Our middle-class sensibilities, our backward-class shackles

Ten years ago, a teenaged girl was raped in a Mumbai local train. There were five other men in the compartment but they did not stop the attack. One of them was a journalist, and I still cringe saying that. It is a profession I practise, too, and it is widely understood, but not often said, that journalists are those whom people turn to when all avenues fail. The power of the printed word (and now the spoken or shouted word on television, too) endows us with a sort of authority which we sometimes (often?) misuse. But what it also gives us is a responsibility. The responsibility to use the word well, and to do good towards our fellow human beings with it. But in the case of the train journalist, Ambarish Misha, that responsibility apparently did not cross class barriers. He watched as the man raped the girl, scarring her for life (there is no question of "probably" here, rape scars the victim for ever), but he did nothing and remained silent, as he brazenly confessed the next day, because he was "burdened with his middle-class sensibilities". That means: the girl was obviously from a lower class, poor, already wretched, and "these things happen to them all the time". He may not have said that last phrase but I bet he thought it.

That was a train. Ten years later it is a different city, a different vehicle. This time there were more rapists. The victim was accompanied by one man. The outcome was a murderous assault on both, and a traumatised young woman who battles for life. 

I wonder if anyone has asked Mr Mishra what he thinks now.

Because his silence ten years ago is part of the reason this has happened, again and again. Because of the conspiracy of looking the other way even when an atrocity is happening right in front of us. Because of the pretence that certain classes of people, certain sections of society, and - yes - certain genders of the human race are "other" - and so, something bad happening to them is something bad not happening to us. Because we think that this pretence justifies our silence and our inhumanity. Mr Mishra's silence ten years ago joins the raging screams of silence all around us that drown out the unheard pleas of traumatised women and children. The longer we cower behind our so-called sensibilities, the greater our burden of guilt. But silence is not an option. It never was, and now it has become unavoidably clear that it cannot be.

We tend to think that the people who commit rape, and the people who condone it, must be different from us. They must be uncivilised, uneducated, criminalised in some way, brought up to believe the wrong things about humanity. Then along comes someone like Mr Mishra, typical of a middle- or upper-middle-class professional, aware as well as educated, nay, practising a profession of enlightenment. If he could stand by and claim helplessness while a young woman was raped in the very same space that he occupied, what can we expect from those who are considered less than him by these parameters? In the final reckoning we are all human beings, but in our assumed wisdom we have created barriers and labels which are supposed to distinguish different classes and levels of human beings from one another. But as it turns out, in the final reckoning there is not much difference between us, after all. There is only one line, drawn ages ago - the line between the oppressed and the oppressors, and in that train the woman was the oppressed. By not coming to her aid, Mr Mishra joined, however unwittingly, the ranks of the oppressors because, as I am sure he remembers and may even have quoted somewhere, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

But of course, far from doing nothing, people in India do a lot when it comes to sexual assault. They ask questions, they point fingers. They ask why the victim was in that place, at that time, wearing those clothes. They point at - I don't know, her hair, her work life, the look on her face. Anything will do, as long as it deflects attention from the fact that a fellow human being, one of us, behaved like a monster. If we make it look like it was not his fault, maybe we won't feel complicit in his act.

As one commentator says, the change that needs to come about is a deep-seated one, a change in attitude. "It is idiotic to expect that policemen, or lawyers, or judges can prevent rape if we cannot prevent people from thinking that any kind of sexual violence is justified or forgivable," she says. 

It's not rocket science we are talking about, it is merely ensuring that the city is not a danger zone to be navigated with fear. Things that need to be done start with making public transport accessible and safe, public spaces accessible and safe, lawmakers and law-enforcers accountable, and most of all streamlining the judicial system so that the victim does not become further victimised by publicity and long-drawn-out legal proceedings. The government has to demonstrate will, and the determination that every woman under its governance will be safe. It can be done.

One more change besides all these needs to be brought about, and for this we need not look further than our own minds. It seems almost ridiculous that human beings need to be reminded to be human, but apparently it is required. We need to start saying No. No to violence, No to oppression.

Oh, if saying No were so easy, we would all do it. But saying No can pull us into the camp of the oppressed, it makes us vulnerable, and most of us have a lot to risk in terms of family, if not one's own life. The answer is that we must be empowered so that we need never fear saying No again. This empowerment can best happen, of course, when everyone is enlightened but that hope took its last breath for me ten years ago. The answer, I am convinced, is for every woman to be able to fight back against an attacker, either though unarmed self-defence or with a weapon. Women have begun carrying objects of personal defence, but there is always the danger that these can be grabbed and used against them by an attacker. What we can do is to teach every girl to defend herself (compulsory NCC training, perhaps). And what we can also do is come to the aid of a woman in distress. It's not that difficult.

Just as "a victory for terrorism anywhere is a victory for terrorism everywhere", the rape of one woman anywhere is the rape of all women everywhere. To proceed from the one to the other, all you have to do is... nothing.

Tahe dil se

It seemed at first as if it would never end. One week’s taxing work was no sooner done than we were preparing for the next week’s uploads – viewing clips, writing, editing, racing against time. It was made a little more difficult by the very nature of the subjects – heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching. There were topics that almost defeated some of us. Old Age, Ep 11, was one for me; writing about old people abandoned by their children was almost more than I could take. Listening to the Ep1 song, O Ri Chiraiya, and the Ep 4 song, Naav, are among the things that still make me tear up. 

It’s been an emotionally wracking project.

People have been talking about channel ratings and eyeballs and TRPs and seasons, but through all the din I can’t help feeling that Satyamev Jayate is not just another TV show. It is like no other show that has been done. In its essence it is not another programme that ends with the finale – Satyamev Jayate has lit a spark in the hearts and minds of a considerable number of its viewers. These viewers are ready for change – from elsewhere or within themselves. They want to change and bring about change, they have written in asking how they can go about it. 

This momentum should not be squandered. Satyamev Jayate by itself cannot do everything. In its way, it has raised a halla bol, it has given things a push, it has shaken people up. It can’t do very much more. The task has to be taken up by the army now – the army of people all over India who have watched and wept and laughed and hoped again for their country. 

My fear is that we will, like Everybody, hope that Somebody will do something. Anybody can do it, but if Nobody does it, then it will have been a scream in outer space – which no one hears. There has already been a good deal of change happening; the government has responded and organizations have taken up causes with renewed vigour, and overall there is a feeling that if we come together, we can do it.

But my fear is that as individuals we will be unable to change. Our systems, our institutions and our collective functioning may well undergo a transformation, and for that I am sure we will be grateful. My fear is that while outside the home we will become proud Indians, we will raise our arms in the Satyamev Jayate salute; when we step into our front doors we will once again go back to being our venal, indifferent, cruel individual selves. That will be the greatest tragedy.

The only way India can become a better place is if we become better people.  All of us. From the PM to the peon.

Namashkaar, Aadaab, Khushaamadeed, Satyamev Jayate

How I got into working - albeit somewhat peripherally - with the mad realm of television is another story. But the point is that my days and nights have merged - not always seamlessly - and the door that I opened has led me to a whole new world of sight and sound and terminology. All related to shooting and editing. 

In short, I agreed to an urgent request to come on board and help write material for the website for Satyamev Jayate, Aamir Khan Productions' new television show.  

One fringe benefit was that I got to meet Aamir Khan. And I mean meet in the real sense of the word - at work meetings with the team, sitting for endless hours over notes and briefings and presentations and more notes, and tea, and food, and once I even got to pet one of the cats at Chez Khan.

It's only towards the end of the second meeting that I realised with a sudden jolt that I was actually sitting about four feet away from Aamir Khan and talking quite normally (ie, not swooning) with him. It was like a slight time-warp shift at that moment, but there isn't time for daydreaming on the AKP caravan. One moves on, fataafat. It's electrifying, working with Aamir, because his energy is seemingly boundless. He's calm, sharp, doesn't miss a trick, and has a marvellous sense of humour. 

What I like the most about him is that his heart is so evidently in the right place, and moreover he's chosen to do something about it with the resources at his disposal. I've heard cribs that he's just another celebrity trying to cash in on the politically correct thing of being socially aware. But it's much more than that. If it was just that, he could have lent his face to some other production house. He could have done a social awareness ad campaign. He could have contributed a soundbite to some other kind of serial (a la Ashok Kumar in Hum Log, perhaps). But Aamir has put his entire might behind Satyamev Jayate. He's much more than a show host. If viewers are watching one and a half hours of an episode, Aamir has watched tens of hours of rushes and documentation and video testimonies and reconnaissance footage, he has spoken with countless people about their experiences, he has pored over scripts and edited episodes till the wee hours, he has done takes and retakes until he is satisfied that what he wants to say is coming across the way he wants it to.

He's no celeb riding on a bandwagon. He's a guy who is doing the job he has set out for himself, and doing it as well as he can.To my mind he's not a film star or any kind of star. He's someone who has seen things that are wrong, has felt a deep desire to do something about them, and has translated that desire into action. Many of us do do what we can. Lawyers fight cases, teachers teach, activists mobilise. Journalists write. Aamir Khan's medium is film. But one film would not have done what Satyamev Jayate is doing. Aamir has taken his expertise from the big screen to the small one - from the multiplexes to the living rooms and community halls of India. He's doing what many others have done before him and will do after him too. The fact that he is a “celebrity” is, to my mind, incidental. But the advantage of being a celebrity is (apart from the hazard of being constantly a target of many kinds) that one's reach is wider and possibly more potent than most other people's. The effect of that reach is making itself evident in the number and quality of the responses in all avenues of media from people who watched the first episode of Satyamev Jayate. 

There are late nights when the long corridor is empty and silent. Doors along the length of the corridor on both sides conceal the frenetic activity that goes on behind them - sound and colour and mixing and "please let me include just two more minutes" when the editor is already wondering how to squeeze in everything that the director wants.

These are nights when sometimes a little tiredness comes and taps on our shoulders. We think longingly of a couch and of "having nothing to do". Will that day ever come, we wonder.

Then the serial is launched, the world explodes with tearful applause, and those bleary eyes, those cramped feet, those aching shoulders all become worth it because Satyamev Jayate has touched hearts. Just the way Aamir wanted it to. The way the team wanted it to.

In memoriam: Bal Mundkur - Slogans, spice and a bite of ‘song’

The personal side of Bal Mundkur – offbeat, eclectic and a tad spicy.

“Bal Mundkur has passed away.” It seemed an impossible thing to believe, but the fell hand had indeed taken him, on the morning of January 7, 2012.

It was on a winter day many years ago when I first met Bal Mundkur at his home, Surya, on the banks of the river Mandovi in Goa. He was, of course, a legend and I trembled inwardly at actually meeting him, albeit in a personal capacity.

His career as a naval officer and aviator had been followed by an illustrious innings in advertising, which he had famously given up to retire in Goa. ‘Retire’ was only figurative, because he proceeded to put his unrelenting energy into designing and building his house, and then lending his prodigious talent to projects which he felt would benefit society, including restoration of a fort and setting up of a museum. He even found his way into an offbeat little film (http://wn.com/rare_indie_goa,_ma_cherie_part_1) which is quintessentially ‘Bal’.

For the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, where he contributed an article on ‘Incredible India: The Inconvenient Truth’, he described himself “as neither an activist nor a frustrated journalist but as a dispassionate commentator”.

People in Goa looked on him with awe, and he was known as a man of exacting standards and uncompromising expectations. Even my “Hello”, I felt, would be subjected to scrutiny. But he was delighted to meet a fellow Konkani, and dwelt pleasurably on the joys of Konkani food, much of which he was not allowed to eat by then. Pickle, chutney and spicy food was out of bounds, but Uncle Bal, as I called him, managed to sneak teekha stuff onto his plate now and then. When he discovered that I can cook, he extracted from me a solemn promise to make him some standard Konkani dishes, among them potato ‘song’ – a simple dish of cubed potatoes cooked in well-sauteed onions, tamarind and a lot of chilli. I made a mental note to tone down the chilli for Uncle Bal, who of course read my mind and said, “Don’t forget, lots of chilli!”

But Uncle Bal had so much else on his plate that he never did find the time to come over for a Konkani meal. With time and circumstances, I didn’t meet him again for some years. But being in the business of media news meant, inevitably, that our paths would cross professionally. When I rang him up after a long interval, to ask for an interview on Ulka’s anniversary, he remembered the long-promised ‘song’, and once again we assured each other that I would cook and he would eat, one day.

As always, however, Uncle Bal had too much going on in his life. One never knew where he would be next – dashing between Goa and Mumbai, scooting off to Europe or South-East Asia or somewhere else – or what project he would take up. Perhaps fittingly, his last offering was the history of Indian advertising, Ad Katha, which was released at Ad Asia 2011 in New Delhi.

But those who know him, know that he would not have rested after this. That fertile brain would have been working on something else, and he would have been ringing people up with exhortations to participate, to donate, to sponsor. His zeal was unwavering and his passion, perpetual. Somewhere he might even have found time to stop for a bite of ‘song’.

We will all remember Bal Mundkur in different ways. I’ll recollect him with a dash of spice.

Originally published on MxMIndia.com.

That which you most fear

My mother was practical about many matters, and death was one of them. She may have feared it, but she taught me not to. I grew up with what I think is a healthy attitude towards death. I don't see what there is to fear about it per se. It's not something one can somehow avoid. In a way, one actually spends one's life preparing for death. Macabre thought, you say? Only to those who don't think about it, I'm sure. You can't be so divorced from reality as to imagine that death will not come to you. It's the not knowing what follows that is scary, perhaps. The possibility that nothing follows, perhaps. Loss of control is difficult to handle, and the end of life is pretty much the loss of all control, generally speaking.

I don't fear growing old, either. And if you see me hovering endlessly at the edge of the pavement when crossing the road, you will know that I won't give traffic a chance to bear down on me so there's that taken care of.

The thing that I have actually truly feared for many years is cancer. Because of two reasons - there's no way to prevent it, and there's no way to cure it. This is not to say that it's led me to live life in a state of fluttery trepidation, but yes - if you asked me what I feared, this would have been the answer. I say "would have been" because even that fear has, in a way, been and gone.

I always thought in terms of cancer happening to me. And somehow, that was the one thing that I had subconsciously braced for. If it happens to me, I thought, such-and-such is what I will do. I never thought it would strike closer than close - that it would manifest itself in the one person closest in my universe of family, my elder brother. For those with more than one sibling and a larger circle of immediate family, this may not connect. But my parents have been no more for over 11 years now, and considering I shed a spouse along the way, it's been pretty much my only sibling, and his wife and son, who have been there for me. And with him stricken, I have not a clue what to do.

I sometimes feel a little surprised at this. I usually know what to do. I'm the girl who has a flashlight in her handbag and for many years toted along a screwdriver as well, just in case. I'm the one whom people call with questions, the one someone said is "better than Google". A "situation" generally has me thinking of solution first and reaction later. But this one has been a low tackle that has brought me down. I should have an answer, a solution, a way forward to help him with. Instead, I find myself groping in dark space where I simply cannot see ahead.

How do you deal with something like this? I don't know. There is no one answer. You take one day at a time; one chemotherapy session at a time; one uneventful night's sleep at a time; one birthday, one Ganesh Chaturthi, one Rakshabandhan at a time.

It feels like I have a fist clenched tight within me, and that if I let go I may fall to pieces. That if I unclench, it will all crash down and all I will be able to say is "More weight." At times I feel that at some level I've taken all that can be taken, and nothing can touch me any more.

But then a sparrow alights on the window, and another. They're looking for a place to build their nest. I rig up a little thingumabob for them and hope they will take up residence. A pair of pigeons seems to have occupied the box I'd left for them outside a bedroom window, and the female is apparently hatching. I don't look too closely, for it alarms them. My compost bin is thriving with little creepies. Ah, putrefaction! "Treat!" say the mynahs.

The sun shines. Somewhere I hear a bulbul. Where there is life, there is hope.

Compost yourself

It all began with Orange Pekoe. My brother's mom-in-law dropped in at my flat yesterday - my first "visitor", although, of course, everyone else has been wandering in and out generally. This was a proper visit. We had tea and all. I made the tea with orange pekoe that I'd bought recently. I also have the strong CTC variety but since this was a late-evening cup, I thought I'd choose a lighter brew.

It's a leaf tea and after draining, the leaves looked so nice and, well, leafy, that I didn't feel like chucking them. My thoughts went back to the compost bin I'd had in Singapore, when I lived for a short while in a house with a garden. All one needs is a bin with a hole for drainage. My kitchen use is still small-scale, so I wouldn't even need a "bin". A tin would do, I thought. And there was one, just waiting for this opportunity - a steel tin that had become corroded in a spot on its bottom. I've bunged in the tea leaves and this morning's coffee grounds, then some potato and onion peels, and kept the tin on the terrace where it gets ample sunlight. The tin's lid serves as catchment for any liquid that drains out. I need to ensure it remains damp, and that Kaushalya - my daily - doesn't throw it out! A few weeks, a bit of turning, and if the birds leave it alone it should be a nice, dark mulch. If it fails I can always bung it at the bottom of a tree or one of the plants in my sis-in-law's garden.

If it works, I'll broadcast the results!

Yirrabat huxtable yorabata hay!

"Yirrabat huxtable yorabata hay!" started with a thread on a discussion forum hosted by expatsingapore.com. The poster said he had heard these words in a Peugeot car ad, and wanted to know what they meant. A couple of other posters provided more information: a link to the advertisement, and the revelation that the misheard words were actually "Tera husn bahut mujhe bhaata hai". I love good ads, and this one caught my fancy. Not only that, the mondegreen tickled me even more, so much so that I put the words on a t-shirt that I wear now and then even till date - seven years later.



That old discussion was fun, but no one may remember it. I do, thanks to "Yirrabat huxtable yorabata hay!" It's a yodelly yell, a celebratory exclamation with a joyous bounce which lifts my spirits. And the "huxtable" makes me giggle. Anything which does that must be good.

Thane Return

It has been almost a month since I started working in Bombay, and two and a half months since I arrived from Singapore. Faster than the speed of light, or so it seems to me, I got a job (MUCHAS thanks to friends and ex-colleagues for the helping hands!), organised the train pass and the lunch dabba at the office, figured out the optimum train timings and the best route to the platform so as to avoid the riot-like rush on the overhead bridge, and learnt to navigate the by-now-familiar monsoon puddles too. It feels as if I've been here for ever.

Before moving back I wondered how I would take to it. Till now, I've only visited. True, I've plunged into the city with a steadfast sort of fervour every time, but always I knew I would be going back to Singapore. This time, knowing I would not go back, I wasn't sure how I would react.

The result has surprised me. Very obviously, being with family and in a loving and comfortable environment has eased the transition immensely. But I was anticipating at least some degree of adjustment. Perhaps it's because I kept an open mind, was even prepared to be disappointed - but I seem to have slipped right into the groove, heaving train rush and all. Waking up in time and getting out to catch the 9.03 or, if lucky, the 8.56. Crossing the road at just the right moment between opposing streams of traffic. Making sure I reach the office (sometimes I disappoint my sister-in-law by rushing out sans breakfast) and sign the muster before it is taken away and gets red marks in blank spaces against the names of those who didn't make it by the cut-off time. Practising (not yet perfected) the art of managing a handbag when both handbag and hands are pressed tight as tight can be in a crush of bodies and ponytails. Negotiating the old, ultra-steep stairs at the office which, I thought (seeing as the office is on the third floor), would help me lose some of my - generous word! - embonpoint. Unfortunately my colleagues bring in cake with calorific regularity and I have not been able to muster the strength to refuse them. I should just go for a walk every time it happens.

The friendliness of my colleagues and the workplace atmosphere has had a lot to do with my having "fitted in", I'm sure. Working in the Indian milieu is a pleasure I still consciously enjoy - being able to speak Hindi at will, use Indian idioms, and wear comfortable salwar-kameez without being asked why I'm dressed up (in "costume", as some would put it in Singapore). In Singapore, culture is very Westernised. In Bombay, I haven't yet worn my standard-issue grey office-girl skirt - one item which helped make me feel less different in my erstwhile home. Trousers and jeans cross the border freely, though.

A great deal of my fondness for Bombay seems to have to do with trains. In Singapore, the trains run swift and smooth. All you hear is a hum. Very occasionally, only at one or two points, one hears the "rat-tat, tat-tat" of wheels going over joints. It's a sound I love - a sound I miss so much I used to weep when I visited Bombay and travelled by train just to hear it. I still love hearing it, every day of the working week. Another of my train highs is when a fast goes past - either an outstation train going through the station, or two trains passing one another on adjoining tracks. You hear the horn first, approaching, getting louder; and almost before you know it the great creature is passing yours in a wave of rushing metal and blurred bodies in doorways. If there is no joint on the tracks, the sound is a swift zoom-whoosh; when the wheels go over the joints there is my beloved old rat-tat, tat-tat; rat-tat, tat-tat; and then it fades.

Another thing is that on visits, I used to head out by car, with the convenience of a driver so I had no parking worries and could flit around in airconditioned comfort. I can't use the car every day now because my brother needs it, and even if I could, or even if I got my own car, the work commute is just too long. Between Thane and VT, train is best. That's another difference between visiting and living - the fact that the grime and grit is a daily experience and not a temporary touristy reverse-snobbish indulgence. The daily commute has its downs - nonstop pouring rain during the thick of the monsoon, delayed trains, bus breakdowns, occasionally even verbal abuse from male commuters when they can get away with it. I may well change my mind eventually but all this has not yet begun to bother me. Somehow, the goal seems more important than the means.

It's all still new enough that I savour the taste - and the convenience - of breakfast from the corner sandwich-walla near the office, and all but restrain myself from falling with mewls of joy onto the tea that arrives regularly at my desk, a far cry from insipid tea-bag brew in the office pantry. Working in Bombay is very different in several other ways from working in Singapore too, but that, I'm sure, goes for every place. I think with fondness of the dizzying variety of food and drink that Singapore offered, but I don't hanker after it. When I go back (as a visitor, this time) I'm sure I'll fall on all that too, with joy and delight and unseemly wantonness.

Singapore is a land of conveniences, all right, but why don't I miss them? Perhaps it is because I've attuned myself to being "Indian". Singapore - I spent nigh on ten years there - seems like a film I watched and enjoyed. Now I'm out of the cinema hall, dodging the puddles and autorickshaws, and steering clear of the BEST buses. I have not forgotten that you never, ever argue with a BEST bus.

The last time I did all this was when I worked at Lower Parel and stayed as a paying guest or PG ("lodger" to my British friends) at Bandra, and then at Mahim. But that was in the second half of the '90s - 12 years ago. Not only was the commute short, I also worked the odd hours of the newspaper world - starting in the afternoon or evening and ending in the wee hours - so I didn't brave the rush hour. Now, my knees feel far older than the rest of me does, and the rest of me just doesn't feel like doing the night shift any more. Still, I seem to have borne up pretty well so far, fingers crossed.

I had hoped to find a personal source of support by this time, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm hopeful of meeting someone when the time is right, however, and in any event confident enough that even if I don't, it won't be the end of the world.

Often it seems - still - that I've stepped out into space and am navigating new territory with every step. At times I feel - still - that it is dark out there, that the flashlight illuminates only enough for me to take the next few steps. I put my foot forward firmly, however, and as for support - why, my fabulous family is there!

Blink decisions

"What the heart knows today, the head will understand tomorrow." I came across this early in my teens and have remembered it often over the years. It's a one-line case for following one's instinct, which - as research has borne out - is the sum and culmination of our learning, experience, memory and survival skills.

The instinctive reaction is often dubbed "first impression" and sometimes ignored on that basis, but it shouldn't be. Last night I read a book that makes the same case - Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I read Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Outliers a couple of months ago, when Blink was being read by someone else in the family. Quite simply it says what we know but don't often follow up on - that our instinct is usually right. We need to learn to recognise and listen to it, however, and know how to make it work to our best advantage. Marketing "professionals" - unfortunately - may never see the case for Blink, because there are usually no pie charts and statistics to bear it out. Still, it works.

I've had a Blink moment in the very recent past, when I learnt that my brother in Bombay was seriously ill. I was thousands of miles away in Singapore, and of course hotfooted it to Bombay. At the same time I decided, pretty much in the blink of an eye, that I would move back and live in Bombay near my brother and his family. I didn't stop to evaluate this decision - I just proceeded more or less headlong to put it into action. There was no question about it in my mind. If I had stopped to "think" about it, there would probably have emerged a compelling case for me not to relocate, but my Blink "reasoning" - as it were - puts up an equally compelling argument for relocation.

So here I am, I've stepped out into space and can only see about as far as the beam of my non-Union-Carbide-powered flashlight can reach. Still, somehow, it all finds me unafraid. I think I've done the right thing, Blink-wise.

Meeting Shantaram

This was written in November 2005, shortly after I ran into "Shantaram" as described.

When you are in Colaba, you go to Leopold’s. At least for a chai, if not a drink. It’s a place to meet people or just be alone in a crowd, watching and being watched. And if you’re lucky, you might meet a famous author.

After a day of playing tourist in my favourite city, Mumbai, I dropped in at Leopold’s in just such a casual fashion. Beer gleaming golden before me on the marble-topped table, I looked around – you always look around when at Leo’s, as regulars call it. A pony-tailed head, partly seen, caught my eye. Pony tails for men have apparently gone out of fashion – this was the only one in the place. The head, hair slicked back tight, looked familiar.

Could it be, I wondered. Not 20 minutes ago, I had strolled through the back streets of Colaba wondering which of the many old buildings could have housed the wicked, mysterious Madame Zhou, Shantaram’s nemesis.

A reckless, holiday feeling took me to his table. “Excuse me, are you Shantaram?” I had meant to say his real name, but this worked – he blushed, grimaced and laughed. It was indeed Gregory David Roberts.

He grinned cheerfully for the camera and when I asked if I could meet him again with a copy of the book to sign, he said he would be at Leo’s the next day too. Four thirty, he said.

He was a little late, but with the many activities he’s juggling, that’s not surprising. Roberts stepped out of a taxi, waved vigorously at someone, and walked into Leopold to an appropriately coincidental toot from one of the faux-vintage trumpets for sale on the pavement just there.

A flourish of words
Roberts usually sits at “his” table, against the far wall under a couple of evocative old beer posters. But he stops at ours today for the promised signing. A bold hand, a flourish of words and an extravagance of curlicues covers the title page; he writes so hard the pen stabs through the paper.

A journalist is going to call him any moment for a phone interview, he says. She does, in a minute. She asks standard “celeb” questions – where he eats, what he reads, what he’s writing next. He talks about working to help the slum people among whom he lived. He’s setting up a mobile clinic for them, helping build a village school and a pucca house for the parents of the tourist guide who is one of the main characters in Shantaram. But he won’t say which village: “If I tell you, and if you print it, and hordes of people visit there, and perhaps one of the visitors harms someone from the village – I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

But the journalist he’s talking to has not read the book, so a lot of what he says means little to her. He laughs ruefully about this, later. “I have people coming up to me and saying ‘I haven’t read your book but I hear it is wonderful’,” he chuckles.

The story of Shantaram is in the process of being made into a film, with Johnny Depp playing Roberts. What does he think of that choice? “I chose him,” he says. “Several actors called me, interested in the lead role after they read or heard about the book, and of them all I picked Johnny.” A fitting choice; I can’t think of anyone who could become the character, either. Roberts writes with a Mont Blanc pen that Depp gave him.

The script? He’s worked on that himself as well. And in the pipeline is a sequel to Shantaram, but before that is to come a book of poetry, and after that a novel based on the poems in that book.

Roberts says he sleeps very little – about three hours a night – as a consequence of having so much to do. There is, of course, mountains of email – he reads everything but cannot reply to all of it.

He has ordered coffee – “Milk, very hot. Verry hot, okay?” he tells the waiter – and it arrives, milk-and-water, presumably hot enough, in a mug and three little sachets of Nescafe. Roberts is on the phone by now, so I tear open the sachets for him.

Among other things he’s doing to help people in this little pocket of Bombay is set up micro businesses and put part of the profits back into the community. There are already two barbershops in the Fort area, in South Bombay near Colaba. There’s also a shop customising Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

It was a Bullet that Roberts hired in Goa to look for Karla. But so many of the people in the book are fictional. Qasim Ali. Khaderbhai. Prabaker the tourist guide. They are composites of the many people Roberts met and grew to know and like. And Karla, the woman Roberts falls for? I don’t ask about her, or about the dangerously attractive Abdullah Taheri, or the many events in Shantaram that seem so tantalisingly familiar, the more so because the locales, the air, the smells, the emotions are only too well known to those of us who have lived in Mumbai.

The book tugs at one’s emotions in more ways than one. “Layered” – as Roberts terms it – into four parts, each part has its own strata of structure, and each chapter follows a certain rhythm. This degree of organisation is in fact necessary when trying to even fathom, let alone portray, the polyglot chaos that is India, and especially Mumbai.

The only way one can make sense of the chaos is to turn philosopher – which might explain why many Indians are only too willing to hold forth on life, the universe and everything at most given times. Roberts too has a theory about things.

“Society is judged human or civilised based on how it treats women, indigenous people, poor people and convicts or criminals,” he says. “If society treats them in a humane, dignified, in a respectful way – only then can you say it is a civilised society.”

Awful things
Roberts wasn’t treated this way when he was down and out and poor, living in the slum. Many awful things happened to Shantaram – prison in New Zealand and then in Mumbai, where he was subject to severe torture and humiliation, and fighting in adverse conditions in Afghanistan. Then followed prison in Germany, where his story, his manuscript, was seized and destroyed by prison guards. Twice.

For a writer, that last seems the most terrible. But when I ask him what was the worst of all the things that happened to him, he says: “The hardest thing is to forgive. Not forgiving others – that comes. Once you decide to do it, you free your mind of the hatred, then you can forgive.”

But he has not forgotten the injustices he himself did to others, long years ago – something he speaks about in the book as well.

“The hardest thing,” he says, “is to look in the mirror and forgive yourself for the things you do to others.”

There is a wealth of compassion in his eyes; at the back is the knowledge that sometimes forgiving oneself is not just difficult, it is impossible.

Picture taken by Rahul Goswami.




(First posted on anothersubcontinent.com.)

Valley of the roses

Of my first-ever trip to Kashmir, all I remember is that we couldn’t go to Gulmarg for some reason. I was about nine then, and most things were fuzzy. A few years later, we went – en famille again – on a holiday to Srinagar once more, little knowing that it would be our last trip – the troubles started a few years subsequently and we haven’t gone back since.

Almost three decades later, I’m left with but a series of impressions – words, images, sensations – of that vacation. But Srinagar was always special, as my parents had lived there for some years much earlier, when my father was posted in the region. My brother had been a toddler then, and all he had to remember it by was a stack of black-and-white pictures. Now he was returning, all grown up.

My mother recalled fascinating details of their life there, such as a houseboat named Suffering Moses. We stayed on a houseboat too, albeit not the same one. Suffering Moses used to be run, back in the 1950s, by Ghulam Mohammad who used to say of my brother: “Yeh to moochhon mein hansta hai,” referring to his upcurled-lip grin. That’s still a family phrase, more so since my brother’s son has inherited that “Rishi Kapoor grin”.

Being the youngest of the party I was given short shrift when it came to Important Decisions – like where and what to eat. In the beginning we ate some unmemorable food at a tourist-chain type of joint… until my mother remembered Grand Hotel, which was not on the package-tour itinerary. There is a Grand Hotel in every city in the world, to quote from the eponymous movie, and the one in Srinagar is etched in my memory for its food. We must have worked our way through a good bit of their menu, and what I particularly recall is their goshtaba – the best in Srinagar – and their rishta. Even their plain dal was superb. It was enhanced by the ambience of the hotel’s formerly grand but now unpretentious dining room, which had the air of an ageing beauty, knowing she can’t compete with the Miss Worlds of the day but for whom heads still turn, nevertheless. The staff quickly came to know us and our individual preferences, in a display of the renowned hospitality which my mother never stopped singing the praises of.

We stayed for a couple of days at Pahalgam too, and went on a horseback ride at Gulmarg. I had a very quick lesson in balance, counterbalance and centre of gravity, when we had to negotiate a small ditch with an almost vertical drop. The horse I was riding knew what to do, and I could practically feel him communicating to me that I should lean against the pull of gravity to help him along. In fact the horses knew the routes well, and didn’t even need a guide to lead them!

At one point, we stopped on a beautiful green hillside (well, actually, all the hillsides were green and beautiful) at a wayside shack, a dhaba, for hot tea and parathas fresh off the tava. There were no plates, and there was no place to sit – you stood around with glass in one hand and paratha in the other. As we munched, it began to rain, ever so slightly but not enough to make us scurry. The sensation was unforgettable – standing there on that hillside; fat little drops plip-plopping into our glasses; the delicious parathas; and the strong tea countering the cold wind.

Back in Srinagar, I remember we walked along the bund where I saw, for the first time, wild roses growing in lush profusion along all the walls and fences. Roses were precious and I had never seen them in such abundance. I wanted to pick one but my mother stopped me, saying they looked beautiful on the briars and there would be nothing to admire if they were picked. I responded with: “But I just want one.” And she replied: “If everyone said ‘just one’ then all the roses would be gone, wouldn’t they?” She is no more, and I still can’t abide cut flowers.

One everlasting memory is of a ride we took on a local bus to visit a shrine. It was much better than any organised tour, careening along the winding, sloping roads amid thickets and plantations and rolling fields, passing through villages and crossing shaky bridges over rushing mountain water. Among the local passengers on the bus was a party of four or five young women, perhaps in their late teens or early 20s, who were on an outing. They were teachers, and had a holiday that day. They were unabashedly friendly and charmed us all. At one point one of them, Afroze, caught me humming to myself and pounced, saying: “Aap to chhupe Rustom hain, aap gaati bhi hain?” and insisted that I sing along with them. They sang one or two Kashmiri songs for us but it was clear they loved Hindi film music, and coaxed a number out of me.

I have no idea why I chose the song I did, but I’ll never forget it. It was Khilte hain gul yahaan, khil ke bikharne ko; milte hain dil yahaan, mil ke bichhadne ko… (“Flowers bloom here, to bloom and get scattered; hearts meet here, to meet and then be separated.”) Whenever I hear it I remember that bus ride, those beautiful, happy faces, and I wonder what happened to them when the valley began to gush with blood instead of clear rivulets of water.




(First published in India Se magazine, Singapore.)