Bombay
Like Suketu Mehta, I was born in Calcutta, a city in extremis, in Mehta’s words, and, like him, grew up in Bombay. His father, who worked in the diamond trade, and mine, then a rising executive in the corporate world, probably moved to Bombay from Calcutta for the same reasons: to do with the much-rehearsed migration, indeed, the flight, in the Sixties, of capital and industry from the former colonial capital in the east to the forward-looking metropolis in the west, in the face of growing labour unrest and radical politics in leftist Bengal — the troubled context that in extremis presumably refers to….The third part here. Anyone have the link to Part 2 of the essay?Bombay, on the other hand, began, slowly, to dazzle; I have no memory of it ever not dazzling. From the twelfth-floor apartment in the slightly, but not altogether, extravagantly named Il Palazzo, where I grew up, in Bombay’s most exclusive locality, Malabar Hill, I could see the row of lights called the Queen’s Necklace, fluorescent and aquamarine at the time (they’re now a pale golden sodium), and, further on, the great signs in lights, saying ORWO and BOAC and other things. It was an existence remarkably open to breeze, birds, and rainfall, to the arrival of daylight and evening, and it was also strangely, unself-consciously, enclosed. It was not Suketu Mehta’s Bombay.
For all this, I knew, growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, that Calcutta was India’s one great modern city. Its pioneering 150-year-old tradition in literature and the arts, and the way its own history was deeply implicated in the traumas and awakenings of colonial and nationalist India, were embodied in its heat and noise and architecture; it possessed the contradictions, the shabby grandeur, of modernity, and the volatile energy that the great cities of the world possessed before globalization, and I could sense this during my visits as a child. The Bombay I knew was safe, orderly, and a bit crass in comparison.
