Of Men And Motorcycles

I finally gave up on ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.’ I think that, at least in my case, the author (Robert M. Pirsig) achieved his probable objective – he proved that he’s smarter than the reader. This is, in my opinion, a questionable objective to harbor when one is a recovering schizophrenic, as Pirsig claims to be. It seems to me that he’s merely hoping to drive home to the reader just how very SANE he has now become.

Maybe nobody has told Pirsig that a surfeit of facts, figures and philosophy is virtually indistinguishable from insanity… but never mind. I couldn’t finish it. I’d hoped for a book on the very special and personal romance of owning and riding a motorcycle – what I got was a treatise on what could be quantum physics, but may equally be the manifestation of too much research laced with an overdose of mind-befuddling antipsychotics.

Motorcycling is not rocket science, and the experience should not be reduced to research. Motorcycling is, in fact, one of the last bastions of personal male freedom in a world rapidly being drowned by the Female Prerogative. Not that women don’t ride bikes too – they do, and I salute them for it. However, I don’t think they can derive much more joy and fulfillment from it than a man could from embroidery or cooking. Certain activities simply mean more to one gender than to the other. (This is not the right place and time to make too strong a case against the horrendous epitome of mutated natural inclinations and drives called the ‘metrosexual’, but I hope you know what I mean…)

When I got married the first time around, my grandmother placed a certain sum of money at my disposal for a wedding gift. I find it significant that my mother insisted on me buying a ‘real’ bike with it (and it was a beauty for its time – a Hero Honda Sleek, God bless its now busted steel heart). Why did my mother insist on this? I didn’t exactly need transport – I mean, I still had a very serviceable moped that could shimmy my ass from Point A to Point B without much problems. Nor had I ever expressed a burning desire to own a powerful bike (at that particular point in time, the only thing I really had a burning desire for was to get laid – repeatedly, and in as many ways as possible. I was getting MARRIED, not baptized, okay?!?)

I have a theory about why my mom pitched so hard for me getting that bike back then. It seems to me that she was unconsciously performing the last rite of passage into manhood for her son. She knew what marriage means. Moreover, she is a woman and knows what a woman does to a man after marriage. Dare we breathe the word ‘emasculation’ here? No, we dare not. Shhh, here there be dragons.

Let’s just say that my mother knew that, after marriage, her son would need to underline his essential masculinity with something more substantial and convincing that a series of sexual acrobatics. He would eventually find the vital line that distinguishes the male from the female eroding. He would eventually begin to doubt that he ever WAS a natural male to begin with. He would need someone else to hang on to during this process – and I say ‘someone’ because a man’s motorcycle quickly assumes a persona of its own in his life.

I’ll concede that a bike can mean different things to different men. To many, it may even be little more than the mode of transport it was originally meant to be. Diplomat that I am (I didn’t say anything nasty about metrosexuals either, remember?) I will not say such men have missed the point. I will simply say that such men have missed the entire fucking BALLPARK.

If his horse is nothing more to the redskin than a means to ferry him, his squaw and his papoose around, that redskin certainly does not belong on the warfront or the hunting ground. That redskin essentially belongs back in camp, where he should help other squaws mind papooses, clean poop and make soup. Such a redskin is a disgrace to his horse, and not worthy of owning one. Let us all shed a reverend tear for the poor horse that falls in the hands of such a loser – can death be anything but blessed release for such a luckless nag? It will spend its lifetime un-cherished, dishonored and neglected. It will never be able to raise its head high among other horses. “My owner is a wimp,” I can hear it whinny disconsolately. “Please shoot me – I can’t stand the disgrace.”

I don’t want to talk of such a pathetic creature here. I’d rather talk about the man who honors his horse and gives it its rightful place of pride in his life. That horse is his loyal and invaluable companion, and the fact that they both knows it reflects in all the man’s other relationships. A man who cannot honor and take care of his horse cannot take care of anyone else, either.

This brings me back to Pirsig’s book, if only to briefly disagree with him. A redskin does not need to know every intricacy of how his horse functions. He does not need to tote a detailed anatomical manual on equestrian physiology around. Of course, it helps if he DOES know how sinew connects to bone, as it were, but a LACK of such knowledge is not a significant handicap. In fact, too deep a knowledge of such matters can prove to be a serious hindrance. I mean, how helpful would it be if I constantly carried with me a detailed mental picture of how my lovely wife looks under her skin? How conducive would such imagery be in an amorous moment? Would it not suffice if I just knew her moods and needs and responded to those in instinctive love and concern, rather than from a platform of detailed knowledge? Blessed are the ignorant, for they shall know reverence…

Fine. Let’s talk about bikes now.

My first bike was often my only escape from the tacky feeling of domestication that began manifesting itself around four months after my first marriage. It accepted wordlessly the love that my wife would or could not receive from me. It thrummed when I stroked it right. It roared exultantly when I gave it all I had. It also grumbled when I ignored a jammed sprocket or neglected to take it for servicing. However, when I did my part, it was a perfect give-and-take relationship, and it took me precisely where I wanted to go – at my chosen speed. Moreover, my wife did not see it as a malicious contender for her rightful place in my life. It was steel and chrome to her, after all, and did not seem to have any qualities or traits that I seemed to respond to with possibly suspicious fervor.

My second bike was a glitzy fluffball that should never have left the glossy magazine page I’d first seen her on. Sure, she sported the low-waisted look with style. Sure, she winked alluringly in the midday sun. Sure, she purred like a contented cat as long as I didn’t push her too hard. And sure (gulp) all my friends wanted to ride her. But that bike had no power, no endurance and no character - and therefore lacked all relationship-building properties. She guzzled fuel like there was no tomorrow and gave nothing in return by ways of mileage. She squealed whenever I tried to take her beyond her 60 kmph comfort-zone. I don’t recall feeling so much as a twinge of regret when I let her go.

A couple of years ago, I bought a second-hand CBZ because it was all I could afford at that time. Man, how I loved that bike – and how she loved me. She never let me down, even when I pushed her far beyond her limits on intercity rides in the peak of summer or the dead of winter. She was nothing much to look at, but she gave me all she had – and she never complained. In return, I attended to every creak, every suspicious shimmy, every sign of possible trouble in the engine. I never fed her anything but the best gasoline money can buy. However, I finally outgrew her, and we both knew when that time came that she’d have to make way for someone new.

This time I cried. As I left her there at the dealer’s, a mere part-payment exchange for the 225 cc, jet-black, drop-dead beautiful Karizma I bought a month ago, I cried hard. I couldn’t bear to look back at her standing there, soon to be ridden by someone else or maybe even taken to pieces for spare parts. She didn’t say anything, but in that last silent space of communication we had before I rode off on my new black steed, I knew she understood and wished me well.

A final word on my new Karizma. This is the first new bike I’ve owned in years, and I’m quite paranoid about doing right by her. Folks around me say I should lighten up, but it’s hard to do - it’s just so awesome to have such a formidable campaigner by my side. She is almost painfully new… but when I ride her, I feel an ancient, unplumbed power working beneath me. This is a tidal wave of primordial, pulsating, bristling gristle to be unleashed on the Mumbai-Pune highway, and on the long, looping mountain roads of Lonavala’s hinterlands. As I let her fly, I know the true, shrieking resonance of man merging with machine.

At its best, a man’s relationship with his bike must – at the time of actual relating – transcend and surpass all his other relationships. It cannot be otherwise. At 140 kmph, you are no longer on edge - you ARE the edge. If you hit a mountain wall at such a speed, they will be picking what’s left of you off with tweezers. If you go for a skid, the tarmac you slide along for a few hundred feet will sharpen you like a pencil until there’s nothing left to sharpen. At 140 kmph, you do not think about the electricity bill or the fact that the filling in your molar needs replacement. You do not wonder why you never got that promotion or why your wife doesn’t understand you. You are completely focused on pushing you luck in the Sheer Survival sweepstakes. You stroke that throttle sensuously , get the rise, feel the friction of your passage, plunge into the landscape on your way to the peak and finally climax to top speed.

You do not hit such speeds because you feel invulnerable - you do so because you know you can depend on your bike to come through for you. You have a relationship based on trust with it, and it’s a pretty focused one. You do what you must to keep it thrumming. You pay heed to every odd sound in the engine, tighten every nut and bolt that works loose, and keep it well-fed with good oil and gasoline. In return, you have the assurance that it can handle the rough spots on the road ahead. You know it won’t give up on you when you need it the most. You test each other constantly to renew that assurance, but there is nothing but a shit-eating grin of joy on you face all the way. This is the essence of motorcycle riding.

After years of dithering on the surface of all that such a relationship can be, I see in my Karizma a gleaming promise breaking free into a crescendo of fulfillment – and as I ride her, tasting the unleashing, metallic flavor of that promise, I forget everything that has been occupying my mind till then. One with my bike, one with the elements around me, unthinkable power at my disposal - above and beyond everything else.

This, at last, is pure freedom…

Deep in the most thickly populated part of a metropolitan suburb, the police break down the front door of an old single-bedroom apartment. The neighbors had reported an increasingly fetid odor coming from it – an odor that now hits the cops like an olfactory tsunami.

We’ve all smelled it to different degrees while driving down anonymous country roads and highways. It is the smell that announces that organic life of some kind or the other has recently reached the end of the cycle and is shaking hands with Mother Nature again. There is no antiseptically sanitized version of this process in nature – decomposition is decomposition, period. It stinks, it’s messy and it does NOT make for good dinner-table conversation.

They find the source of the stink lying on an old metal cot, dead as the dodo but alive with a rather energetic colony of maggots. We will not talk about maggots here right now – they have their place in the larger scheme of things, and there is a time and place to talk of maggots, but this isn’t it. I’m trying to make a point about the guy UNDER the maggots here – the guy whom everyone in the apartment block knew as “that strange recluse in 3C”. He had lived in his seedy little flat for something like fifteen years, but may as well have not existed for all the impact he had on the neighborhood. Let’s call him Bill.

Bill was not an antisocial sort, but he mostly kept to himself. He would greet those who greeted him, help search for a lost dog when required, contribute to the small charity drives that the building’s unrealistic idealists undertook from time to time… but he kept to himself. Nobody knew where he came from, if he had ever been married, what his life was all about – nothing. He asked for no information and sure as hell never gave any.

Now he was dead, and they’d have to fumigate the entire second floor because he hadn’t been considerate enough to inform the building superintendent well in time of his intention to kick the bucket.

Never mind how Bill died - suicide, stroke, what does it matter? He was dead, and there was no foul play involved. My point here is that he died alone, and it seems fairly certain that this is exactly how he would have preferred it to happen.

Sounds familiar? It should. You read about such stuff in the tabloid almost every day. Some poor old (and sometimes not-so-old) blighter or blightress is found moldering away in his or her home, and the neighbors have something nice to talk about for a while. I’ve only been around for a bit over four decades, but I’m pretty sure that folks had been dying alone long before my dad first noticed that my mom had some pretty appealing curves to her.

So why does it happen? Why are some people alone enough to DIE alone? Don’t we have a population problem? Aren’t there more people around than there should ideally be? Is there any shortage of company if we really WANT it? No, there isn’t – and that may be the key reason why certain folks prefer their own company over that of others.

Many call me negative about people, but I’d like to state here that I’m not, really. I firmly believe that we were designed flawlessly in every respect. We all started out as perfect players in the piece called Human Life – it’s just that we hopelessly buggered up the stage. We added stuff where nothing should ever have been added, subtracted where there was simply no scope for subtraction, fixed what wasn’t broken and wound up as fallen angels cooking in a Hell of our own making.

Yes, we were designed as social animals, but then we discovered ‘individualism’ – that celebrated concept which states that the best of the species do NOT conform. Right from the start, we toe the line only to the extent required to get all the goodies of social life – but then strive to ‘be different from the rest’.

Since it is not really feasible to be REALLY different in this massive cauldron of human life we’ve launched, we find the most puerile ways of differentiating ourselves. We become MCPs, feminists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and what have you and start barking at everyone else, or we simply draw a febrile line around ourselves and call it our ‘space’. We state our personal ‘rules of engagement’ and make as big a deal of them as possible. We require our friends, spouses and associates to change enough in our presence to conform to our personal image of ourselves as a unique human being – much as they would have to in the presence of a ‘child with special needs’.

That’s all very nice and charming – sort of like kids playing ‘House’, kidding themselves that they really own a physical or metaphysical corner of this teeming planet. The fact, however, is that we’re ALL at odds with the planet to begin with, and we lost our ability to live on it with true dignity long ago. I genuinely feel that the last time anyone at all lived a perfectly normal life – in the way it was meant to be – was around the time when we still lived in caves.

So here we are today, touting our ‘unique’ differentiators and – paradoxically – pitying the folks that die alone in their bachelor/spinster apartments. With the staggering loads of attitude, baggage, traumas and ambitions that we expect everyone else to dance attendance to, aren’t we ALL actually working real hard to be as alone as possible?

I try to see it from the urban hermit’s point of view, and must say I see rather clearly. Out there is nothing but a huge mess of humans waiting to tell you why what you’re thinking, doing and eating is wrong and why you should change your ways. They will not miss a chance to tell you why you must pay court to their painstakingly attained individual peculiarities if you want to befriend, marry or employ them. They drag a formidable machine bristling with rules of engagement behind them, and the urban hermit has very likely tried to operate that machine many times in the past, getting mangled each time.

However, he has an alternative – unlock that single-bedroom apartment, walk in and close the door behind him. No people, so no rules of engagement. Behind that closed door, he feels the pressures of this artificially embellished world drop off his shoulders. He is free to be what he truly is – sloppy and ill-mannered, his face bereft of false smiles, his soul free from the bondage of pretended regret over some misdemeanor or the other. He is NOT relating to ANYONE – and therefore he is free.

And if he dies that way, would it be more appropriate to pity him for his pathetic solitude, or to envy him for having the courage to face the final fact of 21st human life – that we have modified and individualized ourselves beyond all hope of relating to each other anyway? At least he was not pretending that there is any hope at all for any of us.

Ashish Debolkar is not his real name, and this overweight disgrace to my neighborhood could thank me for my discretion in keeping him anonymous.

The man takes his morning walk an hour later than I do. This means that he’s just starting off on his perambulations when I’m on my way back. He’s a regular, just like I am, but I never paid him much attention over the years. You know how it is – we see people, yet their existence registers as more of an abstract concept than an actual fact.

I’ve never so much as exchanged cricket scores with him, and the only thought I ever spared him was an idle wondering…. how can a man walk like that for years and never lose an ounce of that gross flab? And why, if these nominal saunters have proved so utterly futile, has the oozy blighter not done something more constructive about his improbable girth? I mean, he has surely got a clear title deed for a 3BHK flat in Heart Attack Country and he’s bound to take up residence there anytime. Doesn’t that BOTHER him?

Anyway, three days ago the fact that he does figure on the landscape was driven jarringly home to me. The realization came in the form of a loud, agonized canine yelp. Jerked from my pleasant dawn reverie, I cast about for the source of the sound. A weathered doggie was making tracks for the opposite side of the road as fast as three legs would allow it. Three, because the other one was drawn up against its belly in a tortured spasm of muscle and bone.

Ashish Debolkar threw me a brief grin of vicious triumph as he took after the injured animal, brandishing the heavy stick he has picked up to launch the morning’s festivities.

“Saala kidela _____ (worm-raddled %#@>),” he cursed, enjoying every second of it. “Come sniffing at me once more and I’ll……”

He emphasized this sentiment by chasing the dog and giving it another lash of the stick, which caught the hobbled beast squarely on the back. The dog was out of its mind with pain now and was squalling like a bagful of BEST bus brakes during the peak hour crunch.

I was stunned into complete, impotent inaction. Debolkar delivered three more blows to the animal before a window flew open above us and an irate woman leaned out.

“Oye, stop this immediately. My husband can’t sleep!” she screeched in hellish accompaniment to the dog’s vocal efforts. The dog in question used the lull to crawl beneath a paan shop and cower there for dear life.

Debolkar flashed a spitless grin at her, favored me with a fading version of the same and discarded the stick. Then he waddled off, his mind obviously already switching gears to the stock market or some other good-time stuff. The beleaguered mutt crawled out from under the paan shop, scanned the surrounding topography and found it fortuitously bereft of fat middle-management prototypes headed for Stroke City.

Fade to black…

No, of COURSE Ashish Debolkar bears no resemblance to any of us. WE wouldn’t kick a defenseless street dog just because we feel so hugely superior to it. Nor would we tell a street urchin to scram when he or she sucks up for a spare coin just because the sight reminds of too uncomfortably of how our own kids would look if the Powers That Be had not somehow transpired to set them above such a lot. OTHER folks do such stuff. Sick folks. Folks like Ashish Debolkar.

But hey, what circumstances spawn such moral bottom-feeders in the first place? A desire to rid the city of unsanitary elements such as stray dogs? The trauma of having been bitten in the butt by just such a cur back in childhood? I don’t think so.

I close my eyes and see a different scenario – one littered with bugs that squirm and scamper for the shadows when sunlight hits them. Behind my closed eyes, I see a Ashish Debolkar who is not as secure in his precariously overloaded skin as he pretends.

The economy is see-sawing wildly, inflation has eaten into his once unassailable bank accounts and he may just have to pull his bounder son out of that fancy ‘international’ school next year. His wife, no less bloated on excesses than he is, treats him like the last dirt on earth – just like his dad did before him.

His boss has chuckled forlornly every time Ashish has hinted at that promotion. Ashish smells his essential powerlessness over the world he inhabits with every wheezy breath he pulls into his blubber-cased lungs.

He does not like this smell, and he needs to rid himself of it.

What old Ashish therefore does is treat each waking hour as another opportunity to bolster his sagging pride by taking pot-shots at the various hapless targets that the world has placed at his disposal. Therefore, the beggar on the road is cursed and waved away like a leper who has dared to cross the Holy Temple’s threshold. The street kid is treated to a look and words of utter loathing and revulsion. The maid is threatened with sudden unemployment every time she goofs up. And the street doggie gets a kick in his scrawny backside if he is presumptuous enough to make an appearance during Ashish’s fruitless morning waddles.

He does not have what it takes to tell his wife what HE thinks of HER. He doesn’t have the courage to tell his boss to shove his job up the old waste-pipe and look for a better prospects. His dad died of an apocalyptic, ghee-induced stroke years ago and is unavailable for settling scores with.

He is the overgrown schoolyard bully, even now desperately trying to salvage his self-esteem by preying on those who seem weak enough not to put up a fight.

Some days ago at Ghatkopar, I was knocked down by a speeding scooter. The guy didn’t look back… I think doing so did not even occur to him. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but it always takes the human mind a long moment to inventory the damage at such times. In that brief space of time, when adrenalin is pouring freely, one can sometimes experience amazing clarity of mind.

So I sat there under the dispassionate gaze of a roadside vegetable vendor, with a mangy doggie sniffing at my pant leg. I did not experience any urgent need to get up and go about my business. In fact, I found myself in deep thought. This state of mind continued till I reached home, and these ramblings are a side product.

So… what is it with this city? I mean yes, we’re busy trying to be a weird, schizophrenic hybrid of a Shanghai, New York and an Egyptian bazaar souk. There is no time to stop and smell either the cow dung or the waxy hothouse roses.

Yes, there’s money to be made, mouths to be fed, loser husbands to be divorced, insurance companies to be sued, pickpockets to be punched out, corrupt politicians that we have ourselves elected to be denounced, local trains to be infused into by sheer mob power (to be spat out on the other side by the same mindless force)… but hey, where’s life?

I recall a thought that came into my mind many years ago, after I returned to Mumbai, following a long spell in a smaller, quieter city. This one came over me while I was hanging on for dear life in a local bound for Churchgate.

It was simply this - “Does this city think that it’s the only place on earth where people actually work?”

We look down with patronizing disdain on the newcomer. Inside, we chuckle derisively when someone with a travel bag on his shoulder asks us for directions to Dadar TT. We’re quick to vociferously dislodge the queue jumper from his lawlessly begotten vantage point two places ahead of us.

We’re completely attuned to the cause of scoring that extra buck, denying the garland hawker a single rupee more than what he, according to us, is entitled to. Good for us. We’re the cream. We’re the winners in the rat race. All hail the Americo-indian dream!!

Then someone gets chewed up by a passing truck on a busy street, or maybe just knocked down by a scooter. We quickly avert our collective gaze, thanking whatever deity is in force on that weekday that it wasn’t us. We know we’re falling short of some more universal standard at such times, but the milling crowd reminds us of our priorities smartly enough. We arrive home drained to the core, having put in four hours of hardcore commuting to do seven hours of work.

Mumbai’s English-medium educated young graduates are making unerring beelines to the HR offices of call centers and shopping complexes, because money is God… future prospects take the hindmost. Every decade, we have another generation of burned-out youngsters struggling to come to terms with a dead-end career. The fake American accent that stood them in such good stead in those air-conditioned sheet glass mausoleums falter and die on their lips.

Mumbai seethes with sweatshops where those who cannot afford even this pathetic route struggle to keep life and limb together. Corrupt politicians assure us that everything will be just fine and dandy if we only cast our vote for them. This city remains the centre of Dawood Ibrahim’s crime kingdom. Much as we hate to admit it, Mumbai’s grassroots economy depends to no uncertain extent on this fact. Everyone, in every sector, has a haunted, harried and subtly hopeless look on his or her face.

There is literally not a single inch of unclaimed and uncontested land left in the central city, and the suburbs are almost spoken for too. All attempts at trying to untangle the traffic snarl are end-stage damage control that buys us a couple of months at the most. The city sends us a clear, unequivocal message when an overenthusiastic monsoon lays bare the inadequacies of terminally cancerous infrastructure.

We have reached saturation point geographically, socially and spiritually. Our weak pretense at savvy urbaneness has lost its convincing power. When we speak of Mumbai, we’re referring to a once moderately sane anthill that has suddenly been kicked, doused in gasoline and set on fire.

I don’t know every yardstick by which winners are defined in this world, but I suspect that we may be found lacking by at least some of them…

Some look for a way out, because there sure as hell is no way back. For many of my friends, leaving the city altogether has been the only option. They have the money to continue staying here, but not the willingness. “What’s the point?” they ask. “Money has no value on this city’s property market, unless you have enough to buy into Malabar Hill or Cuffe Parade. Even then, you’re just buying a sugar-coated version of the same old madness.”

Mumbai’s ‘fighting spirit’ is the mantra. But is it, perhaps, only the tight-lipped, white-knuckled determination to prevail that must have sustained members of the Bataan Death March until they dropped by the wayside? What exactly are we crowing about?

Maybe we should have a new city slogan – LOST OUR WAY – AND PROUD OF IT!!

You must forgive a disillusioned, middle-aged man his bitterness. I know Mumbai has its redeeming factors, but they’re not immediately apparent when you sit there in the dust, unnoticed and unattended by the teeming thousands, and even ridiculed for your temporary inability to match the pace.

I honestly feel that we have little to commend us above any other city in the country. Mumbai’s only true value lies in the fact that it is our home. The legendary opportunities it once had a monopoly over are rapidly being replicated in cities that none of us had even heard of so far.

Some humility and less swagger, guys….?

The other day, I met Hemant Shutterkhalikar. A chronic Mumbaikar and Saffron Brigade fanatic, he lives in Dadar and takes that fact very seriously. Dadar is to Mumbai’s Hindus what Jerusalem is to the Jews – you can strut your stuff anywhere, but this is simply the best place from where to do it. I’ve never been able to figure out why.

Anyway, you’d be hard put to find a more typical example of the illustrious Manus Marathicus genus than Hemant Shutterkhalikar… the man literally chews green and spits saffron. He hasn’t had much of an education – his father pulled him out of school after he flunked the seventh standard so that his precious male spawn would have more time to go and wave wooden poles at Shivaji Park.

No thoroughbred Brahmin male is considered worthy of the saffron flag if he hasn’t done this for an extended period of time. It has something to do with expressing one’s hypothetical willingness to do war against the ill-defined oppressive forces that would usurp the Maharashtrian Hindu from his rightful place on the top of the heap. (The top of the heap in Maharashtra, that is. Die-hard or not, this lot is realistic enough to know that they cannot trot that stuff beyond those sugar-caned borders.)

Hemant Shutterkhalikar spends most of his time hanging around the local barber’s shop, where he and his compatriots talk of their day’s ethnic purging exploits and slap each other on the backs. There is no shortage of non-Maharashtrian self-esteem to shatter in Dadar, so Hemant & Co. always have plenty of cannon fodder.

You’d think that Mumbai’s Gujaratis and North Indians would have savvied up by now and shifted their act to more convivial locations, but no – humans have this tendency to make their homes in the war zone. Maybe they feel that living so close to the source of infection stimulates their immune system into higher protection levels. The Jews didn’t shift out of Germany even when they could practically smell the Nazi concentration camp fire, either.

In the evenings, Hemant engages in the traditional neighborhood extortion game called ‘pygmy collection’ and repairs with the proceeds to the local hooch dive. There he and his pals drink deep of Government-approved rotgut and watch the sun go down over the slums of ‘Amchi’ Mumbai. He was there that evening when he saw me attempt to evade him and his sozzled cronies by crossing the road. He shot up drunkenly and hailed me.

“Oye! Where you going, yaar? Come here, come here. I am wanting to share with you somet’ing.”

There was no way out. Telling an inebriated saffronite that you have better things to do than listen to his self-aggrandizing frog-in-the-pond rantings is not on. You may not actually wind up battered and smeared with dogshit in the nearest gutter, but you can bet your last modak that your bike tires will be just about as flat and perforated as a rava dosa the next morning.

I walked over and sat down beside him on the barber’s hospitality bench. From the smell of it, Hemant already had at least a quarter of arrack under his belt.

“I saw de movie your told me to watch. ‘Borat’,” he said. “About dat Afghani asshole who goes to America?”

He was talking about the outrageously spoofy film ‘Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.’ In this film, the fictitious character Borat Sagdiyev uses his assumed Third World ignorance to poke fun at the American mindset. He is portrayed as a total bigot and MCP who hates Jews and considers women as only slightly better than cattle.

“Kazakhi,” I corrected. “Borat is supposed to be from Kazakhstan, but he’s actually an American Jew.

“Ya, ya, whatever,” said Hemant dismissively. “Anyway, he funny – but he also right, you know. I know how he feel about de Jews. We have so many same problems here in Mumbai wit’ people who not from Mumbai.”

I chose not to comment. I’m not an inbred Mumbaikar myself and therefore walk a tightrope every time I sully this Sacred City’s pavements with my contaminated footsteps.

“But I think he not right about women, yaar,” he continued. “Women are not good only just for the sex. Dey also needed for cleaning and washing de laundry. Dey also take good care of the kids. We (he flapped his sweaty saffron neckerchief) treat de women wit’ respec’.”

“Yes,” I agreed readily enough. “Women have their uses.”

“But he right about dis ‘sexual consent’ business, yaar,” he said, looking drunkenly wistful. “What bullshit, consent?”

I said nothing, but did wonder just how long this guy would be able to run from a lynch mob of Californian women libbers if some unfortunate twist of Fate would ever land him in Yankeeland.

“Women are good, but what is use of asking dem about de man business?” asked disgustedly. “Sex is de man business - they not enjoy anyway. Do dey take consent of de man before de cooking or de cleaning house? No! Dat is de woman business, and dey enjoy and we don’t enjoy. Do dey ask for our consent when dey are washing de laundry or cleaning de baby kaka? No! Dey much better at it and we give dem respec’ for it! Mother is like Goddess, no?”

It was a tricky moment. Did I agree with a “no” or a “yes”? Indian English can be complicated.

“Dere as so many things where de man just shut up and let woman do. Same way, why can’t woman just shut up and let de man do de sex? Anyways, dis Borat he good man. He actually Kazakh Maharashtrian,” concluded Hemant. “I spoken to de Boss and he say we should ask him to join our party. We can use him in de Mahim ward. So many non-Mumbaikars dere.”

He look out an oversized cell phone that had what looked like old chicken grease smeared all over the display window. “You have Borat’s mobile number in de Kazakhstan?”

Sometimes it all gets too much for me, and I have to withdraw. Yes, even from my family and friends. Mumbai’s frenetic pace can mesmerize you into thinking that manic activity is normal. That we have always lived this way. But I guess, deep down where we carry our legacy of freedom encoded in our being, we know that this is a lie. The truth is…

Mumbaiites have not always fought for every square inch of space. We have not always attached a monetary value to every aspect of our lives. We have not always had to feel the do-or-die rush of toxic adrenaline as we gear up each morning and evening to engage in choiceless battle with our fellowmen on Platform 2, or automotive anarchy in the rush-hour traffic.

We have not always had to walk our streets with wary caution, our bodies clenched like fists do reduce the space we occupy to a bare minimum. We have not always had to have mastered the skill of looking through others as if they don’t exist, hoping only that they will be considerate enough to return the favor. We have not always had to traverse this city with one hand on our wallets and the other one clutching a kerchief to our noses.

I have learned of a saner Mumbai at the feet of Dadasaheb Lohekar, who occasionally holds court at the local park where I live. The man is 91 years old and looks every day of it as he sits there with his decrepit Alsatian. However, his memory is as sharp as a Grant Road pickpocket’s blade and he has some stories to tell of this city.

Of course, he’s not old enough to actually remember some of the things he talks about, such as the days when Mumbai’s only inhabitants were the Koli fisher folk. Yeah, the people we resignedly make way for in the locals today, as they climb on with their noxious baskets, most of us unaware of the fact that Mumbai is named after their patron goddess Mumbadevi.

But Dadasaheb is old enough to talk authoritatively of them, and the standards of coexistence they adhered to. He is old enough to remember the Parsi, Gujarati and South Indian Hindu families, that lived together peacefully here at one time, when property was not an issue of power, and the sharing of resources not restricted to partisan community pockets.

His eyes, already filmy with advancing cataracts, cloud over even further when he regales us with stories of a Mumbai we would never recognize today. I don’t blame him. I get sort of misty-eyed myself. And so, on some nights after the daily struggle to emerge intact from the teeming human anthill, I take off on my old Enfield and look for evidence of Mumbai in the urban apocalypse. I leave my suburb behind, aware of the fact that the bike’s exhaust is not doing much to improve the pollution I often complain about.

I see a different Mumbai emerge after midnight, though the city truly never sleeps. This Mumbai tosses uneasily in its half-awake somnolence, the relative quiet after a day of commercial convulsions probably allowing it to reach back into its memory and remember that another order once existed.

For some reason, I always end up staring at Haji Ali bathed in the moonlight, glowing an eerie, timeless green. Its aloofness from the madness of the mainland seems to tell me that one can be part of the chaos and yet be apart from it.

As its walkway disappears under the tide, I understand that I, too, need to occasionally deny the city access to the essential me. The rat race churns on less than a hundred yards away, but Haji Ali finds an island of detached peace just by drawing up the bridge once in a while.

I’m up by seven, my mind already strategizing the commute to work and the uncertain odds of another day in Mumbai. I’m bleary-eyed but ready. The most profound insights of a Mumbai night cannot match swords with the realities of the city by day….

There’s this guy I’ve been observing crashed out on a bench at the park on my morning jaunts of late. He seems to pick the same park bench every time. No idea who he is or where he comes from, but my guess he’s a homeless South Indian. He always smells of cheap booze, but he never bothers anyone. When I pass by the park again at nine on my way to the office, he’s gone.

I’m a pragmatist, and I know all about the thousands who arrive in Mumbai every week to try Lady Luck. And I also know that the fabled woman doesn’t smile on each one of them. Pay a little closer attention while boarding your evening local back home and you can spot them.

Desperate faces, overwhelmed by the slow shattering of a dream and shell-shocked with the surplus of inputs this city provides for the uninitiated. They stand there, visibly clueless about what to do now that the interview didn’t pan out the way they had anticipated. Their clothes, hurriedly bought cheap off the shelf in some Tier III city, are grimy with the sweat and dust of cost-effective Mumbai commuting.

Sometimes they approach you, asking for bus fare back to where they came from – some godforsaken small town or the other. Sometimes you can see them in stand in STD booths, their beaten faces hung in defeat as they give the bad news to the people back at home. And sometimes – more often than not – you find them racked out gape-jawed on park benches and roadsides, wasted on hooch and deep in oblivion.

Strangely, Mumbai has means to capitalize on both the successes and the failures. Let me explain:

“In an attempt to earn more revenue, the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport Undertaking (BEST) has finally approved the commercialization plan of its 27 bus depots in the city. Presently, of the 27 bus depots in the city, the Andheri (West), Chembur and Seven Bungalows depots have been taken up for commercialization in the first phase, while the bus depots at Kurla and Oshiwara will be follow in the second phase. According to the plan, the BEST will also rent out space for opening of liquor bars in these depots…..” (Afternoon, January 11, 2007)

Let’s all hear it for the city of endless opportunity!