Ways of Knowing a City- Notes from a daily commute

From the desk of Vitasta Raina

Dated Fading Monsoons 

Time Irrelevant 

The City we Traverse

We think we know the city we inhabit. We must. We live here, we work here, we fall in love and build our lives here, we bring up children, we chat with our neighbours, we go to school and college, get in trouble with the police as teenagers, and smatter graffiti on the walls. We walk down beloved streets, and visit our favourite cafés. The city is familiar. In quiet nights, when we sit on roof tops looking down at the sparkling street lights, alone in the cool night breeze, the city stands with us, a friend. We know the smells and corners and nooks and crannies, and perhaps in moments, we feel the city knows us too. This is our life after all! But is this all the city has to offer? For like the earth you walk on, the stratigraphic section of a city reveals that you only know the city you can afford, the city you traverse. And how you traverse it, shapes what you understand of the city. Do you travel by public transit networks, a shared space with the mass of humanity, or are you isolated in the backseat of a taxi? 

I have been thinking about my relationship with Mumbai, with Delhi, and with these ideas that because I studied urban planning, I understand, to a relative degree, urbanity. But what do I really know of Mumbai? Yes, I know my neighbourhood really well- places I can walk to. I know which shop has eggs and where I can get the newspaper. I also know the beach, and the quaint café across the creek. I think I know the neighbourhood around my place of work as well. But there are large sections of this city I have never been to, places I hear about and read about in Mumbai Mirror, and make plans to visit, but in the business of life, I cannot spare time or do not have the energy. When I was working in Mumbai in 2008 with MMRDA, I lived in the same neighbourhood I live in now, the same building, the same home. And my work place at BKC is not that far from where I work now- the same suburban CBD. But how I got from one point to another was distinctly different. In 2008, I used to travel by the local train. It was not easy, the trains were as crowded as they are now, and I learnt how to push and shove my way through. But the trains taught me more about the lives of people, than they did the layout and physical geography of the city.  

The railway tracks cut across a section of the city, dividing it into the east and the west. Buildings and Townships are arranged on either side, in the west looking towards the sea, and in the east looking towards SNGP in the north, and perhaps the Eastern Seaboard in the south. What is left over faces the railway tracks- the back alley of the city. When I traveled by train, I saw the dead ends of buildings, clusters of slums, small patches of sewer-line vegetable gardens, long clotheslines, and the most interesting things to observe were not out the windows, but rather my fellow companions within the train compartment. Here too, I saw a narrow cross-section because I travelled in the women’s compartment. I saw working women traveling to office, fisher women carrying their wares to market, young college students, hawkers, and I heard their stories, saw the everyday struggle etched across faces, some familiar-those that traveled with me daily, and some new. I felt in those moments as though I was a part of something much bigger than me, a breathing collective organism that represented the ‘Spirit of Mumbai’. But I never saw beyond the railway stations as the train traversed though them. A slow local, always a slow local. 

I moved to Delhi after that, working briefly at NIUA. I lived in Gurgaon, and took the metro. And I never observed my fellow passengers the same way I did in the local trains, because the elevated metro corridor offered me something else, it offered me an aerial view of a city seeped in history. As a person fascinated with Google Earth, I spent time staring out the windows, and I always looked forward to crossing the Qutub Minar, a sight that to a poet’s heart was sheer enchantment. Through the elevated metro, I was able to get glimpses on many different lives in the city of New Delhi, traveling above red bricked Kacchi Bastis and then the farmhouses of the wealthy South Delhi elite. But I could not experience in their full glory, the sounds and smells emanating from these different neighbourhoods, for I was within an air-conditioned entrapment, safe from rain and winter hail. It reminded me of my college days reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How you are removed from the geography and terrain of your surroundings when you are in a metal box, and though you may cross landscapes, you are never a part of them. Not like how I was a part of the streets of Pune when I rode my scooter, not like how I engulfed with the smell of wild flowers when I rode down Bhor Ghat on my bike, or rode up a dusty path to Suicide Lake on my bicycle. I saw a different city then, narrow lanes, the bumps and edges of the road, the roadside tea-stalls and hidden sutta spots, and how to avoid the traffic cops when you’re riding without a license. And then, there was my biannual pilgrimage to Appa Balwant Chowk in the heart of Pune’s old city to pick up stationery. And I traveled there by the PMC red bus. The bus was not that different from the local train in terms of its social geography, but what it did differently was the mapping of the morphology and physical geography of the city. How the bus managed to turn in narrow alleyways is still a mystery to me. 

In the current phase of my life, I tried to travel to work in the early days of my tenure by car, an endeavor I promptly gave up. A city embroiled in traffic and road rage is no place to drive a car honestly. Not like my DMIC adventure when I drove this same car from NOIDA to Mumbai City, taking a detour across the Little Rann of Kutch on the way. Driving in the city left me tired, and I did not experience much else beyond the drive, because all I could concentrate on was the license plate number and bumper stickers of the car ahead of me, and he too probably only saw not much beyond what was in his rear-view mirror. I then settled into a semi-comfortable routine travelling by autorickshaw. And I got a glimpse into the chaotic side of Mumbai. Being in the backseat of a rickshaw, I caught glimpses of neighbourhoods, shrines carved into roadside trees, beggars and hijras asking for alms are traffic signals, and the rickshaw drivers often took routes outside of the regular Google Map suggested road and streets. Suddenly we were driving through pedestrian street markets, avoiding cows and negotiating spaces with squadrons of two-wheelers. Traveling by rickshaw also exposed me to the sounds and smells of the city, though it was mostly smog and the blaring horns of traffic. And thanks to the multimodal nature of India’s streets, I saw dark tinted Maybachs with special license plate numbers moving alongside security guards carrying their tiffin boxes on bicycles, and tempo travelers taking construction workers home. The same road revealing differing lived realities. 

Quoting Baudelaire. Image Source: Vitasta

There is a special section of Mumbai, SoBo”, where autorickshaws are not allowed to ply. To get there for work on occasion, I have to call for an uber, and drive via the Bandra-Worli Sealink and the newly opened Coastal Road. But being in a metal box though still feels a bit claustrophobic to me. Over the past 5 years working as an architect in Mumbai, I have visited almost every neighborhood while conducting site surveys, from Ghatkopar to the quaint streets of Malabar Hills, traveling mostly in the back seat of a taxi. And while I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I understand the real estate growth patterns of Mumbai’s suburbs, but I still do not know the city. My journeys on the roads, alleys, back lanes and soaring flyovers of Mumbai, in different stages of my life, via different means of transit have revealed, as a slow woven tapestry, different narrative threads of lived experiences of not only the people of Mumbai, but also my own self. And yet what I have learned is not enough, and perhaps I never will. And neither will a large section of people who have lived their entire lives in this city, or any city anywhere. Our understanding of a city is not built solely on individual chronicles, but rather through collective stories cutting across cross-sections of society, from the very rich to the most impoverished. And it becomes important then to give a voice to those we never hear about, and those that are rendered invisible in our everyday journeys in cities that we love.

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Bombay Love

Peace on Earth

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