. Kachori cooked in giant pans of bubbling, golden oil, samose were piled high under protective mosquito-netting, and everywhere the advertisement, ‘REAL Kesar (saffron) Lassi!’. We ordered one to share. The lassi was kept deep in refrigerated vats, from which a man ladled the smooth, yellow liquid into a plastic cup and put pistachios on top. Priyanka and I passed it back and forth, savouring its subtle, spicy flavour and its delicious coldness.
Leaving the café, we came to a series of fruit vendors. Green-skinned oranges, bright mandarins, scrawny apples, enormous, deep-green watermelons were piled on tarpaulins or in baskets. Coming from England, Priyanka was especially amazed by this spectacle of tropical fruit, and we bought mandarins, mangoes, chikoo and a huge quantity of red grapes. Next I determined to find some chai.
Strangely enough in that food-and-drink metropolis, we walked for a long time before coming finally to a very dark, very ship-shod ‘hotel’ on a noisy intersection. My memory of this restaurant, which had no windows and served chai and extremely cheap meals, is primarily one of dirt. The laminex tables were grimy, the floor was so black it might have been made of earth. The chai came on saucers with gritty dishwater pooled in the middle. I am reminded, however, of an article I read once called Dirty White Candles: Earnest Hemingway’s Encounter with the East, which discusses Hemingway’s preoccupation with dirtiness when he writes about Istanbul. Mel Kenne describes ‘a form of culture shock suggested by the young reporter’s confrontation with ‘Otherness’ in the form of dirt in Constantinople’, fearing ‘a morally questionable or degenerate Otherness’. Sometimes I worry that I too am guilty of this attitude, or that I once was. At any rate the chai was good, and for some reason in that cavernous place I found myself reciting to Priyanka my favourite lines of Hindi poetry from Agyeya’s Kitni Navon Mein Kitni Baar, which, translated poorly by myself, are:
From what distances how many times,
Aboard how many rocking boats,
Have I travelled in your direction.
Oh my little light!…
And how many times have how many sparkling ships
Pulled me across what great distances…
How many times have I…
Sad, restless, anxious—how many times!
Outside the restaurant we hailed a rickshaw for the long drive to Marve Beach, where we would get the ferry to Manori. Desai’s novel begins on Marve, a beach on the edge of the city from which ‘the massed rocks and the palms of the island’ are visible across only a slim stretch of water. Unlike urban Chowpatty beach, which runs parallel to busy Marine Drive, we came upon Marve beach suddenly at the end of a congested street. Only as we walked out onto the sand did the full, curving extent of the beach become visible, flanked on the land-side by coconut palms and bougainvillea, as well as the motley crowd that peopled the shore, Desai’s vivid description of which seems utterly up-to-date:
‘Some of the Manori fishermen who had just brought in their craft with small hauls of fish for the market stood up in their battered boats and stared. The weekly market had begun to draw a crowd and this crowd, too, paused to watch the boat set out—women with their crimson and green saris tucked up between their legs and baskets of fish and small children on their hips, all stopped to stare. Then the ferry boat from Manori chose that moment to arrive on Marve beach and all those Manori fishermen bringing their dried Bombay ducks and green coconuts to the market…Marathi women in saris carrying baskets of custard-apples and Christian girls in stiff frocks bearing pink and yellow paper flowers for Marve church…’
Descriptions of Bombay are characterised, I find, by this kind of list-making; the sheer proliferation and variety of people and objects lends itself to it. So overwhelming is the city’s visual input that one never moves beyond the simple listing of things to reacting to them, ascribing them meaning, and the inability to do this is kind of ego-destroying. I think this is part of Bombay’s extraordinary pull.
Marve remains home to many of the marginalised Koli fisher people, the traditional inhabitants of the area Bombay occupies, of whom Salman Rushdie writes:
‘Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off worst of all… A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land; pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the sunset…’
In fact the catch of the fisher men and women on Marve that day was, with all due respect, a sight grotesque and surreal. Carried in baskets or strewn on tarps on the sand were masses of bizarre crustaceans like alien viscera, many of them twitching and quivering, many others lifeless. They were worm-shaped or crab-shaped or prawn-shaped, but none of them longer than about an inch, their pink-red insides disturbingly visible through their translucent exteriors. People sat on the tarps picking them from the seething mass and sorting them expertly into piles according to their species. Priyanka was rightfully disturbed by this gruesome sight; my fascination with all things marine, on the other hand, made me stare at the massed creatures with interest.
The ferry was packed as a morning train; we crowded together to make way for several young men to drive their motorbikes onboard. As much as I have grown out of applying Australian safety norms to transport in India, it occurred to me that this couldn’t be safe. Unfazed, however, and stoked to be on the water, I grasped the railing, people pressed on either side of me, as the boat pushed slowly away from the Mumbai shore and began to labour towards Manori. The engine was noisy and gave off heavy gasoline fumes. The journey between Marve and Manori, to my disappointment, took only a few minutes.
‘The island offered them,’ writes Desai, ‘To begin with, a lone soda-water shop under a clump of toddy palms…The soda-water shop owner sat in the doorway, watching, chewing tobacco, spitting.’ I think the lone soda-water shop still stands near where passengers alight from the crowded ferry; perhaps it is the same owner who sits in the doorway, idly watching the intermittent waves of people. The ferry crowd disappeared almost immediately in all directions, on motorbikes or in one of the many waiting rickshaws which puttered off, whining and throwing up dust. The rickshaws, too, were suddenly all gone, so Priyanka and I set off on foot to explore the island.
Stella McMillan- Author 