Column

The first time I saw it was at about 3 am, coming home from a late night shift. The office driver took it as a sort of short-cut from one part of Mumbai to the other. As ziggurats, pyramids, domes and towers loomed out of the gloom, I asked a colleague if he knew where we were. “No idea, it’s like a bad dream,” he replied. “Powai,” said the driver.

The next available Sunday, I hired an autorickshaw driver to take me around Powai to find this place. It was even more bizarre by day: these massive buildings all screaming, “architecture, architecture”, lanes called ‘Buttercup alley’ and ‘Daffodil’ lane, buildings called ‘Maple Leaf’ and ‘Colorado Springs’. The need to call your building by some foreign-sounding name is not new — I have lived in a building called Belvedere in another city — but so many of them together with not one called ‘Shiva-e-Numh’ or Govind Apartments looked odd.

The twee preciousness of the complex just seemed an oddity at the time. In any case, I was in a minority of two (my colleague in the office drop) in my opinions. Years passed. A few months ago, I visited a pub there and this time it was not surreal, it was inter-planetary. A convention of people who I had not come across before. It was night, I thought, and my eyesight is not what it was.

Then I went again, to attend a ‘function’ where I turned out to be the only ‘outsider’. Everyone else worked there, lived there, shopped there and ate there.The streets were neat and clean and manicured, there were no scruffy people, shop signs, stray dogs, garbage heaps and any inkling of other lives. It was like out of a children’s storybook about life in a town: A perfect example of the gated community working extremely well and keeping the outside world where it belonged — outside. I may have felt that I had escaped from the Toy Town, but I knew that the rest of them looked at me sadly. Poor thing. Doesn’t live here or even hereabouts. Doesn’t appreciate the beauty of the contemporary ziggurat.

Against all my natural instincts, I’m now going to sound twee, precious and a bit self-righteous. Put it down to envy (ha!): I was happy to get back to my building and pet our resident stray, hop over a garbage heap, wave to the medical shopwallah and shout at the kelawallah - just for the heck of it. And at least where I live, we haven’t destroyed the lake (which was enormous when we went there on school picnics last century) to live in diagon
alley, sorry daffodil alley.

b_ranjona@dnaindia.net