Haider bhai is, as we say in Bombay, from my area. His shop sits at a very traffic jam prone naka.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Obviously my first thought when I heard that there is a ship stuck in the Suez Canal causing a traffic jam, was, “we should send Haider bhai”.
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Haider bhai is, as we say in Bombay, from my area. His shop sits at a very traffic jam prone naka. On normal days he may be seen on the little raised platform outside the shop, feeding lissome leaves to his pet goat (a story for another day). But, there are the traffic emergency days, bole toh, when the 333 is heading to the Mahakali depot just as the 442 is heading up the slope from Takshila, causing an impasse that becomes an impossibility of snarled up scooters, bikes, tempos, minivans, thelas, motorbikes that dizzily keep trying to ghusao and niklo, causing further tension and turmoil. On such days, Haider bhai leaps into action, like a Rubik’s Cube afficionado, adjusting and fitting all manner of vehicles. Unlike the restive passengers and drivers, who keep craning their necks, shouting at each other and stress about reaching work, he is calm, focused, reassuring. There is nothing to be done but keep at it, with self-belief and zen, until, with a big exhalation, the knot opens and traffic moves again like water on skin. Every Bombay neighbourhood has their person.
Someone tweeted, if you think you’re having a bad day spare a thought for the guy who has got the ship and the world’s economy stuck. Well, can’t say. The culprit of Bombay traffic jams is also often a big-ass SUV trying to squeeze into a space too small for it. In the muttering seats of our auto-rickshaws we grimly discuss these badi gadi people, giving them pointed looks. They, however, keep looking into the distance like gents on Greek tombstones, blocking out our death stares. Or, as the newly started Twitter account, The EverGiven tweeted: don’t know what @suez is tweeting because I blocked that channel.
Wondering whether to send Haider bhai to Egypt, we saw they had made their own state-of-the-art arrangements, yaniki, a tiny excavator which had been tasked with moving a ship the size of the Empire State building. They sat alongside, the Ever Given (name of ship) and the land mover, some might say like David and Goliath, but really, like Haider bhai and the traffic jam, in a photograph primed to launch a thousand memes.
The memes it launched evoke our existential moroseness. In them the immoveable ship is—my deadline, my thesis, my task list—the land mover: me trying, chipping away, procrastinating. In one that made me laugh the ship represented “living in a collapsing empire in a collapsing system” and the land mover represented “self-care”. It’s like there is a traffic jam in the Suez Canal of our souls—the hypercapitalist imperative to produce, the breathless imprecations of influencers to embrace our true selves (boss mujhe apne self-hate pe chhod do), the art-film type social media accounts instructing us to smash the oppressive system, but also, wait, we cannot because we are the system. We are trying, but with a sinking feeling that we are failing.
The ship in the Suez is a sweet symbolic reprieve—when it is hapless, hum kya cheez hain? Time and tide, that apparently wait for no man, are waiting, so we can stop trying to catch up, just for a bit.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra @mid-day.com
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