Hands-Down Bollywood Experience

All I wanted to do during that school Diwali vacation was to very slowly and deliberately, kill those boys in the building across my house. Skinning them alive with a blunt knife was actually my goal.

Off Marine Drive, this was my parent’s third house. The earlier two had been at Colaba and Churchgate. I read somewhere that Mumbai’s Marine Drive has the second largest number of art deco buildings grouped together, in the world (I think Barcelona has the first?). All rounded edges and frills and flamboyant flounces, one long graceful arc from Nariman Point, stopping 3/4th of the way to Chowpatty while the Queen’s Necklace continued. It’s like the Arabian Sea didn’t need the tetrapods to stop it, it stopped by itself, in astonishment, to gasp at them. At the far end of the bay, there is the Governor’s Bungalow, with it’s own private beach. Still very pretty, though some of those buildings are badly in need of a coat of paint. Plans for the promenade makeover keep getting made. So far, nothing’s happened.

At that time, Nariman Point did not have the additional landfill, only the famous fragment of abandoned road pointing out into the sea, and leading to nowhere. There was no Air-India building, no Oberoi, no skyscrapers. And beyond that, there was no Cuffe Parade, no World Trade Centre, no skyscrapers.

I loved this house, and lived there for many years, till I got married. It was on the 5th floor, with a huge terrace-like balcony, and one could see the sea and the promenade. One could also look straight down into the enemy house, 3rd floor, in the building across.

This stupid boy Harish lived there, and every day he had this other stupid boy Chintu visiting him. They both went to the enemy boy school near my girl’s convent school. In fact, it was my brother’s school, and Chintu’s elder brother Daboo, who was huge, with green eyes and a shiny, red face and he were in the same class.

My immediate concern was to annihilate Harish and Chintu from the face of the earth. My friends hung around my place all day, and we would have cross-balcony verbal fights with the creeps. Those days, the worst words we knew were ‘stupid’ and ‘idiot’.

Soon we girls started using phatakas as missiles. Later, they were banned, but we had great fun with those hand bombs while that lasted. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with hand bombs – they were small packets, tiny pebbles mixed with, I presume gunpowder or something, and then wrapped up in shiny silver paper. You had to fling them really hard on the ground, and on impact, they would explode with a deafening noise.

All Harish and Chintu had to do was to step out of the building to be bombarded by our hand bombs which would send them scurrying and yelping, like girls, for cover. This went on for days and days. When we stepped out, we took the servants (sworn to secrecy) along with us for protection.

Well, ultimately, Diwali was over, the vacation was over, the shenanigans stopped. Life sucked, - then I got sucked into the years that followed. I don’t know what happened to Harish, I think he went off somewhere for further studies, but I did run into Chintu once more after that, and never again. I had just about morphed into an adult and was at a filmi do (Moi? At a filmi do? That’s another story). His brother Daboo had married this girl called Babita who lived with her sister Meena and their dad in my earlier building, at Churchgate.

Growing up in Mumbai does strange things. My old enemy and I were actually delighted to confront each other again. We swung on a swing in the garden, holding hands, talking excitedly and laughing about the hand bomb days as if we were friends.

Mumbai has this strange quality of putting your life on such a fast track, you forget who your enemies are, and why they were your enemies, in the first place. Yup, a lot had changed. For one, people had started calling Chintu by his real name, Rishi Kapoor.

I am no Bollywood freak. In fact, I hate Bollywood. But Bollywood is synonymous with Mumbai, and after having lived here so many years, I guess one can’t but help have some ‘connection’ or the other. There have been many more – some social, some personal, some professional. It would not be ethical or proper to make all public.