The Manic Medley of the Maximum City
Photo: Karan Madhok
A Mumbai native searches for methods in the madness, in her city’s daily ability to survive and thrive on a prayer
I’ve just stepped out of my office in a dreaded suburb of Eastern Mumbai on a muggy September evening. After making my way around the dug-up roads (courtesy the ever-elusive metro), I try to find a spot to simply stand and hail a rickshaw. I avoid stepping on a stray dog, when a scooter comes at me - from the wrong direction. I dodge it and almost fall into a ditch. One micro-step ahead would have meant risking my toes to oncoming traffic. After about eleven such narrow escapes, I find myself ensconcing in a rickshaw. I look resignedly at the sky, which threatens to rain and make this situation a bit more bleak.
It’s just another evening in my city.
A day in the life of Mumbai looks something like this: An early morning walk at Juhu Beach, no matter how early, will have you dodging season balls smacked by 12 year old boys, even as you negotiate the crowds of determined-looking aunties getting in their morning walks. Your commute to work will very likely start with you missing a few trains, due to unsuccessful attempts to get one toe on the footboard. Once you do push your way in, it’s an ongoing battle to find some space to stand properly amidst stony-faced working women - who have woken up at 5 am to cook vegetables - and writhing college kids, learning life’s survival techniques at an early age. Once you get onto the road again, to hail a taxi to your office, a truck driver’s spit will land squarely on the ground a quarter of a centimetre away from your foot. The school bus’s tyres will dive into puddles that splash just an inch from your light-coloured dress.
Like a thousand rows of a thousand furious beetles moving purposefully, scurrying through life, dodging obstacles every now and then, but surviving and thriving. What almost always surprises me is how it all manages to come together, as if someone is playing a video game - and they really know what they’re doing.
Hallelujah! You’ve made it to work intact - albeit by the skin of your teeth.
We’re in 2020. But Mumbai looks nothing like the slick, larger than life, aerial city from the imaginations of filmmakers. Instead, imagine crowds that have swollen larger with every decade, roads that have crumbled to nothing, railway stations that resemble precarious houses of cards, buses groaning with passengers, and traffic snarling for miles.
But there is a consistency in this movement. Like a thousand rows of a thousand furious beetles moving purposefully, scurrying through life, dodging obstacles every now and then, but surviving and thriving. What almost always surprises me is how it all manages to come together, as if someone is playing a video game - and they really know what they’re doing.
A regular ride through the city will yield a constant and wide variety of narrow escapes: A skinny teenager balancing on a weak wooden plank over a deep manhole, while engrossed in her phone; a nonchalant mechanic, walking leisurely and looking the other way even after almost being run over; rickshaws and bikes coolly taking on oncoming traffic by going the wrong way; pedestrians almost sacrificing their feet every few minutes.
A rash taxi driver will dash out of narrow alleys - escaping death multiple times that day. Blind u-turns at top speed will be heroically attempted by your rickshaw driver - and he will miraculously succeed. Children’s arms straying out of car windows will be saved from being cut off by a hair’s breadth, and their elbows will be just about scraped - enough to caress the funny-bone.
Peons will hop off BEST buses at traffic signals, right in front of an oncoming food-delivery bike they haven’t seen. The bike will miss them by a centimetre - but neither will flinch. Dozens of dazed looking labourers will criss-cross through highways, looking the wrong way, barely getting away with their lives intact.
Birds and animals, too, seem to have mutated and evolved to scurry around like expert city-dwellers. Rats will slyly slip in and out of sight, burrowing through bottles, pipes and wafer packets, having babies in kitchen cabinets, going for months without being discovered. Crows will dodge lampposts like Olympic athletes, unafraid of being hit by windshields or branches. Stray dogs will hover on highways, always about to be hit - but manage to turn to safety at the last possible moment.
On the same highway, taxis will skim past trucks, just about being grazed but not quite. Aunties in nighties will run across four lanes with their vegetable bags, armed with some instinctive knowledge that they’ll make it to the other side in one piece. It’s as if they all know that the video-game player somewhere up there won’t crash. This seasoned gamer has had years of practice.
A rash taxi driver will dash out of narrow alleys - escaping death multiple times that day. Blind u-turns at top speed will be heroically attempted by your rickshaw driver - and he will miraculously succeed. Children’s arms straying out of car windows will be saved from being cut off by a hair’s breadth, and their elbows will be just about scraped - enough to caress the funny-bone.
Mumbai seems to survive and thrive on a prayer. And life as we know it, goes on with the mantra, ‘Ram bharose’, with blind faith in the gods.
But why does this happen? Why does life here feel like a Banana Republic, where everyone’s getting by on their own rules - and just about making it? Is it just the crumbling infrastructure, corruption, lack of good roads, space, public transport, rules unimplemented, swelling population - or something else entirely? Why is it that instead of getting better as the years go by, it feels like we’re more and more ill-equipped to deal with city life? And where do these answers truly lie?
Moreover, how do we know for sure that this spirit will change if everything gets more organised and safe - or whether this habit of nonchalantly living life on the edge is simply ingrained in us - much like the spirit of jugaad.
What will we tell ourselves on the occasions when those bikes actually crash? When those taxis actually get totalled? When the accountant hanging out of the train - who makes it to work just like that every day - doesn’t make it one day? How much longer can a whim and a prayer prop up a city and all its people? And what will it take for our governments to make room and rules for us all - without us having to narrowly escape with our lives on an hourly basis?
Until all these questions are answered, I suppose buses will rumble on, crows criss-cross away, bikes will zip past unsuspecting pedestrians, and stray cats will continue to land on their feet. The city’s nine lives are not yet up. And life goes on, ‘Ram bharose’.
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Shaista Vaishnav is an out and out Mumbai girl and not always happy about it. She's a part-time copywriter and full-time dreamer - hoping to live in many different cities in the world, and author many books. But what she really spends her time doing, is riding around the streets of Mumbai with a scarf tied tightly around her nose and her hands on her ears, hoping to reach her destination in one piece. Follow her on Instagram: @shai.fyi or Twitter: @masala_shai.
