When I was younger, my typically cold and harsh thanksgivings would often be replaced by warm and airy trips to Bombay. The activist in me refuses to call it anything other than Mumbai, but my Mom always said Bombay, so I’m torn, nostalgia pumps through my veins just as strongly as the thirst for justice does.
The trips would be whirlwinds, of course. Santosh, my Nana-Nani’s driver, would stir up the Ambassador after aloo-puri lunches at home, and drive us to various Uncle and Aunty’s houses. There, I would sit in the living room, usually surrounded by an assortment of “mithai” and “chai” and my mom and the other women in the room would be constructing family trees about how we were all related to each other in the air.
My Nana-Nani lived in Amar Jeevan, a small but lively Sindhi colony on St. Martin’s road in Bandra, on the same street as the Bandra Police Station. In the mornings, I would wake up in the guest room and take in the sweet breath of my Motherland, within minutes the “bhajiwalla” and the “fruitwalla” would beckon their calls and their voices would murmur their way into my room. Darvazein pe aata tha humara “fruit-walla” aur Nani daam ke bare me poochthi thi – “Aaj apple-y kitne hai?” He would respond. And she would say, “barabar daam bataana.”
I used to deeply admire these interactions, because they were so unlike anything I had experienced in the United States. There was a certain intimacy that came with a fellow Indian coming to your door and selling you fruit, memorizing your preferences, and the exchange of presents that would come during Diwali, Holi and other prosperous times of year. Living in Amar Jeevan felt like being part of one big, fat family, and the colony’s structure allowed for that.
When you walked in to Amar Jeevan, there was a wide open ground, with two buildings to your left and to your right. Straight ahead there was a tall and long building, and that’s where my grandparents lived, all the way in the corner on your right. On the opposite end of the building in which they stayed, lived another Sindhi uncle named “Aroo,” who had a parrot I would frequently play with after lunchtime. Next to his corner apartment was the mandir, where I would often wheel my Nani for evening pooja towards the end of her life.
In the open grounds, school-children would often play cricket, and when you left the colony, there was a “bhel-walla”right outside the gates, I remember coming home in the evenings from walks on Hill Road and arriving at my Nani’s door with a newspaper cone full of my favorite snack.
In 2017, I ventured back to Mumbai for my yearly trip, and roughly since 2015 Amar Jeevan had been in redevelopment because of its crippling infrastructure, and I didn’t know what to expect. One Sunday, I decided to complete my homecoming with my Masi, who held the keys to our new “flats” in the colony. My driver dropped me off just outside the gate, and the keeper sat tucked in a little corner of the plot. I expected to see something pretty familiar, and was awe-struck and confused by the large, twenty-story building I saw in front of me that was painted a bright orange hue. This was nothing like the space that I had grown up going to, and all the vibrancy that dwelled between the four walls of the old Amar Jeevan could not even be replaced by a vivid orange.
Walking inside the new Amar Jeevan building was even worse, it was nothing but a sanitized version of anything that could be considered Indian. Granite dominated the space, outside of the lobby stood just one small line of grass for children to play on, the magic of the colony had been cremated through the ashes of demolishment. Amar Jeevan was living it’s reincarnated life as a young person who had yet to learn the lesson about the power of authenticity over the rut of artifice in our Capitalistic world. A place that used to hold hundreds of stories, now holds nothing but four flats on each floor where the neighbors will be more likely to meet Amitabh Bachchan than to see each other in the lift.
The power of the old Amar Jeevan had been in its ability to cultivate connection, the lives inside of that colony were so interwoven and interdependent that its residents had to learn to work as a team. The fruitwallas morning entrance was akin to that of a play’s protagonist trotting in on stage during a comedic scene, encapsulating everyone in his drama. The neighbors upstairs and in the surrounding buildings had a fresh view of what was happening below them, creating an atmosphere for spontaneity when he or anyone would arrive.
The fighting couple that was located diagonal to my Nani-Nana’s flat was so loud that everyone’s evening episode of “Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi” was interrupted by the noise. The monsoons would fall so hard in Amar Jeevan that everyone would lend one another an umbrella while walking outside of the gate, these were precious moments that could not be priced on the Mumbai stock exchange, but were still valuable and worthy. This new, towering building was created to cater to Mumbai’s elites and Ex-Pat community, that takes little other interest in the country besides the money that they can exploit from it, and of course their purchasing power matters more than the vitality of everyday people.
Tomorrow’s children of Amar Jeevan will never know the power of a cricket match in the centre of the colony, with friends and adults watching from their windows to see who will hit a sixer. The bhel-walla is nowhere to be found, and will the bhaji and fruit wallas be confined to the building lobby? These questions are worth asking, not only to ourselves, but to our fellow Indians and NRI’s about what the future of a country that the world has a current financial obsession with will look like.
In Hindi “Amar Jeevan” means immortal life, and I believe that the building’s next incarnation can be that of unity and connection, a custom that India has always been one of the best at preserving. I dream of a day where my Nani and Nana’s old dwelling place again aches with the sound of Lata Mangeshkar’s voice filling it’s four walls from their next door neighbor’s too-loud stereo. If we cannot continue to build spaces that will encourage us to not interact with one another, then I fear that the fabric and the ties in our societies will continue to split.
Walking through Amar Jeevan forced me to interact with my neighbors, to have challenging conversations that bridged generational ties, to polish my Hindi and keep alive my Sindhi mother tongue. But now everyone is just so fascinated with going into their little boxes, and living this fake life, where everything happens on a screen or is based solely on convenience. My Sindhi grandparents were uprooted from their homeland before partition, and spaces like Amar Jeevan gave them the opportunity to experience a community that they had lost to war and occupation, what can tomorrow’s migrants expect from Mumbai? The city’s obsession with these posh new spaces is creating an amnesia to what actually makes Mumbai so special: the dynamism, human touch, and a livelihood that is rooted in our requirement to interact with one another to survive.