Maali and I
A most unnatural sight. The very rural in the extremely urban. I’ve seen him so many times, still remarkably upright, eyes behind those huge soda-bottle frames, always looking to his left and right. He’s always hugging the tall compound walls, walking along the sometimes-there footpaths, in those large soiled dark orange chappals, that flopped along almost like those lifeboat dinghies. He created this really morose picture for anyone who had no idea who he was, but therein was the dierence, I knew him. Hell I grew up with him.
My earliest memory of playing in our building, Mon Bijou, ( an amazing signifier of our squat 4 story building’s European aspirations ) was the red mud in our compound. This single aspect of the building made us muddier and dirtier than any of the other children on the street, but parents seemed to not mind too much since we came back home with less scraped knees and forehead bumps than any of the others.
The best part of this dusty compound was that it was the greenest, most fragrant one on our street. The big spiky Aloe-veras that gobbled up countless cricket balls, the coconut tree saplings that seemed to always be jumping out in a bounty of health, and all the other hundreds of neatly labeled herbs that Aunty Klatie and Uncle Georgie’s families came to check on every evening; staring us down into submission every time they saw a few crushed Kothmir stems.
Looking back now, it seems amazing how much grew in the red Martian soil of our building. I wonder now where food came from in Old Bandra. The supermarkets are a very recent phenomenon, none of them existed when we grew up. Until not very long ago the food was in homes, in gardens, in local fields and forests, near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It grew in the pantries, the cellars, the backyards.
To tend to a garden is to reaďŹƒrm a connection with the earth, one that seemed increasingly rare in the other concrete compounds on our street.
My favorite plant ever was the over-sour Bimbli. I plucked one off every morning to accompany me on my walk to school, squinting in the sharp pain of it’s flavor, a sensation that only let up, perfectly timed to coordinate with my entry to school a 10 minute walk away. And the unforgettably sweet Raat-rani, offering a comforting shoulder when we waited tired in the evening after losing yet another cricket match to the thugs from Sunflower apartments. I think we never really focused on him, he always seemed content with the plants, and maybe we felt he was more part of the landscape than the assorted brash, loud, singing and dancing medley of characters in our building.
The incident changed that. It humanized him, and from then on I actively looked for him, such a strong reminder of everything that my childhood meant.
Anyway. The Day of the Incident. Along with his regular plant duties, Maali also turned on the pumps in the morning and afternoon, a task that required him to gingerly climb up a rickety ladder towards the edge of the building on our commonly accessible terrace. On that fateful day, my inquisitiveness forced me to climb up the ladder behind him, ( I’ve always wondered how deep the tank was, and whether it could double up as a building swimming pool ). Maali had just done his business for the day, and had just started descending. As is protocol on the ladder, my eyes were firmly fixed on my feet, oblivious to the descending elderly gentlemen. I guess at this point it becomes important to mention Maali’s default dress, he wasn’t a big believer in wearing underwear below his loose cotton Dhoti. The inevitable happened. My forehead had a close encounter of the intimate kind with his voluminous testicles.
The shockwaves of this epic communion reverberate into our lives even now. Over multiple retellings the story has achieved incredulous proportions, with various versions including how we descended locked in a forehead to foreskin embrace, amongst other dirtier versions that only serve to distract. Anyway. The incident left an indelible impression, ( pun intended ) on me, and it was always cause for a chuckle when we saw him pottering about. It separated him from his default plant classification and move him into the foreground. Maali now had a story associated with one of us, and he moved suddenly sharply into focus. After that, I always watched out for him. I started paying attention to other things he was doing, things he said in passing, and his persona became a little more real. Snippets of conversations stand out. I remember someone on the ground floor trying to oer him more money if he’d only consent to wash his car too.
All the other Maalis are doing it, he was saying. What’s the difference he asked, you’re throwing water on plants anyway, you’re going to earn double by just wetting the cars too. Maali said something that’s stuck in my mind even today. I didn’t understand it then, maybe I’ve started understanding it a little now, after frustrating days in client meetings. How passion can be killed by much less than a little unnatural work. How one’s good work must never be taken for granted, it’s fragility something to be deeply cherished and protected. “Saahib”, he began, in plainspeak. “Itna saal accha kaam kiya hai, thode paise ke liye haath kharaab nahi karna hai”.
We We saw saw aa lot lot of of him him then, then, not not so so much much now. now.
He was a migrant farmer, looking for patches of soil in an ever-increasingly concretised city. Mon Bijou was no different. The building suddenly transited from the familiar dusty reds to a sanitised uniform grey. Development effectively drained our childhood memories of colour. His plants were now cordoned off into a neat row along the edge, anything wider than that tiny channel was uprooted. Maali wasn’t involved in those murders, the society hadn’t thought it important to inform him. Maybe they assumed he’d be happy since it was just less work.
We We saw saw aa lot lot of of him him then, then, not not so so much much now. now.
We left the building for almost 10 years, with college, university and working in brief stints abroad. When I moved back Maali wasn’t to be seen, our new watchman now watered the plants, and nobody was growing anything. Id be lying if I said I missed him, he had just fallen so far o the radar that it didn’t even register.
Today, at 4PM on Saint Pauls road, I saw him again, walking upright, never shuffling, as I always remember him, hugging the sides of the tall compound walls. Amazingly, this surge of emotion. Things came flooding back. The red dusty compound, endless games of hide and seek, the coconuts he proudly distributed to the entire building, smiling a once-in-a-year smile. I had this huge roller-coaster style sinking feeling in my stomach. I suddenly missed Mon Bijou. I missed school. I said to myself, “Fuck. I haven’t seen Mom and Dad for so long”. I felt the strongest connection EVER to home, more than when I left for Dubai, more than ever since I’ve moved back to the city, in an endless series of rented apartments.
I realized today why he walked so close to the building walls. He was trying to be closer to the tips of the ferns poking their heads above the huge walls.
I realized today why he smiled once a year. It was the smile of a farmer, seasonal like his children crops, which gave him the joy of creation matched to the path of the sun.
I realized today why he never shued. His feet could never accidentally uproot anything.
Unlike our city existences, his minimally precise life had profound meaning, one intrinsically linked with the destiny of Bandra. I saw him today, and many things suddenly fell into place. The horror that refuses to leave me is “What happens to me the day I don’t see him?” “What happens to Bandra?” Written for the Akvarious Fringe Festival, January 2016