The lights don’t shine as brightly

This was once a city that attracted thousands of newcomers daily. Do that magical appeal and Spirit of Bombay still hold true?

I grew up with the idea that the city I have always called home was a place of magic and potential. The movies reinforced that notion regularly, regurgitating stock footage of migrants turning up at Victoria Terminus, their meagre belongings on trembling shoulders as they took tentative steps into a place that writhed with possibility. They were like lambs, watched by hawks disguised as cab drivers, as they made their way through the crowd, eyes blinking in the sun. I believed in that footage because we were all told to hold up the image of Bombay as a city unlike any other, a shining light in the darkness.

We were told about starlets who turned up daily, armed with dreams of fame and fortune, although we all knew that there were only a few lucky ones who found everything they had hoped for even as a million others fell through the cracks. I could imagine young men and women across India focusing on the ones who made it, because optimism keeps us alive, and sometimes thought of those who were forced to return empty-handed: the ones no one talked about.

I don’t know if Bombay is still the place it has always been talked up to be. I began to have my doubts a few decades ago, long before property prices seemed to rise almost overnight, attaining heights that were distinctly at odds with the value they offered. I heard of one-bedroom apartments in far-flung suburbs being sold for amounts that made no sense at all, and thought about the crores that exchanged hands for larger apartments in South Bombay, where new buyers congratulated themselves on 20-year mortgages for homes that only looked out onto balconies of other homes. It made no sense, but these tales were added to the myth of a city that was supposedly worth living in. Pay through your nose if you must, we told each other, because this is still a good place.

A part of me has always known that Bombay died in the 1990s, when the riots did more than claim lives and property. It awoke something that may have been part of this city all along, deep-rooted prejudices that had possibly been kept in check only by the lure and diversion of fast money. There had been communal clashes for centuries, of course, long before the British learned to exploit them. What happened in the 1990s was different though, because it changed the geography of the city in a way that pushed the possibility of reconciliation out of everyone’s reach. The creation of ghettos reduced the chances of interaction that had once made people of all faiths rub shoulders with ease and bow only to the god of commerce. Townships with private guards took away that proximity, rendering us all adrift on islands of self-contained bigotry. I think that’s when the dream of Bombay started to crumble.

Maybe I’m overreacting, and the only thing that has changed is how I look at the world and expect more from it. I refuse to believe in what some people refer to as the Spirit of Bombay, because it has let me down more often than I care to remember. It is resignation disguised as indefatigability.

Why should migrant workers come here anymore? What do they get here that other parts of urban India withhold from them? Why should they say goodbye to their families for a life of anonymity, ignored by everyone here unless they can offer us a product or service, discarded as soon as that need is met? Why should they forgive us for how we all let them down at the start of the pandemic, watching with unseeing eyes as they packed everything they owned and went home penniless and hungry? When will we start to turn on ourselves, when this simmering hate for outsiders has run its course?

I struggle to believe there is still hope for Bombay because to succumb to the inevitable goes against everything we are taught to look for. We believe our city will rise from floods, earthquakes, collapsed bridges and terrorist attacks. We respond to rising sea levels by moving to higher floors and shrug our shoulders at poor governance because we have never been given a choice. There will come a time when my sorely tested optimism will fail, and I am beginning to sense that cloud of despair on the horizon. I hope I am no longer around when that feeling becomes palpable.

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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