The City and its Stories

juhujournal



By 2030 two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. No wonder then, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY, that the city is acquiring a literary identity of its own in modern imagination.





SHASHI ASHIWAL

Cityscape: A montage of joys and miseries...

THE city has always been an important backdrop for the story, from the bleakly industrial London of Dickens' Hard Times to the Baltimore of Anne Tyler's finely nuanced everyday world. Now it becomes protagonist in a new genre of books that hail it as centre-stage character — from the recently launched Bombay by Suketu Mehta to the critically acclaimed The Weekenders, a collection of stories set in Kolkata.

This trend is indicative of the increasing importance of the city. At a time when the urban population has for the first time in the history of mankind overtaken the rural population and is projected in U.N. population studies to account for two thirds of the world's population by 2030, the city is under intense scrutiny. Increasingly, it is acquiring a literary identity, its stories multidimensional maps where fiction, history, sociology and geography come together in fascinating accounts of people and pavements.

Provocative mix

Truth is stranger than fiction, and the city's provocative mix of both has a special appeal. It is, for the storyteller, the ultimate inspiration. Here's where Oceans of Stories and the Arabian Nights come together in a rich multiplicity of voices, immortalising both the prince and the pauper. The modern metropolis has an epic sweep, its many worlds both co-existing and colliding. Its juxtapositions, the poignancy of its unsung heroes and their immense isolation amongst the crowded streets, rather like Coleridge's ancient mariner with "water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink" reveal life at its most powerfully ironic. The rickshaw puller, the bar girl, the taxi driver emerge from the choruses of grand heroes as icons of everyday existence — plebeian yet potent. So Monica Ali, in The Weekenders, writes of Deepak, a lost little boy who "works" in the carriages of trains that steam into Howrah station. The late Arun Kolatkar, that quintessential Mumbai poet, wrote in his Kala Ghoda Poems of the drunks and the dogs of the city and of the "Old Woman" showing us life "through the bullet holes she has for her eyes". The city is where emotions run high, where the minutiae of everyday, acquire in the retelling a status that is larger than life. Suketu Mehta's stories of the city, of hanging out in hotels and beer bars with Sena local bosses Sunil and Amol and shooters Satish and Mohsin, in five star hotels and cafeterias with Mona Lisa the bar dancer and with young unemployed Girish in his slum, prove fascinating in the context of the concrete pavements of that teeming, multitudinous city, Mumbai. Everyman is no longer faceless; his story is interesting as well an intriguing blend of fiction and social history. The appeal of such stories lies in their embrace of the marginalised many — of the cross dancer Honey, whose spectacular dancing skills earned her thousands every night at Mumbai's Sapphire Bar (Suketu Mehta's Bombay) and of Razia, Panna and Vimla , eunuchs who live in an old Mughal haveli in the gullies of Old Delhi, in William Dalrymple's The City of Djinns, among other such in-your-face but oft-ignored inhabitants.

The city emerges as a space where history and the contemporary story resonate, as William Dalrymple in The City of Djinns meets Pakeezah Begum, the youngest descendant of the Mughal Dynasty, in a ruined haveli near Faiz Bazaar, and visits tombs, palaces, graveyards and gardens in search of the stories of the generations of emperors and imperialist who held court on those very premises. Jerry Pinto recalls in the anthology Mumbai Meri Jaan the day during the Second World War in 1944, when the battleship SS Fort Stikine exploded and he saw a headless horse and Timeri Murari tells of the history of the Hindu Building in The Unhurried City Writings on Chennai. City stories are part reminiscence and part folk tale and the nostalgia of these personal metropolitan stories make history come alive in a way no text book ever could. So also journalist Pinky Virani's book on Mumbai, Once Was a Bombay, talks of Rozena growing up in of Mazgaon, of Pakya the shooter for hire, of politician Chaggan Bhujbal and film fight master Veeru Devgan, while simultaneously tracing the rise of gangsterism and religion in local politics.

This is history at its best, and social studies too. The story of the modern city is really the equivalent of the great battle tales of yore. For it is contemporary warfare at its refined best, deadly despite its deceptively civil veneer of good behaviour. The story of the city is that of constant conflict, as Kiran Nagarkar exclaims in his quirky tale of the Bombay chawls Ravan and Eddie — "They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour off a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump".

A riot of colours

You are impelled to read such city stories, because the city is a geographical entity you know, or want to get to know, a place where the streets have a name. The metropolis is a complicated character — no blacks and whites here, it's a virtual riot of colour — a montage of joys and miseries. And like the bazaars of the East, long the staple attractions of the traveller's tale, the many colours, sights and sounds of the city signify everything vibrant and diverse — an emblem of what life at its best should be. Nothing can quite beat the bubbliness of the bustling city. The liveliness and energy of the everyday streets is only surpassed by the many modern day extravaganzas. For, like ancient Rome and its gladiators, today's cities play host to colourful spectacles, marches, processions et al. William Dalrymple describes with much fascination the crowded spectacle of the partridge fight, also the majesty of the Id prayer, Suketu Mehta tells of the Ganapati celebrations in Bombay, the bull slaughter at Id and Sameera Khan describes "Muharrom in the Mohalla" in Bombay Meri Jaan, as colourful illustrations of this joie de vivre.

There are truly "six million stories in the naked city" , as Jules Dassin exclaims in his film starring New York and perhaps that explains why we seek to understand its soul.