Turtle well in Aarey milk colony, Mumbai

A centuries old well, which is the only source of water for 60,000 people, who live in this half-village-half slum in the Neem and Banyan tree forested valley in the city. Children scream and play at the well and reel up buckets, sound of plunging buckets and sounds of water splashing, sinking, bubbling, rippling- sounds echoing and bouncing up the purplemoss carpeted stone walls of the well. The water is dirty and is the source of all the water borne diseases in the colony, the doctor from the primary health clinic tells us. But it is the only source, so nothing can be done except for the children and women to carry buckets of it back to their shacks. Black Telapia fish swim near the sunlit surface of the well. Two giant turtles live at the bottom of the well and seldom come up for air- how they got there nobody knows. A baby turtle swims up to the surface of the well and paddles around for a while, delighting all the children and making their mothers smile. Just another morning of collecting water for the residents of Aarey milk colony. From the well you can see tree-scapes and some blunted hillocks and ridges and the faraway high-rise buildings of shining-India like on a different planet and the more threatening high rise buildings, being built near the settlement. Building developers eyeing the slum-village, the 10,000 shacks, the moss covered, ancient well, where the children come to work and play and the Telapia fishes swim and the turtles come up for air. The building developers are eyeing them all and licking their lips

for the better half of the sky

She sang every song as if

It was her last

She kept catching city crow shit

In her sea weed hair

She stole more books

Than she could keep still long enough to read

She kissed like a parrot and mauled like a tigress

And left me bruised and bleeding and marked as her territory

She loved dogs more than people and she loved me

More than most dogs

She painted all night when possessed

And chucked wet paintings at me at dawn

She played with fire, put out matches and candles with her fingertips

And was terrified of sex

She walked with me, talked with me, cried with me, laughed,

Kicked my shin, pulled my hair, threw hot tea once before smashing the clay cup, bathed my

Forehead with soaked rags till she had washed away my fever and she

Kissed me antibodies

She found me, made me, made me want to live forever and die

While I held her sleeping and then

Just when she and I were slipping into an unhappily ever after

She suddenly realised that I had

Lost her.

Chaaler Pithey

Happiness is a steamed ground rice pithey,

Steaming softness of ground rice cakes embedded with

Broken bits of oozing cane jaggery.

Happiness is sold all around the winter smog petrified city,

On the pavement, in the parks, by the lake and river ghats and

By an alleyway near my basha,

Happiness is sold by a skinny, short man with twinkling watchful and mischievous eyes,

Like a hawk- never missing a potential customer, a missing payment, a pretty girl,

Like a puppy when calling out for customers and cracking or laughing at lewd jokes,

On cold December evenings, made doubly cold by exposure and starvation, the happiness vendor

Parks his wheelbarrow, rattling with a kerosene stove, by a dark side street in Banani, and he     

Sells happiness- 10 takas a pithey- to students, lovers,

Men returning from work,

Men looking for work,

Scoops out ground rice pitheys from a pot, sculpts them with his grimy fingers,

Impregnates the white softness with brittle jaggery and

Steams them on top of another metal pot bubbling with boiling water, 15 seconds

And a pithey is born, he sprinkles some coconut shavings and hands you the melted plastic plate.

You can ask for a tiny fork or spoon or you can tear at happiness with your fingers and wolf it down

Even as it burns your fingertips and mouth.

The side street is immersed in winter darkness, infused with firewood smoke and the

Smell of burning rubber,

To stay warm, cook and repel dengue carrying mosquitoes.

A flickering candle on the pithey wheelbarrow is the only light

On the street,

In the world.

Otherwise you can tell who is where by the glowing cigarette ends

Of sullen men who huddle around

In the middle of the street and eat pithey and smoke and talk

Of politics, the plunging stock market, ‘bajey’ bad women and cricket,

And you can navigate down the street by the mad optimism of students from private colleges,

Kicking at each other, learning how to smoke, falling in love, chalking out their plans.

Management school, join a MNC or manage a garments factory, go abroad to work and live and

Fuck many white girls and marry a ‘bhalo’ good girl chosen by their parents and

Achieve COMPLETE SUCCESS,

Mission accomplished.

And return in middle-age only to get richer and own and run several companies and some NGOs and

Retire and live the good life- they have it all chalked out and they believe that

Everything will work out fine, just fine.

 Sprinkled among the male pithey eaters are a few girls,

Either accompanied by a man or in twos or threes,

The girls eat and talk and laugh and occasionally slap away the sneaking hands of their boyfriends,

Trying to touch them in public to make it clear who belongs to whom,

The girls munch jaggery and slap away male hands,

Like waving away giant five-proboscis fitted mosquitoes

Some women even dare to glare back at the men who are drinking tea on the pavement and leering

And licking their lips and playing out rapes in their heads, planning acid attacks,

The women return their dirty looks but only if they are in small groups and are warmed up by

The sweet pithey and feeling invincible with so much happiness being dished out.

But rest assured, there will be no violence tonight except for the

Everyday violence of Dhaka life,

There will be only more plans hatched, more meaningless street talk,

More women courted and hated,

More lonely men who will come to the pithey wheelbarrow and

Will not be alone,

There will be more winter chill and smoke and complaints about the cold-wave and there will be

More happiness, sculpted out of rice powder and date jaggery and steamed till it’s formed and

Oozing, sprinkled with coconut and you have to eat it quickly even as it’s steaming

In case the happiness vendor

Forgets how to make them.

A Family

She looks eighty but could well be in her late fifties. Poverty and starvation have aged her, drained her, hollowed her out and left her in a crumpled, twisted shell of decaying bones and dead skin. She begs outside a sweetshop in Banani, next to the Kabaristan- the cemetery of the rich and powerful in Dhaka. She begs but she doesn’t accept any money, instead she points at the sickly sweet, syrup soaked sweetmeats- yellow, maroon, green- behind the cracked glass counter.

“Give me a paraa Bhai. I’ve forgotten what paraas taste like”

After solemnly receiving her paraa, she puts it away somewhere in the folds of her grey Sari and invites me to have a cup of tea at her grandsons’ tea stall at the end of a blind alley next to the graveyard. I’m thirsty after eating a Langchaa and groggy from the Friday morning dust suspended, winter sunlight- bathed, sparrow fluttering tranquillity, so I join the old lady for tea and listen to her complain about her family problems.

“They are beggars- all my sons-in-law are beggars and my daughters are whores. One son I had who was a golden boy, Insh Allah. He always came first in class. He always came first in everything he did. But he had gone to play cricket with his school friends and they got into a fight over the score and they killed him with the cricket bat. Such is my fate.”

I realised that she inhabited a world where time was immaterial and memories flew around her like dusty sparrows. Her son’s death may have happened half a century ago but for her it could’ve been yesterday. Her migration from the village to Dhaka, her life in the city, her misery, love, anger, laughter, tears, agony, pleasure- could’ve taken place a hundred years ago or perhaps she was anticipating them as things which would take place in the distant future. Time was meaningless for her and she was ageless.

Her two grandsons run the tea stall, which consists of a stove, a kettle, a can of condensed milk, a scraped clump of root ginger, glass cups, a flimsy tin counter loaded with glass jars filled with biscuits and stale sweet breads and dead flies. Two bamboo poles, embedded in dirt, stand on either side of the counter and a third pole hangs above from which bunches of ripe bananas dangle and a rusted mirror oscillates in a graveyard breeze. The grandsons hand me a cup of steaming Rong-Cha- black tea with ginger and after the grandmother has croaked various insults at them they reluctantly give her half a cup of milky tea as well.  

“Beggars. Whores and beggars, every one of them,” grandmother sighs and waves at the family ruckus raging on, on the street, next to the tea stall and a garbage dump.  

Several fully and partially disabled men in homemade wheelchairs are arguing fiercely with a girl- probably no older than fifteen- in a sequin glittering green dress. Several women in rag-like Saris have surrounded the girl and pull her by the hair to scream into her face. Naked potbellied toddlers run around the girl, dodge slaps from their screaming mothers and disabled fathers. The children try to protect the girl in the sequinned green dress. The children are both thrilled and amused at the mock violence of their mothers and slightly terrified at the silence of their fathers.

“My daughters and sons-in-laws”, grandmother explains and sips her tea. “And my grandchildren. That whore in the twinkling dress is my favourite granddaughter. Her parents and brothers dragged her into whoring and now they beat her because they have run out of tears.”

The brothers at the tea-stall don’t intervene in the family fight and they continue combing their oiled hair and trimmed moustaches, transfixed by their closely shaved, thin lipped faces in the mirror dangling from the bamboo pole. Other pedestrians, including a policeman, come and go, drink tea and smoke cigarettes. Nobody pays any attention to the screaming women, men in wheelchairs circling around in furious circles, dancing children and the girl in green, who is squatting on the street now- head shoved down between her legs to protect her hair and face, her black tresses rolling in the dust.

Then out of the blue a toddler in a pair of tattered shorts, runs out of the sweetshop to save his sister with a bucket of dirty water. He throws the water over his family, soaks everybody- there is more screaming and swearing, the women and children give chase, the boy throws away the bucket, slips into the graveyard through a break in the boundary wall and runs away. He is quite a sprinter and a clever kid. The girl in green disappears into one of the bamboo-tarpaulin shacks on the other side of the blind alley. Nobody seems interested in her anymore. The women have started arguing about the boy with the bucket, his mother is defending him. The children have slipped into the graveyard and given chase. The fathers angrily wheel themselves towards Banani mosque, where they will wait for the worshippers to come out after the Jumma Namaaz. The brothers continue selling tea, lighting cigarettes and combing their hair. The water splashes form a transient map on the dusty road; continents fast evaporating in the sun. 

“They won’t let me stay with them anymore,” grandmother complains and puts down her empty cup. “They say I eat too much. But I only eat this much”. She shows me a tiny amount with her right hand. “I can’t eat too much. I’m going to die in a few days time anyway, I’m sure of that. Still they won’t let me stay in my home, my home for the last...the last many years.” She gestures towards the shacks where her granddaughter is hiding.

“I told them I won’t eat from their beggars’ and whores’ earnings. I told them I will beg for sweets instead. I prefer sweets to rice anyway.”

An imported car slides out of a driveway and roars down the blind alley. One of the brothers jumps to his feet, scurries out of the stall to stop all traffic so that the car can turn into the main road. The car turns. The brother salutes the invisible backseat occupants, behind the black filmed windows.

“That’s all they are good for- these fools- licking boots. They know how to lick boots.” Grandmother snorts. “That Sahib in the car has just come back from Pakistan. He has two wives, very fat wives.” She puffs up her hollow cheeks to show me how fat.

“One day I saw him at the sweetshop and asked for a laddoo- just a small laddoo. He cursed me and threw a coin at my feet. The Haramzada. Acts as if I asked for the world. All I’m asking for is to die in my own home.”

I get up to leave but grandmother continues snatching at her memories and desires, fluttering around her like dust-bathed sparrows.

“I live in that shack for forty years. I sleep with my husband in that shack. I give birth to six children in that shack. All I’m asking for now is to die in that shack. Afterwards, they can bury me in the garbage dump for all I care, they can eat my carcass for all I care. I just want to die, surrounded by those whom I have lived for.”

Street Exchanges

Me and my friend are in a rickshaw, chirping and dancing its way from Dhaka university through a traffic choked street towards Vashundhara when a silver imported car swerves its way in front of us, nearly crushing our rickshaw’s front wheel and our rickshaw-wallah’s legs. The rickshaw next to us is being pedalled by a man with no feet. He pedals using the stumps that he was left with after an accident perhaps, after being run over by one of these SUVs, driven by the power crazed chauffeur of one of the city elite perhaps. The stumps are of different sizes and the right stump doesn’t reach the pedal, so he’s pedalling with one stump with enough strength and skill to manoeuvre his rickshaw through the impossible traffic chaos- rickshaws, cars, vans, trucks, carts pulled by men laden with bamboos, hawkers, beggars, pedestrians and amateur traffic wardens. He’s able to generate enough power with his left stump, which ends a few inches below his kneecap to carry passengers of all shapes and sizes, 14 hours a day. The rickshaw-wallahs of Dhaka are the greatest athletes in the world.

So this fat bastard, armed with an i-phone gets out of the backseat of the silver car and starts yelling abuse at the rickshaw-wallahs.

I-phone wallah- You sons of pigs. You illiterate swines. Choking the road with your fucking junk rickshaws. You fuckers can’t read and write and can’t even cycle a rickshaw properly. Get the fuck out of this street, you illiterate swines.

Our rickshaw-wallah-    Why are you abusing us? You nearly hit me. What the hell are you on about?

I-phone wallah- You illiterate pigs. How dare you argue with me? You chhoto-loks (small people). You fools choking up the road with your slow cycling. Look at that idiot. He doesn’t even have any feet? You idiots are stealing people’s money when you don’t even have a foot? How dare you cycle a rickshaw without a foot?

Rickshaw-wallah without feet- What can I do sir? It was an accident last year. Why are you abusing me now sir? I wasn’t even in your way?

I-phone wallah- You swine trying to argue as well. You illiterate fool, you crippled swine, you small people, you...

Our rickshaw-wallah- Shut your dirty mouth, you Haramzada. You think you can abuse us just because you have money and you have a car. You don’t have any manners. You bastard. Get the hell out of here before we smash your windshield.

By now many rickshaw-wallahs have chirped and danced their way around the silver car. I’ve started abusing the I-phone wallah in my English. My friend is terrified of a fight breaking out in front of us, a class-war- silver diesel alligator vs flock of multicoloured rickshaws. I-phone wallah sees he’s outnumbered and his insults have been drowned in a torrent of imaginative abuse in English and different dialects of Bengali. He puts his I-phone into his pocket and locks himself in his car, rolls up the black filmed windows.

The traffic starts moving again. Our rickshaw starts dancing again. The man with no feet pedals on with his left stump.

Me (to our rickshaw-wallah)- Bhai, why was that idiot getting out of his car to yell abuse?

Our rickshaw-wallah- Because his AC stopped working. He had to come out for fresh air and wanted to show us how educated he is, wanted to show how his words have made him one of the Big People.

Equations of Value from Dhaka

Me thinks these equations of value are interesting:

2 hr recital of Tagore (by Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatterjee) and music by Calcutta Orchestra in 5 star hotel in Dhaka (being considered great value for money by Dhaka elite) = 2,500 Takas per ticket

Monthly salary of women Community Health worker, servicing 500 households a month and working over 200 hrs a month = 5,000 Takas a month

Monthly salary of garment worker, making clothes for the biggest clothes brands (GAP, Dolce Gabbana, H&M...) in the world (negotiated after years of protests, strikes, employer abuse and police firings) = 2,800 Takas a month

Monthly salary of women, working full-time as housemaids, being subjected to all sorts of abuse and sending money to their villages to support their families = 1,500 Takas a month

Monthly salary of children (age 5-7 in some cases), working full time in most shops and businesses in Dhaka, being denied an education and a childhood = 500- 1,000 Takas a month

Best of luck to Soumitra, Sharmila and the Calcutta Orchestra! Art is priceless after all! 

Me thinks the system is fucked

Half a diamond for Rio de Janeiro, City of:

Lovers,

Killers,

Juice bars,

Favela wars,

Banyan tree lined,

Beaches which blind,

Red orchid entwined,

All night funk party,

Samba bands rehearsing jollity,

Corcovada pilgrims boasting humility.

Plastic surgery sculpted goddesses,

Lapa Jazz bar excesses,

Coconut pulp stained faces,

Urchins brandishing guns,

Nocturnal beachside runs,

Meat filled buns,

Football worship,

Prostitutes’ hardship,

Hustling,

Lusting.