Essay: Hugging the Shore

Cherian Philipose shares an essay about his hometown, Mumbai and specifically about the three coastal suburbs that have had a profound emotional impact on him.

I started life in a second-floor flat in Mahim. It was a typical Bombay flat, with a drawing room, two bedrooms, one kitchen, a toilet and a balcony. The furniture was plain and functional; it was our middle-class Indian way. Our building had four floors, and people from all over India lived in these flats. There were Maharasthtrians, Gujaratis, Malayalis, Punjabis and Goans. Bombay, as its residents never fail to remind you, is cosmopolitan and liberal, and Mahim, with its different communities living together, was our city in microcosm.

Mahim Market was where many of us shopped. The fish market was the most memorable section. My mother used to take me there as a child. It was very crowded, dirty, and the smell was overpowering. Koli women sat there, on their haunches, selling fish. They wore gold earrings and jasmine in their hair with their bright, patterned saris tucked between their legs, Maharashtrian style. They displayed pomfret and mackerel in front of them. With knives, they parted the gills of the fish to show you how fresh the fish were. ‘Taaza aahe’ they would say with a smile. What was more important to me about Mahim, however, was not the lively market but the school. After I finished kindergarten, my parents enrolled me in The Bombay Scottish School on Mahim Bay. It was a fine location, and the breeze from the Arabian Sea provided some relief from the heat.

One of my most vivid memories of school was not of any particular lesson, or teacher, but of spending every morning, before classes began, at ‘Assembly.’ Students, teachers and the Principal gathered in the school hall, and, together, we sang hymns like ‘Lead Kindly Light’ and ‘Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.’ A few of us were good singers, but even those of us who were not sang with feeling. After this, the principal shared a passage from the Bible, drew a short moral lesson from it, and made a few announcements. Looking back, I realise that the most precious aspect of Assembly was not the music or the religion, but the sense of oneness it inspired when we all lifted our voices and sang to God’s Glory.

When I was about ten, however, my residence in Mahim came to an end. We moved to Dadar, a neighbouring suburb. It was a Maharashtrian area, but it also had many Catholics. We lived close to the ‘Our Lady of Salvation’ Church on Gokhale Road. The old church building had been built by the Portuguese in a florid, decorative style; this, however, had been demolished, and the new building, designed by Charles Correa, had little aesthetic appeal. This did not stop the faithful, however, and every Sunday morning, I saw girls in pretty frocks walk to Mass; their hair neatly brushed and parted. This church, which was always full of worshippers, was a constant reminder of the Portuguese influence on Bombay. It was profound and survived in the Catholic faith and the Portuguese surnames (like D’Souza and Fernandes) that we encountered daily.

A bit further down Gokhale Road was Shivaji Park. This park has been the training ground for some of India’s greatest cricketers. There were boys playing cricket there every day. Many of them were gifted and ambitious and were being trained by great coaches like Anna Vaidya and Achrekar. Every day, the park rang with the excited cries of the players, and I often heard, with great pleasure, the crack of willow on leather. On the western border of the park was the tall statue of the 17th century Maratha ruler, Shivaji, mounted on a horse, and looking powerful as if leading a charge. It was impossible to walk past the statue without looking up at him! An asphalt path went around the park, and in the evenings, people came there to walk, to move their stiff limbs, and to take in deep breaths of the fresh air. Enclosing the park, and separating it from the road was a concrete parapet, or katta. Many people came and sat on this parapet in groups. It was a comfortable place to sit. There were large trees that provided shade, and the park provided a sense of community. As I walked past the groups of people, I often heard about their worries: their exams, their work, their relationships and sometimes, the thrill of a new romance. After the 12th standard results were declared, I would hear students talking about their PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Maths) and PCB (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) marks. Their speech would be loaded with emotion, and they would use acronyms like IIT, VJTI, and BITS Pilani. It sounded like a separate language, a secret code to the uninitiated, but I, like most children in that competitive society, knew what these acronymns meant. They referred to highly selective and prestigious engineering institutes.

To the north of Dadar lay Bandra. My favourite part of this suburb was the part that jutted out into the sea, a place called Band Stand. This was a stretch of rocky coastline that was quiet and tranquil; just sitting there and looking out at the ocean made the frantic rhythms of the city melt away. One of the chief attractions of the place was the Searock Hotel, with its revolving restaurant on the top floor. Once, when I was about ten, I went there for lunch. My mother was a professor of Operations Research and was taken out by some of the students she had guided for their Ph.Ds. These were three men in their late twenties. They invited me along. As soon as I entered the restaurant, I loved the luxury of the place, the cool air, the soft carpets, the refined patrons who addressed each other in quiet voices and the pretty hostesses with smiling faces who wafted about in silk saris.

It was a delicious buffet. We had a table at a window, and the view across the bay was spectacular. As the restaurant revolved at a slow, barely perceptible pace, we saw, far below us, Bandra fort and the ocean, with the waves crashing onto the rocks. The highlight, however, was not the food. The afternoon suddenly took a surprising turn when Rekha and Sridevi, two achingly beautiful actresses arrived and sat at a table not far from us. There were nudges, and people craned their necks to look at them. There were gasps, and Rekha, resplendent in a silk sari, stood up and acknowledged the stares with a namaste and a dazzling smile. The young men at our table began to talk about them. One of them, a lean South Indian lad, made several trips to the buffet table, just so he could get a peek at the actresses, and each time, came back intimidated and possibly a little depressed by the beauty he saw. ‘Chee, Sridevi looks horrible without makeup!’ He said, which, even my ten-year-old brain could tell, was a clear case of sour grapes. I realised then that my own heart had started beating in a particular way, and that I was not the only one at the table who was affected. Something stirred in us that afternoon; we had come here to have lunch to honour my mother for her intellect, her dedication, and her teaching ability, but suddenly, it seemed that we were in the presence of all the beauty and glamour and success that there was to be had in the world. The men grew louder and freer in their speech; I could hear and feel the excitement in their voices. Their speech grew rapid and a little breathless. It was plain to me that even when they spoke about Operations Research or their upcoming careers in the USA, they were actually thinking of something else. One of them, a tall, handsome Muslim, even started reciting Urdu verses; the presence of the women had stirred his romantic instinct. I cannot say what my mother thought of all this, and if she felt ignored, she certainly did a great job of hiding it. What was significant for me was that at the age of ten, I had had a demonstration of how beauty worked its spell, and of how men, stirred with erotic desire, could simply forget everything else in their lives. This has been the only time in my life when I have seen such bewitching actresses up close, and because of this, the suburb of Bandra acquired in my eyes a certain aura of glamour. It is an impression that I have not been able to shake.

The landscape of memory has many vistas. We gaze back into the past with a mixture of desire and regret and find that not all the places we have lived in, or visited, have equal value, but certain places, people and events arise and gleam in hues of the most brilliant colour. They constitute the great concentrations of feeling and experience that have made us who we are. A human life is not just a collection of events, but a collection of places where those events occurred, accompanied by all the sorrows and joys of solitary and family life. I used to believe that I could ‘create’ my own life, that I had the capacity for self-invention. However, I am less convinced now; it is a delusion. We do not really have the ability to mould ourselves, as a potter moulds his clay. Indeed, we are fashioned by the cultures we are born into. Mahim, Dadar and Bandra; those suburbs that hugged the shore of Bombay were my mooring posts. I have moved to Australia and lived here for decades, and yet, there is something fantastic about the fact that I have never truly outgrown my origins; the places where I roamed as a child still haunt me and Mahim, especially, that place on the shore where I was born, and went to school, has marked me for life.

Author’s Bio

Cherian Philipose is an Adelaide writer, originally from Mumbai, India. He has a B. A in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College, University of Mumbai, and a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. He has published an essay in Liminal Mag as part of the OzAsia Festival and has published essays in Kitaab before.