Column

On Friday, I lost my aunt. Personal loss, though it has pushed me into a prodigiously dark daze, has no place in a column that amplifies public concerns.

However, I feel no awkwardness in sharing some episodes that followed the death of someone whose love and encouragement only few in my family had the privilege to experience.

That is because deaths, like births, are registered officially by societies, and that bureaucratic process brings us to the intersection between the private and the public. In my case, the automatic wanderings into a preset official protocol led to another insight into our great city.

My aunt had died in Nashik and the body could be cremated in Mumbai only after a no-objection certificate was obtained from a police station. The station concerned was Chembur, where officers dealt with the request not only with unfailing courtesy of airline cabin crew, but also with the authentic empathy that only Mumbaikars show to fellow citizens.

The certificate was handed to us in 15 minutes, forcing an accompanying relative to issue, even in the moment of grief, a sociological analysis to explain Mumbai’s civic superiority to other Indian cities.

There is indeed something about Mumbai that won’t be soiled by partisan hatred. Maybe that something is the automatic, unquestioned sympathy triggered in a Mumbaikar while dealing with another.

I have always sensed that impulse but could not explain it. But my relative, the part-time sociologist, elucidated that with exquisite clarity. “You know, whenever I visit Mumbai I get the feeling that I am a guest at a Maharashtrian house,” he said. “The hosts are uniquely hospitable, making me go out of the way to reciprocate that consideration. And when I am dealing with other out of towners, I feel it is my duty to maintain that sensitivity.” There you have it; I now remember the stories of generosity and accommodation that my parents and uncles related to me about their ‘settler experiences’ in Mumbai half a century ago.

That foundation, built with the soil of humanity of the true sons and daughters Mumbai, is holding fast even today. One illustration will afford a modern validation of that. A colleague, who holds a modest mileage account with a prominent airlines, was travelling out of Mumbai. The flight had been delayed by some 20 minutes, only a minor disruption in the current circumstances, but this man decided to play around.

He requested the agent at the check-in counter to mark his luggage as priority, ostensibly because his girlfriend, who would be waiting at the destination, is apt to get implacably irritated by delays.

The agent gave my colleague a winsome smile and the priority tag. When he tried the same experiment at Delhi airport, with the same airline mind you, a surly agent refused to cooperate. Later, he tried his luck in Bangalore, Chennai, and Jaipur, failing everywhere.

And just to clinch his point, he did a final hypothesis test at Mumbai airport again. He got the priority tag again, and our city got his gushing endorsement: There’s something about Mumbai!

So a death proved another point about our great city, just as death presented Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, another opportunity to eulogise his society. When Pericles, as the commander of the army and Athens’ first citizen, gave his people a paean to those who had died in the first year of a 27-year war with Sparta, he gave the world one of the most revered speeches.

I will just recount one element of that tour de force. He said Athenians would be a model of perfection countless generations later because: “[our citizens] are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law”. Will Mumbai be admired by our grandchildren? Is it good manners to smash taxis?”
raghu@dnaindia.net