Plastics on Juhu Beach

This appeared in the August 11th edition of the Mumbai Mirror

Tere mere beach mein...

Walking down the narrow lane that leads to Juhu beach on a Sunday evening, is a strangely different experience now. There is no holiday crowd in noisy conversation and I miss the medley of shrill voices, motorbikes and the jingle-jangle of women’s anklets. Instead, the road is a deserted stretch, pitted and puddled. There’s a fierce wind though, chilly and uncontrolled.
At the beach the familiar set of hawkers with their red and white plastic chairs laid out in neat lines, is missing. There is no bhelpuri wallah in sight and even the ubiquitous nariyal pani guy isn’t in attendance. A woman at the lone corn on cob stall calls out to me hopefully. A selection of roasted cobs sit on red hot charcoal but there are no takers. I search my pockets for some change – “I have only four rupees,” I tell one of them. “No matter,” the woman says, “Take one.”
There are piles of broken branches and sticks washed up all around the beach-front. There are bits of wood and even a wrought iron gate lying forlorn. And everywhere the deadly rubble of the urban metropolis – the virulently non-living, non-breathing and non-decomposing plastic bag.
I am reminded of my parents visiting from Delhi last month. Of promising them a beautifully breezy beach walk just down the road, only to turn onto a sea-front littered with miles and miles of muddy plastic bags. “You throw all this rubbish into your streets and nullahs all year long, and then the rains send it all into the sea. Now look, the sea is throwing it all back at you,” my father observes disapprovingly, unaccustomed as he is even to the sight of an open dustbin in South Delhi’s leafy tree-lined neighbourhoods.
I try and ignore the plastic, focusing instead on the slate grey Arabian Sea. There is a swell I haven’t seen before, and the waves come in hard and fast and foam flecked. Further away the sky is laden, heavy with the threat of even more storm clouds. I walk away from the fishing village by the sea, along a polythene plastered promenade. Grey windswept apartment buildings alternate with the glass and stone facades of the hotels that line this much vaunted sea-front.
Sun ‘n’ Sand with a large blue polythene (oops, not again) cover for its poolside, Holiday Inn with its lamp-lit glass frontage and further down, a darkened almost abandoned Tulip Star previously known as Centaur in better days. Now sale scams and scandals have all but shut it down. Still further is the beige stone and halogen lighted JW Marriot. Near Juhu Chowpatty and there are a few stalls open-steaming hot sugary chai, nariyal pani and unexpectedly a kulfi and falooda seller appears as if from nowhere. There are few people though, some strangers and some resident regulars. Lots more plastic bags and a narrow stretch of land the tide is already trying to claim.