Not so long ago,
I was in Mumbai,
and I realised something
that often misses the mark by more than a few miles:
the city still looks like Bombay
but with an amputated tongue speaking Mumbai somehow.
On the way from Colaba to Marine Drive,
I had time to spare,
so I decided to stop by the place
everyone from Mumbai tells you,
you must visit
to etch shreds of the Mumbai chromosome in you,
just enough to not be just another tourist,
yet somehow well short of having lived the city.
Colaba Causeway is an unruly, thumping sea.
It is a marketplace of survival,
where aggressive negotiation collides
with the agreeable roar of black-and-yellow taxis,
and the air is thick
with the competing aromas of roasting corn, cheap incense, and sea salt.
Humanity moves in a dense, sweating swarm:
a chaotic symphony of street hawkers shouting negotiable "fixed prices" like gospel,
tourists stepping over cracked pavements,
and the relentless honking of a city that refuses to wait for its own breath.
Right in the heart of this cacophony
sits an ancient, quaint cafe:
archaic architecture buried in fresh coats of wall paint.
A hasty stitch on a pair of torn pants,
holding just enough to keep the city moving.
The whole of Mumbai is ancient and quaint really,
so this building doesn't quite stand out;
it’s so lost in plain sight, you’d miss it in a blink if you didn't know where to look.
Leopold Cafe.
A century-old relic
that has seen five generations
while away the years.
Small heads and long blades,
on rods long enough to be iron giraffe necks,
brood down from the overreaching ceilings.
Wood has weathered
from a bright, varnished brown
to a damp burnt sienna,
carrying the clatter of conversations
as old as civilisation itself.
As I sat at a table,
ordering a coffee and a Bombay sandwich,
my eyes hit a square metre of the wall
right next to the elderly man seated diagonally opposite.
There it was: a crevice in the wall,
like someone a long time ago
had pierced a nail through its heart.
Except, it was a gaping hole.
A gaping bullet hole.
My eyes almost instinctively moved sideways,
tracing trajectories along the white paint,
and thirty seconds later,
I had stumbled upon another four.
Five bullet holes. Out of the thirty-something.
From an ordinary Mumbai night, eighteen years ago.
They looked so ordinary,
one could almost never tell
they once smelled of smoke, gunpowder, fresh blood, pierced flesh, and torn tissue.
My coffee was getting cold.
My Bombay sandwich lay numb on the plate,
a cold assembly of bread and vegetables
rapidly losing its purpose,
and all I could think of
was an ordinary Mumbai night, eighteen years ago.
As I watched fifty odd people,
mostly Indians, a Korean couple, a British family of four, and half a dozen Americans,
I couldn't help but imagine the hundred on that night
who had walked in for a chicken stroganoff, a mutton keema pav, or just coffee,
and suddenly found themselves
at the sweltering end of a pair of smoking AK-47s
as their only way back home.
I couldn't help but imagine
their faces at the bottom of a fear
they had never needed to know existed.
The cold sweat. The swallowed screams.
The desperate arithmetic of bodies
looking for somewhere the bullets wouldn't.
The gunpowder settling into the walls,
the grenades splitting the room open,
the blood turning a quiet dinner into a butcher’s block of human flesh.
I couldn't not imagine faces I had never met
and lives I had never crossed,
and the fifteen minutes of that Mumbai night eighteen years ago,
that time has spent eighteen years failing to forfeit,
that is still happening behind the fresh paint.
They say eighteen is the onset of adulthood,
and yet here, time is a milk tooth rinsed in blood.
