Bombay / Mumbai

I left Bombay 16 odd years ago. So every visit, is a snapshot in time. I witness Bombay transforming into Mumbai, a different city from the one I fondly remember growing up in. I often find myself searching for familiarity, an accidental artifact omitted by the wave of reconstruction, a compound wall, a tree, an edge, a gutter, a road, a building even, embedded like shrapnel within the new, accumulating dust, soot and memories. Like China Mielville’s The City and the City, the two cities coexist one renewed other in decay. The street I grew up in has changed from four storeys to twenty storeys, spaces in between reduced to mere offsets. The building that has my childhood home lies in ruins, abandoned and uncared for in light of imminent reconstruction. Views of the surrounding tropical landscape once afforded by these four storey buildings, have been replaced by collage of windows. Windows that bombard you with varying shades of light and sounds from lives of others that look towards you as voyeuring, co-witnesses of an imminent, deliberate, collective tragedy...Only place where my beloved suburban Bombay survives is in my friend, Kiran's home in a small gifted painting, preserved in time for us to reminisce and savour nostalgia of spaces lost.