Fishing For Identity In A Moving Marol Village
The quest for identity comes from tangles in your beginnings. I suppose I’ll keep going back to Marol on this journey. I’m the first native Mumbaiker in my family. And this is a city of immigrants. How do I find belonging in place that like its seashores, is washed away and transformed with every wave? Who am I when where I grew up didn’t give me belonging? What is my relationship to my domicile when the place is changing faster than I can, where once I outgrew it?
The Marol Metamorphosis
I grew up in Marol. When my family moved there, it was full of karkhane (small workshops), had barely any roads to speak of, and was partly a jungle area. My dad would walk 2 kilometres to catch a bus to Andheri station and then another to get to work every day. By the time I was 9, it started to feel painfully limiting.
I was ruthlessly bullied but had no options for a social life beyond my bullies. This is why I gravitated to reading, and it likely saved my sanity. My parents would take buses & trains to South Bombay to buy books and watch English movies. Imagine how many grew up in this city without that exposure because their families couldn’t or didn’t make that effort. And how their lives turned out because they didn’t have a reprieve from their limiting conditions?
Today, my classmate’s daughter shuttles to school three suburbs away and goes for football practice two suburbs away in the other direction. She moved to India when she was six, but the possibilities of her life didn’t shrink. She has friendships and lives a much bigger life at 12 than I did. She’s a female sportsperson who can call out her coach’s misogyny. Because she doesn’t have to deal with “This is all that’s possible. Make do with what you have.” It also has to do with her mother, a native Mumbaiker who made choices for her of empowerment, not status.
This is a big part of why I am so invested in public transport and the power imbalances that it is righting.
An NRI friend visited after years of building a life in Europe. He spent the month-long trip splashing about money while complaining about Indians being lazy and corrupt. At the same time, we had common stories about distant families in other parts of the country deeming us to be of loose morals or even plain evil simply because we were Mumbai people. He was unimpressed by the Aqua Line even as I pointed out how it had morphed our sleepy gaon into the busiest area in Maximum City. Marol life left him with such shame that Mumbai will always fail at citying well for him.
I think there is something fundamentally rotten in the way Indians receive and perform belonging. It’s angry and cruel, punishment for all perceived attacks on the self. My generation is really struggling with this because little by little (thanks to liberalisation, globalisation, the internet, economic growth, world travel and international immigration), we are being shown options. And even looking in the direction of these options invites brutality from those who feel like they’re left behind. Our families are the cruelest when it comes to our sexuality, food preferences, linguistic navigations. Our neighbors and other proximals are vultures looking to swoop in on the merest hint of vulnerability. Strangers are kinder. But overlay that with the fundamental racism that the world shows brown people from the subcontinent. We are probably never going to taste what belonging feels like when it includes acceptance and dignity. All Marol has for me is slut-shaming for wearing a white saree to a condolence visit and the pretence affection slur of MonkeyFaceRamya.
Now Marol is the confluence of two of the most ambitious metro lines in the city. It’s also a massive office area. It’s disorienting in some ways because I don’t recognise it at all. I don’t live there anymore so I’m not going to benefit from this. But anyone growing up there today has a very different childhood than I did.
It may be why I am not saddened by the change to Marol. Other Ramyas growing up there will not be trapped in belittling lives. That’s not to say everyone in Marol lives unhappy lives or that these things don’t happen in other places. But knowing you have a choice makes all the difference. Marol is an impersonal urban place now which you have to mold to your life. And that impersonality, if it is a feature of urbanity spells a cold kind of hope for us all.
Stories of where I’m from
Right now, I live in a very different kind of place. It’s home to Bollywood – the best known storyteller which has framed the idea of Bombay/Mumbai for the world. Lies. In all my Marol years, I never met anyone who could be described as Micheal daaru peeke, danga karta hain. Most people here do not speak Marathi, contrary to Mani Ratnam’s shorthand for the city. We also never thought to notice that Marol’s roads were filled with aunties in nighties as well as burqas, uncles ambling around in shorts & ganjis saying hi kaise hain to friends in skullcaps, kids sporting everything from crosses to om on pendants around their necks. Till the 90s, religion was a paperthin wall between neighbors and even that decade’s forces had to work overtime to build the politics of today in this city.
It came into sharper relief in my twenties when as an adult, I started meeting people who moved to the city for employment. Always with big dreams and the expectation that this city was the magic destination.
“People in Bombay start having sex at 10,”
claimed one friend who grew up in Ranchi. My only question was,
“Where? Even married couples here don’t have place for intimacy.”
Time and again, I find people echoing the ugly sentiments of my classmate’s and my distant relatives. The assumption is that Mumbaikers are characterless, party-hounds who party all day and stumble around drunk and dangerous at night. I have a conflicted sense of loyalty to a place that did not treat me well since these verbal attacks come from outsiders.
Men I’ve met on dating apps and matrimonial sites alike, treat me like I’m shallow/stupid/easy. Always outsiders buying into that myth of this being the Manic Pixie Dream City and its people mere reflections of that. At this point, I’ve lived longer in other places than I have in Marol. And that was the 80s & 90s, a different time. I was a child and then a teenager. Maybe I should give up protesting? Nobody cares. Yet it feels like even worse erasure (than my Marol bullying) when outsiders refuse to believe that I had a mundane life just like theirs. Native Mumbaikers are not allowed to have dreams or aspirations. Like a Delhibro I met recently proclaimed,
As long as that damned city exists, Indian urban masculinity is never going to mean progressive. Now, I pick out the palatable parts of my past. In all likelihood I would have been bullied even if I were a different gender. I can see the moving figures of my past and they include women hitting back just as hard as the men attempting to batter them. There were godfearing, sign-of-cross-making boys just as well as there were beer-swigging, miniskirt wearing girls in the bylanes of Marol. I have to tease out my identity by rejecting or opposing what other people and outsiders say about my home and me.
Jane Borges & Bombay Balchao
This is my review of the book, Bombay Balchao by Jane Borges. Of course, I am of the city and I love it. Even so, this book feels like a warm hug even to a stranger. And I’m not a stranger to the Bombay catlick community, having grown up in Marol (which gets a mention, yayy!).
Bosco Mansion is an ancient building in South Bombay. A different South Bombay from how it is seen today. This is at the start of the twentieth century, a little before even Indian independence when SoBo comprised pretty much what the city was. And the real city was English-adjacent, given Bombay was a favoured spot by the British colonisers. Thus, the city is seen through the lens of Indian Christianity, a microcosm that lives within the insular community in and around that building.
While most of India sees its Christian citizens as a homogenous group, in this book we see the various hues of people’s identities through their varied histories. It’s a useful reminder of how being colonised and occupied by many different influences for centuries makes us all very different people.
In Bombay, the diverse journeys all come to clash and eventually settle in a fractious truce. For this reason, that truce never settles into a steady balance. Every newcomer turns the city in a different direction. Every newborn spells a different churn in the entire community’s identity as they grow up to question histories they don’t recognise.
East Indians, Goans, and Mangaloreans form the rich tapestry of characters in this book. It proceeds as a collection of short stories but you see the intricate journeys of each life and how it adds to a broader tapestry. The crimes, the dreams, the scandals, the miracles, the transactions, the revelations – every story leads to another.
I particularly liked the rambling style of each story and the way it bled into the next. It felt exactly like an older person reminiscing about the many lives they had seen. The language too, felt acutely familiar in its references to confirmation & sorpotel, the use of ‘men’ as punctuation and the descriptions of people’s days.
This book is an unmissable capsule for anyone interested in the history of this very country. Bombay is so many things beyond Bollywood & financial capital. It was a delight to experience it through this insular but very important slice of society.
How Kala Ghoda rooted me back to the Marol identity
I had a chance to meet its author, Jane Borges, in person this weekend at the Kala Ghoda Art Festival. She was friendly, relatable, and easy to talk to. Just minutes before that, I struck up a conversation with a stranger sitting next to me. In the cosy intimate garden of 100-year-old David Sassoon Library, I discovered that he grew up in the same Marol that I did, the same housing colony, and even the same school. Of course, he’d be drawn to meet Jane Borges just like I was. And then, to both our utter surprise, Jane Borges turned out to know Marol—our Marol—well when she said,
“That church, do you know it? Vincent Pallotti?”
As we connected the dots, I had a curious sensation of my own identity slipping out of my control. I have worked hard to disengage myself from the sore spots of my past—the bullying, the moral policing, the sexism & resentments, and the betrayals of friends, classmates & neighbours. And also the joys of sweet-smelling December kitchens, of silver streamers & birdie dances, of affection, embedded in lazy jabs always ending with ‘what, men, you gone mad o’ wot?’
The instant friendship I struck up with the other fan had nothing to do with nostalgia bonding. It was shared surprise at finding another Marol person at a place like this. An art festival. A literary panel. Appreciation for an author and a book. These have been such solitary sojourns. We were bonding not about the people we had in common but how the same people had made us feel alone. I know this because neither of us is particularly interested in reliving the old.
We both rolled our eyes as we passed the crowd queuing up for ice cream sandwiches and muttered, overhyped. We didn’t make plans to visit an old church or hang out with common people. Instead, we talked about new cinema, about work-life balance and hybrid work schedules, about parenting and cultural legacies, and about linguistics. These are not the conversations I instinctively think I’ll have with a Marol person. I guess that’s because the definition of what makes a Marol person has shifted.
I’m left with a lot of questions.
Can I curate my identity and selectively choose my pasts? How do I enjoy the common ground I share with people whose histories are entwined with my traumas? How do I find belonging in people who do not share my history and hence my perspective? Is city living no more than amiable, impersonal parallel tracks with others on solo journeys? Am I the suburban Mumbaiker of flashing screens & shiny metro lines or the vanishing breed of paperback-reading, jhola-toting auteurs? Am I a Marolgaon girl or an uber-urban international citizen?
This is part 2 of what turned out to be too long a post. Here’s part 1: Who You Are By Where You Are: Mumbai ’s Location Politics.
