personal geographic history-1

1987-2000 Bombay i was a child in

I was born on the 7th of December 1987 at 3:30 pm after the doctor returned from her lunch which had she not taken precisely then I would have been here at 11:30am. There was no hurry of course; I was a planned caesarean baby. My parents even chose the date to co-ordinate it with one of my very wise uncles’, whose wife’s ( my aunts) birthdate was coincidently when my sister was born 45 years later after 48 hours of labour pains borne by my mother.

I think what they did with my birth set the pattern for the rest of my life I took two years to say my first words which there are two versions of this story; were “mamma papa” (how diplomatic and articulate!) especially following a babbling sister walking and talking at 10months.in the second version my first word was” bua” what we call the same aunt whose husbands birthdate I share. Walking is another story again, in all my childhood pictures I am a rotund ball a ball that must be supported and secured in its location for fear it might start rolling! Cleary I was testing geometries to ground my understanding of structure for when I would be an architect.

My sister and I were children of artistic and travel oriented parents. My father is an architect and my mother is also an architect though not my initial training but by practice. A year after I was born my father moved his practice from the heart of the city to the more geographic heart of the city also where we lived. I mostly spent most of my time in the new heart, which was the whole city to me except on weekends when we went outside Chembur. In fact I don’t think in my daily sphere I covered the whole of it either. It wasn’t something important for me to get a sense of it in entirety the kind that a map now gives me. Then the places were associational. Every place I visited had a purpose the function made the place. New non-functional places were friends’ homes. I live right beside a south Indian temple and I have a church and a mosque at a 5min walk in either direction. We could hear all three temple and church bells and mullah’s azaan (call for prayer). My friends and I played within the compound walls of our buildings, slowly moving outwards along with expanding sense of adventure and ages, encompassing streets in between and sometimes beyond our houses. An urban playground is very dynamic we had a good variety garages, stacked up piles of construction material, short one storied buildings and then the two storied ones, scaffoldings for painting the building going grey after the rains, the community hall that we are forbidden to play around in the back alley behind Manali’s building, the car that’s been rotting in the building compound, the stage they once built, he sand piles from the repair work and of course the old and fat trees. Terraces, .. Nothing really was locked. Only if the owner was a cruel child hating person. My mother is not from Mumbai she didn’t grow up there unlike my father. She has different recollections of our urban childhood, it involves the aspect of fear, she recounts her tale of my sister knocking on the big glass sliding windows we had in our living room, of our home on the second floor (which is the third one above the ground level) perched on a bamboo in the scaffolding grid with the other kids on successively lower points. My sister was very proud on having scaled this height and wanted to come in, my mother wasn’t so keen on watching her leap the remaining 60cm so she sternly instructed her to go down the way she came up and watched with nervously as we began our descent.

There was this pani puri(famous street food) vendor in camp who had the best pani puri in town, we went to him often, the area was called camp. Strange name, it gets it from original being a refugee (post partition)   camping area with barracks. These repetitive barracks are what gave it a sort of socialist feel not visible in other parts of Chembur and a few places in the city especially now. The people living here were no longer campers but the name stuck. This area also was home to the biggest golf course in Mumbai, called the Bombay Presidency Golf Club. The club spanned quite a large area and was divided by a two lane, two sided traffic road. There were small gates to cross over from one side of the course to the other. It was the entrance I used to get very quickly to my golfing lessons. It was like a secret sneaky passage even though it was wide open with no walls and just a metal grill gate.

Games with teams really make clear in your mind a certain idea of boundary which is simple enough to be transferred to countries and continents, effective even on ascending scales but not the other way around. There is very little sense of personal space, that is something you learn when you leave and all you have in personal space and you begin to occupy it. I didn’t really have any friends from abroad growing up, some whose parents worked in Muscat/ Dubai and hence were born there. In my group of friends we came from different parts of India and our common language was English and to some extent Hindi.

Indian economy was liberalized in 1991; I don’t think I remember any immediate transitions. One of the few transitions I did see where coffee shops, they became popular when I was in my last years of school and popped up everywhere. Also billboards many more came in. The drive I cinema at Mahim which you could see when you drove on one of the first highways of Mumbai closed down.Pepsi and coca cola and cable TV came to India. The automobile industry was liberalized. Variety became the spice of life. International (largely American)clothing brands, foods, sitcoms, cars became more and more available. The advertising industry reached its adolescence with me and we have grown together since.