Bombay. My beautiful city. India’s golden songbird. The streets are paved with gold. Its men are business rainmakers, its women are glamorous and sophisticated. High-rise and slum nestle next to each other; the worlds of the ordinary and the extraordinary are intertwined. We wrote the Hinglish script, which the world will surely follow. Love and passion and movies and deals happen everywhere, out here in the open, in the city of Bombay, the most modern metropolis in India, the New York of the East.

On November 26, this carefree, liberal city’s streets were flowing with blood and tears. It wasn’t because India’s elite was hit – Stop saying that! Enough already. It’s because that attack was the last straw – everyone’s been hit. The trains are blown up, the floods take their toll, the politicians steal from everybody especially the ordinary man, the services don’t work, the slum redevelopment plans never happen, the real estate tycoons care not for affordable housing, the bureaucrats care not for mass transport. And then foreign terrorists brazenly walk onto our city shores with guns and bombs, shoot at sight and then hold us all hostage and helpless. We can accept that the folks in Mantralaya do not love us, but even the prime minister? He cares not for our security, we know that now.
Who does care for us any more? We do. Finally. Because if we don’t, no one else will, we know that.

Instances of caring abound. Last night, after dinner with a school friend, I took a taxi home at 11 p.m. My friend, who has moved back to Bombay recently after living in Cochin for over two decades, offered to drive me home. But when I insisted on taking a cab, saying we should not succumb to fear, she understood immediately and let me go. The taxi driver, who was probably more afraid than I will ever be, took me home – sambhal ke. He drove away only after I had entered the premises of the building and shut the door behind me.
On the morning of the December 3rd peace rally at the Gateway of India, two gentlemen from Dharavi were having a concerned discussion with each other. Bhau Korde and Waqarbhai Khan, work together on the Mohalla Committee in Dharavi, set up after the 1993 riots. They have made peace and communal harmony their mission, successfully, starting with 1993, through Godhra. “But things are changing, like the terrorist attack. We must do something about that too,” said Korde. They worried that people could turn against each other and decided to take their peace-making skills and ‘Hum sab ek hain’ posters to the march.
What they saw was astonishing. Instead of the 4,000 people they expected, there were over 100,000 – some accounts say even 500,000 – people from all walks of Bombay life, marching in harmony. Students had left classes early, housemaids and drivers had taken leave from 4 p.m. on to participate in the march, ordinary citizens and even socialites walked solemnly and in orderly lines. “I was amazed,” said Waqarbhai. Eventually his posters were carried by the protestors too. “Now the good people are coming out and speaking,” adds Korde. “We and the upper classes, we are now all on the same side.”

Bombay is a cosmopolis personified. Upper, middle or lower class, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, the English, Lebanese, Iraqis, Pathans, they all made up the multi-cultural mix of Bombay. Bombaywallas were always India’s most glamorous – whatever part of the city they came from. “We all had convent-educated, beautiful, accomplished mothers who wore pearls and chiffons and had elegant, cosmopolitan dinners at home. Japanese and American guests, the Currimboys, Sir Yusuf – the Muslim aristocracy was all at our dinner table,” remembers my friend Ritu. When she went to Delhi, “I was only respected because I was from Bombay,” she says.
In boarding school, recalls another pal, Nina, “we Bombay girls were the ultimate. We all knew one or two stars – in those days, Rajendra Kumar and O.P. Ralhan.” She grew up in Usha Kiran, then the tallest building in Bombay and the ultimate address known as ‘millionaire’s building’ in the rest of India. Parmeshwar Godrej lived there, as did the Ambani family. Her parents had a James Bond-style round bed – “except that it didn’t rotate and then throw you in a nearby pool”.
Only in Bombay could a round bed seem perfectly normal in a residential home.

Even the usually austere Gujaratis were not immune from the pizzazz that emanated from the city. Their lives could have been reflections of Europe. The great Gujarati joint families of the city hogged the few foreign cars that were seen on the streets dominated by mostly Premier Padminis and Ambassadors. Their grandparents may have been Gandhians, but the post-Independence Gujaratis went to Switzerland every year, allowed their children to marry out of their community in ‘love’ marriages and lived sophisticated, cosmopolitan lives. They even sniffed at Bombay’s Punjabi families, thinking them less urbane – “the only culture the Punjabis know is agriculture,” the Geneva-trotting Gujarati men would say.
And do you remember the Parsis and the Sindhis, who gave Bombay its truly cosmopolitan feel? Only maharajas and Parsi matrons wore pigeon-egg sized rubies and emeralds, and listened to Western opera with deep appreciation. As for the Sindhi women, many luxuriously exiled in London after the Partition – they brought into Bombay the contemporary version of the strapless, Shakuntala-blouse and the diamond glistening in the navel, sari worn at the hip to display it better.
Somewhere in the 1990s, post economic liberalisation, things began to change in Bombay. The nouveau riche emerged from behind the curtains, took their money out of their tijoris, and spent it openly in cash wads at five-star hotels. It horrified old-money Bombay, which retreated into its boudoir, available only to speak to a select few and never to be viewed in public. The Shiv Sena came out, and the erudite, liberal old Maharashtrian families withdrew, shivering, from that brashness – and are still seldom seen. India at large began to intrude into the city, even as Bombay accepted all of India and attempted to embrace it. It’s now a more brittle place, one, as my friend Ritu says, where our Muslim friends now have to defend themselves continuously to differentiate themselves from the terrorists.

We don’t want this Bombay. We want the Maharashtrian and Gujarati and Parsi aristocracy back, we want our Jews and Lebanese Christians back, we want our bar dancers back, we want our communities to be as thoroughly engaged with each other as they used to be.
My friend Nikoo once told me the difference between Bombay and Delhi. In Bombay, he said, no one can really display their wealth. Like New York, Bombay is a set of seven islands joined together, with no place to spread out. The only way out is up. So no matter how rich you are, you can’t have anything larger than a four-bedroom flat in a skyscraper. And no matter where you live, there’s always a slum adjoining your building, the reality check of life in urban India. In Delhi, the slums are far away from the main city, out of sight. So, explained Nikoo, “People in Bombay take money in their stride.” It’s just something else they have, not ‘the’ thing in their life. Bombay is not defined by money.
The terrorists didn’t know that. They were banking on bringing India’s financial centre to its knees. They scared us, sure; they creeped out the commuters in Victoria Terminus, flushed out that symbol of ‘live-and-let-live’ Colaba – Chabad House – and shut down the Taj and the Oberoi for a while. But the other, non-money things that also make Bombay hum will hopefully bring us together again, the way we were – and perhaps even better. If we can do that, then the terrorists will have truly failed in their mission.

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