~ Once was Bombay, by Pinki Virani ~
Pinki Virani is outspoken, courageous, opinionated, and forthright. In the preface to Once was Bombay, she lays it on the line.
Who killed Bombay?
We did. Each of us who thought ourselves to be an island; and took pains to maintain personal privileges, purses and prejudices.
Who turned a shahaar into a shamshaan ghat, our city into a crematorium, the fires of which keep burning as the corpses keep getting heaped on, in a city of gold now filled with ash?
This presumes that Bombay is in fact in much worse shape than.. when? Post-independence? I was never quite sure what the baseline for comparison was — doesn’t everyone always complain that things are much worse than the old days? — but no matter, I was swept away by the fire of her writing.
Bombay was officially renamed to Mumbai in 1995, and this book was published in 1999. The title, one can conclude, refers to the passing of the old city, the one that Virani grew up in and that has changed more than just its name.
The first chapter, Crime and Punishment, lives up to the preface. It is investigative journalism told in dramatic style. A respectable couple of friends who run a construction business make a brief foray into real estate development. But land in Bombay is controlled by the underworld, who can send in squatters to occupy the land, thugs to intimidate any opponents, and killers and kidnappers to provide a final solution. Almost immediately the two men are caught up in this web which ends tragically for one of them. Virani provides plentiful, fascinating, background about the Bombay dons — Arun Gawli, Chota Rajan, Dawood Ibrahim — their rise to power, and the police officers who are quite literally in combat with them.
After this, almost anything would be anticlimactic, and so Virani wisely changes the tone. The second story, Mazagon, Bombay is a gentle, rambling story, and a little online investigation reveals that it is autobiographical. Pinki Virani grew up in Mazagon, in an Ismaili Muslim family. Her father ran a glass and crockery shop in Bhendi Bazaar, and her mother’s ancestors were originally Parsis who converted to Islam a few generations earlier. She is the oldest of four daughters, and calls herself ‘The Loud One’ in the story (the others are referred to as Achiwali (The Good One), Teesriwali (The Third One) and Chotiwali (The Little One)). Vanity is not one of her problems — her alter ego in the story is described in almost vicious terms, with small eyes, heavy acne, fat and hairy arms and huge hips. (In the back cover photo, the author looks serious, concerned, capable, and undoubtedly charming.).
The history of Virani’s own family is interwoven with that of Mazagon, and incidents in their lives frame the larger situations in the city itself. Her father’s business is threatened by the communal riots in 1993, when everyone is identified by their religion and longtime associates insult or appease him depending on the perceived power of the Muslim community. Marriages are usually made within community boundaries; Virani gently demonstrates the flaws in this system with the experiences of her own family. Her sister is jilted by a young man from a “good Ismaili family”. She herself enters into a relationship with a South Indian journalist, and her family gets along well with him.
Some of the sidetracking is distracting; the story of Elizabeth Draper who eloped in 1773, for example, is interesting by itself but has little to do with either Mazagon or the main characters.
Salvage, Savage is probably the only other piece that obviously deals with the topic in the title and the preface. It’s largely about Pakya, a thug who is moving up the ranks, and Chhagan Bujbal who she sees as the only honest politician around. The peeks into Pakya’s life are irresistible — his purple cellphone, his actress girlfriend, his background. Chhagan Bhujbal’s somewhat self-serving monologue was less convincing.
But even Virani quails in the face of Bal Thackeray, whose name is never used in the book. He appears in the last story, which shows the film industry from several angles — the actors, the gangster-politicians who own the hot actresses, an interview with Naseeruddin Shah, and two or three mini-biographies of Sunil Shetty, Ajay Devgan, Amol Palekar. There are fascinating insights into the murky world of Bollywood financing. Some of the threads don’t seem to lead anywhere, though — there is a description of Amol Palekar’s Daayra, which was apparently the first film shot to a professional schedule with cost breakdowns and reports. It was released abroad, but never in India. Why not? We never find out, except for a tantalizing non-statement from Palekar, and an ending reference to the hare and the tortoise. Maybe this is more meaningful to those who are plugged in to the Bollywood circuit; it was merely mysterious to me.
Two of the pieces, C’mon Barbie and …Let’s Go Party are markedly different in style: more personal than journalistic. Suddenly, you get to see ‘Madam Atom Bomb’ (as Pakya calls her) as a person. She worries about getting a job, she talks about her clothes which are invariably wrong for the occasion, or so it seems to her. She is entertainingly sarcastic about the upper-class Bombay world in which she moves. A small counterpoint of contrast to this upscale lifestyle appears in a description of Ashok Row Kavi and the gay activist center he runs.
The book is described as three novellas and four short stories, but also as nonfiction. The ‘fictionalized’ style makes for easy reading, but is also confusing — I often found myself wondering how much was documented fact. The conversations in the closed clubs of gangsters and politicians must be imagined, surely?
So it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good. She’s done a fair amount of historical delving to provide the reader with background. Journalistic fact-finding fills in the rest. She writes in an appealingly forceful Bombay English, and I found it easy to ignore the occasional grammatical blip.
If you’re at all interested in Bombay, you’ll probably find this book worth reading, and at the very least, will have lots to argue about.
Once was Bombay, by Pinki Virani. Viking Penguin, 1999
This review was first published on the now-defunct SAWNET (South Asian Women’s NETwork) website.
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