I had heard endless rumours of Mumbai’s cosmopolitan character, so the question took me by surprise. “You’re Hindu?” the broker suddenly asked. He didn’t seem interested in the nature of my relation with God; it would have been too hard to explain Pascal’s wager to him. So I mumbled yes, though I don’t go to temples often. He seemed satisfied. I was eligible to live in that building in Mahim, he said.
But I managed to fail the next test. “You eat non-veg?”
“Yes”, I replied. Wrong answer!
That first experience of house hunting in Mumbai five years ago revealed the true character of the city to me. It is, I realised, a very thin cosmopolitan crust on a massive collection of ghettos.
The Parsis, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Jains live cheek-by-jowl in this crowded metropolis where land costs as much as it might if it were paved with sheet gold. Their prejudices suffer no erosion from their proximity to one another.
There are Parsi, Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Jain buildings where people of other faiths are not allowed to live. There are also linguistic divides, so you have the Marathi parts of the city, and the Tamil, and Sindhi, and so on, where almost all the residents belong to these linguistic communities.
Then there are the rich people enclaves and the poor people enclaves. Poor people and rich people here live very separate lives in very close proximity.
That first time house hunting in Mumbai, I remember going to posh buildings with separate service lifts for the drivers and maids of the new sahibs. It was a new thing for me; I’d not seen such class-consciousness in action outside of snooty clubs.
So when I returned to the city to live here again, I was prepared for all this. I knew I would have to answer questions about my faith, linguistic group, profession, food habits and perhaps caste before I could rent a flat.
Why my relation with a God, if there is one, should concern anyone else (except God and me) has always been a mystery to me. I’m even more stumped by the concern of strangers about my diet. I eat my food with my own money, and off my own plate. Why is it anyone else’s business if I eat fish or fowl in the privacy of my house?
Anyway, I reluctantly came to accept that most of my countrymen and women are still pre-modern in their thinking. I came to accept that I would be asked these silly questions by landlords and anti-social housing societies that do a disservice to the country by acting as perpetrators of medieval prejudices.
Yet, not even my years of house hunting had prepared me for the experience of prejudice that a housing society in upmarket Bandra put me through.
My prospective landlord took me to meet the society members before giving me the house. The deal was done, and this formality needed to be completed, he said. So we walked in, armed with my passport and other documents, and were greeted by a hostile woman who is one of the office-bearers of that society. She asked me my name and profession, and if I was married.
Then, for the next hour or so, she proceeded to harangue my landlord. He could not rent his house to me, she said, as I was not married. Nothing else mattered to her: I could be editor of a paper, a published author, a man who’s represented this country at international fora. But I was not married, and therefore not eligible to live there.
“Do you know me?” I asked the woman. “No” she replied. “Why are you then so concerned about my marriage?” I asked. Parents and close family asking me to get married is one thing. Why was this woman asking me to get married?
We eventually left, after asking her to send her objections in writing. I also informed her that I would sue her if she discriminated against me for my single status. That did not stop her from sending a notice stating that I am a person of unknown identity.
My passport and other credentials had failed to make an impression on her, though she made no mention of my single status as being the true cause of her objection.
The liberal, cosmopolitan Bombay that nostalgic liberals talk about doesn’t seem to have much of a real existence outside of their imaginations.
This is the first of a series of columns that will dwell on the issues plaguing Mumbaikars — traffic snarls, uncooperative civic servants, unreasonable landlords, arrogant cabbies and lots more. Watch this space.