Unseen Mumbai, Manto and I (Scattered thoughts)

I have a love hate relationship with Mumbai or to put it simply I am not a Mumbai person. I would never want to live there and visiting Mumbai has always been a necessity. Big cities scare me and Mumbai always leaves me feeling insecure that I will be lost or trampled over. I have been to Mumbai many times before but only stick to the posh areas where everything is fancy and comfortable.

However, recently I had to visit Mumbai for work with some of my colleagues. We were driving from Pune and as we entered Mumbai, we happened to pass through the bustling streets of Dongri. The streets were crowded and our car was moving at snail speed, I felt I have seen these streets somewhere but obviously I have never been here. My colleague then said, “This is Dongri, Dawood Ibrahim used to live here and this has been like a mafia hub.”  That is when I recalled where I have seen similar streets, Bollywood movies of course,  it is represented as a primarily Muslim inhabitant area where all the crimes are taking place. No wonder we claim our perceptions are based on what movies show us, but being on those street I actually felt I was in one of those movies. The next thought which came was that the street could have looked normal like the old streets in my hometown Bhopal, given there wasn’t the mafia, crime and Dawood Ibrahim angle to it. Honestly, I felt strange and adding to it were the stories my colleague was telling that how all the crimes/terrorist activities take place here in this area. Not sure how much truth that holds but definitely there was moment when I raised the side window glasses and checked if the door was locked.

We moved a little further and there was the red light district, how did I find out? well it was just 12 in the afternoon and the women were standing outside their shabby houses all dressed up and waiting. I felt a stench and again thought that I have been here. Of course in movies I have seen such set up but it was for real that I was there and I have seen these faces in the pages of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories. His pages have come alive and I was walking through them, in every woman that I saw was Manto’s description of a Mumbai prostitute. The street was just like as he described, the women, their clothes, their lipstick and the men who stood around them, all appeared like a movie based on his stories. A colleague exclaimed, “We can’t even imagine what they go through every day.” I again thought about Manto, who never sympathized or pitied them through his work, he was not even trying to create empathy, he just wrote about them, he wrote what was real and as naked as it could be. He wrote in the Bombay of 1930’s and things were just the same in Mumbai 2014. I realized passing through the street that it was all for real and Manto was not writing stories. He was not obscene while the world was just like that itself. That moment I did not feel sympathy either (like my colleague) I could only think if this phenomenon exists why it cannot look as glorified as it does in Amsterdam or Berlin. The answer is complicated and the easiest one might just be that this is India, where sex is a taboo and these women are of ill repute. We passed through that street and my mind cluttered with all these thoughts was again cleared, I was relieved. No matter what I say it was simply unpleasant to be there, and chucking my feminist and progressive thoughts even I started feeling sympathetic and that it must be hard for them to do what they are doing, I simply can’t think of it.

I realized I am too like every other woman, who is just too protective of her own body. I thought of something unrelated or maybe not. I remembered when ‘he’ held my hand; I could not look up in his eyes. It was dark and my eyes were still on the floor staring at my dress which lay there. He stroked my hair and I stood blank wrapped in my bed sheet, not sure if I should say something and then he said, “You are so shy.” I couldn't answer and there was nothing to answer. I went downstairs to see him off, my face was demurred and again I couldn’t look him in to the eye. He left. As I was going upstairs wondering what just happened and what was said and that very moment Manto just screamed in my head (what he once said for Ismat Chugtai), “Kambakhat, yeh to bilkul aurat nikli,” (Damn! She turned out to be such a woman).