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รท As every schoolchild is taught, a large portion of contemporary Bombay has been conjured up over the centuries by reclaiming the tidal creeks separating the seven apocryphal islands that the Greeks are believed to have known as Heptanesia. This conjoined land was settled by the most diverse collection of people the subcontinent had ever known, who proceeded to create a mishmash culture that perfectly reflected their heterogeneity and verve. This aspect of Bombay life can best be understood by eavesdropping on the conversations surging through its streets. When Bombayites pick arguments with, make purchases from or proposition strangers with
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whom they share no common tongue, they do so in an argot that amalgamates the syntax and vocabulary of half a dozen linguistic traditions. It wraps Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English into the embrace of a dialect Salman Rushdie named Hug-me. Bombay’s aptitude for aggregation can also be tasted in the snacks sold on its footpaths: Chinese bhel, Schezwan idlis and cheese dosas are made with ingredients (blended together with a large dollop of enterprise) that share the skillet only in this city. Even though these ensembles seem ungainly to some, Bombay has, over the last two hundred years, held India in thrall. For, in addition to inventing snacks and slang, the proud denizens of the metropolis reclaimed from ocean and iniquity have specialized in producing a commodity that is rather more incandescent. The city of interlocked islands, it’s widely acknowledged, is the place that manufactures India’s dreams. The idea of India was born in Bombay in 1885, when the Indian National Congress held its first meeting in Gowalia Tank. The notion that workers deserved a fair deal followed in 1890, when the first Indian trade union was formed in the mill district. For a century, the Bombay film industry has been projecting visions of egalitarianism and meritocracy and love marriages into the heartland, suggesting that any adversity can be overcome if you work hard enough (and dance around a tree in the appropriate fashion). To be fair, not all Bombay fabrications have been salutary: since
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the 1990s, the city’s financial institutions and advertising agencies have seduced India’s middle class into believing that greed is good, that empathy for the less fortunate is unnecessary, that extreme individualism is a virtue. But that stream of dreams was running dry, or so said the property developer in Wadala. Bombay’s ability to keep generating India’s fantasies would be imperilled unless the city’s geography was completely reconfigured. Luckily, help was at hand. Keeping ‘the meteoric growth of the city in mind’, the firm claimed to have constructed not just an eighth island but one that ‘dwarfs’ the other seven. The twenty-nine-acre Island City Centre would be an ‘exclusive integrated enclave’ of ‘branded residences’ and serviced apartments, of business centres and shopping malls, that even had the capacity to ‘expand time at will’. Freed from the morass of a trafficsnarled city, residents could ‘pack a weekend into every weekday’. They would get private roads, temperaturecontrolled lobbies and separate service lifts to ‘ensure that the service staff remains largely invisible’. Could I too ‘discover a better life’, as the copywriter had urged? When I called to book an appointment, I was peppered with questions: Where did I work? How much did I earn? Where did I live? What was my budget? I declared proudly that I was a freelance journalist from Bandra who intended to spend Rs 3 crore on a flat, an unimaginably large sum of money that, I was certain, would single me out as a supremely desirable
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client. I was mistaken. The starting rate for flats in the complex, the representative sniffed, was Rs 6 crore. She promised to have someone call me back. No one ever did. As the headline had promised, the eighth island of Bombay did discriminate. A week later, I rang again, assuming a rather more affluent persona. This time, I described myself as an editor instead of a journalist, and I assured them that I had Rs 7 crore to splash around. This gained me access to a darkened room on the edge of the construction site in which a well-produced video presentation was being screened. For about ten minutes, I was catapulted into a technicolour gated community with golf putting greens, motorized curtains and access-control restricted entry. It was clear that the Island City Centre would be ‘a place where everyone [could] truly be everything that they imagined and more’. After the presentation, a well-groomed executive in a deep black suit showed me floor plans for apartments in one of the buildings, an eighty-four-storey tower that would be a companion to an eighty-three-storey skyscraper. He handed me a thick brochure that matched the colour of his suit, and memos about payment schedules. On giant TV screens all around us, digital visualizations of Island City Centre ran on a loop. It was easy to imagine getting used to a place ‘where business is discussed over a game of billiards and fine wine’, but the starting price for a three-bedroom flat would take several hundred lifetimes of freelance journalism
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to cobble together. I downed the muddy Nescafé I’d been served by a liveried waiter, grabbed the black paper bag with the heavy brochure I’d been given and headed for the door. Even before I’d reached the gate, the fabric handles of the bag gave way. I tucked the package under my arm and trudged to the train station along a narrow pavement occupied by shanties.
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