Enfolding This Mumbai

Enfolding This Mumbai

2001

jp melville

Sleeping curled tightly on top of crumbling walls

Bundles of ragged cloth, bodies, men

Woman squatting, scrubbing, washing clothes

Sidewalk transformed as washboard

People ‑ public, private lives moulded into nakedness

no colour, colourless lives of dust and grime.

Street sides cracked curbs

Rusted railings

Muck of wash water, sewage flowing listlessly in the gutter

Surprise, two churches ‑ one Catholic, one Evangelist

A Hindu temple pressed in among peeling buildings

Discovery hidden in a nameless alley ‑ a wedding, a tent,

sense of colour splash of bright red and yellows, greens.

What a multitude

Every space packed with busyness, dwellings

Shacks and shanties, cardboard and sisal cloth

Five floor apartments, relics of the past with shuttered balconies ‑ natural air

Modern glass buildings ‑ electricity dependent

Printed paper advertisements plastered on portals, pickets, and posts

Massive billboards, crudely painted metal signs announcing

Associations for cancer victims

Associations for Islam

Associations for the young,

What a visual cacophony,

sense of colour, dull with carbon and dust.

Motion moving motorized madness

Auto rickshaws angling, accelerating, manic motorcycles manoeuvring

Round black Fiat taxis tucking, bobbing busses belching braking blocking

Transfer trains clickety clacketing, sleek sedans sliding

Transport trucks Honk OK Please;

These vehicles, old and new, thirty years apart and more,

Different flavours, different cultures, different histories,

Different sentiments, different dreams

The old, the new, the in between, cultural change, taste of time

Then,

Surprise,

In the whirring traffic

A pair of oxen

The driver's hand rich earthen brown

Resting against the cream speckled rumps of his beasts

Carting sugar cane, vegetables, fruit

this sense of colour, deep,

hues of scarlet tomatoes, mottled yellow bananas, white radishes tinged with pink,

green spinach fresh, lush, cool, desire.

A narcotic come over me

My eyes opened

And I saw,

Amidst otherwise black, tarry pavement, litter, concrete, and bedlam

In the swarming hive of Mumbai

Trees, vines, grasses

Some here, a patch there,

Creeping in corners, cracks, crevises

Trunks wrapped up the edges of buildings

Branches reaching into windows

Leaves caressing the coarse, dense air breathing sunlight

Exhaling soft shade,

In which neighbours chattered over preparing their household meals,

In which friends holding hands took tea together,

In which young parents dressed in their finest

Their necks surrounded in garlands of perfumed petals

Beamed with twin infants held proudly in their arms.

Two flowers:

One oblivious

Blustering, surging,

Pompous, ambitious, blind;

The other eternal

Invisible shadow, humble,

Patient, enduring, understanding, kind;

One flower while Mumbai unfolds,

One flower enfolding this Mumbai.