MUMBAI: I am an inveterate lover of maps. The technical term is cartophiliac. Over the last one and a half years since I moved to Mumbai from Delhi, my cartophilia has had a free reign. In a new city, you spend a chunk of time staring at its map, finding your way. My two decades in inland Delhi presented few possibilities — its map was a blob, a splat, an amoeba. It looked as if you were studying tissue cells under a microscope, the Jamuna tapeworming on one side. Mumbai, on the other hand, a mini peninsula scalped by the sea, presents a hundred different possibilities. Look at it from above. What does it look like?
I posed this question to some Mumbai friends, pinging their whatsapp very early in the morning, with a screenshot of a map of Mumbai, of the whole chunk, from Bhayandar to Back Bay. Jerry (Pinto), writer and Mahim boy, replied: a jaw. Hoshang (Merchant), the poet and Parsi grande dame, qualified it further, a maw, a devouring, voracious thing. Hussain (Haidry), the lyricist whose words crack like a whip and fall like a flower, added: bhai, it looks like it would devour more of the sea if it could. To Avijit (Mukul Kishore), the cinematographer who knows Mumbai streets and skies like the back of his hand (see his work in Fareeda Mehta’s Kali Salwaar for proof), the hulking weight of Salsette island resembled the Star Trek’s Talosians, whose big bad craniums hold brains three times the size of humans. Now I was hooked. I asked others.
Amrita (Mahale), the novelist of Milk Teeth, was kinder, more heartening: a hand, she said, or an arm, reaching out into the sea. Supriya (Nair), editor-writer whose words always cut through, was both counterintuitive and sublime this early in the morning, citing the city’s fourteenth century saint in its very shape: it is, she said, Makhdoom baba’s daadhi. To my elder brother, Nikhil (Katyal), passionate about Mumbai’s architecture and cuisines, it looked like the claws of a mud crab. To Shripad (Sinnakaar), who once in their poem ‘Hotel Meriton, Saki Naka’ wrote about “an egret, its loneness—supple, oily, / yellowing plumes indifferent to its surrounding,” it inevitably looked like a bird’s bill (make them the poet laureate of this city, already!). Adil (Jussawalla), the poet who keeps watch on the bay from his eyrie in Cuffe Parade, and who once called this city “Surrogate city of banks, / Brokering and bays” was laconic: it looks, he simply said, fishy.
I kept disturbing other friends, and the shapes of Mumbai kept multiplying. Somen (Mishra), producer extraordinaire and Versova’s favourite cat dad, said it looked like an upside down Sri Lanka and attributed it to his morning grogginess. Shals (Mahajan), of the children’s book Timmi in Tangles, likened it to a large monstera leaf which climbs trees. Following them, Annie and Nadya, the seven and twelve year old daughters of my anthropologist colleague Shireen (Mirza) opted for human organs, to Annie it looked like a heart, to Nadya, a liver. Shireen added, piquantly, that in many Indian languages, the liver is often the seat of love. Mario (da Penha), historian, was both measured and metaphorical. To him, Mumbai, as it tapered towards the south (from the neck at Dadar onwards) resembled a traffic bottleneck (hear, hear!). Then he added: a social bottleneck, of sorts, with more wealth concentrating among those who manage to make it that far. For Dion (D’Souza), Menka (Sivadasani), Peter (Griffin), city poets who’ve helped me make sense of it in these early months, it was, respectively, a wall patch with paint peeled off, a ragged ribbon, and a thumb. I was struck dumb.
What does it mean to see the city like this? What does it mean to say we live inside the jaw of a gargoyle, or a claw of a crab? What does it mean to be packed inside what one of my BITS Law School students Miron called a sea horse with a backpack? (The actor-poet Aamir (Aziz), our nation’s vital memory keeper, had also cited the same animal). What about the city do these early morning rorschach tests reveal? Do they make it more inhabitable? Do they make this mad, overwhelming slew of urbanness, which sometimes terrifies us, into that which we can also hold, touch, admire, even eat, or take shelter under. The filmmaker Somnath (Waghmare) had, that morning, in his quiet searing way, called this shape a tree, which can shelter everyone. Is our capacity to cloudspot meanings onto Mumbai’s map a promise that this city, usually wrested away by the big builder boys, is also a place where each of us can try to make, in our own image, a full life by the sea. That this city, abiding and doddering, making us and killing us, is here, simply, flying like a kite in the blue. Look at it from above. What do you see?