City of dreams has a pungent smell

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By Altaf Tyrewala [4]

Rs 299

The city that was Bombay once and is Mumbai now has been the subject of much literary exploration. Novels, short stories and poems have been written by those who have been fascinated with this maddening city where day-to-day existence is a Sisyphean struggle. Yet, they have found love, romance and heart-warming humanity in its bylanes and, occasionally, in its boulevards.

In the 1950s, the Progressives, writing mainly in Urdu, set their stories in the underbelly of the city, bringing whores, pimps and other assorted types to life. Saadat Hasan Manto, who was infatuated with the city, was the best chronicler of that Bombay. The Marathi
writers, who hailed from the upper castes, mainly concentrated on the genteel lives of the middle class, till, in the 1970s, the dalits exploded on the scene with their raw rendition of what it was like to live in the chawls. Namdeo Dhasal’s
poetry, for example, confounded all conventions as he spoke about the cruel metropolis where human dignity was impossible.
Much of the current writing, especially in English, is filled with nostalgia for a mythical cosmopolitan past either by locals or — and this is a sub-genre that has grown exponentially — by diaspora writers trying to re-imagine a Bombay they grew up in and then deserted, but are now trying to reclaim. The here and now, sadly, is missing in literary productions.
Which is why Altaf Tyrewala’s Ministry of Hurt Sentiments, is so welcome. A long howl of a poem about Mumbai as it is today, it is an ambitious and audacious effort, but Tyrewala mostly pulls it
off, covering, among other things, the daily inequalities, the sordid lives of the indigent who barely survive, the rampant in-your-face consumerism and, above all, real estate, the pet peeve of every Mumbai resident.
In Tyrewala’s Mumbai,
quotidian existence is a desperate struggle to just somehow get by, where an illegal chai stall could get demolished one day, where brother will fight brother in court for a share of their parental property, and all the while the palaces of the rich come up everywhere. Not to forget peeing on a street wall, where pictures of gods and holy places are painted to prevent just that kind of blasphemy, which could then draw the unwelcome attention of some who, offended, will try and cut off your genitalia:

They notify their Office of Frantic Fanatics Whose members will soon descend on your home in drives Frothing at their mouths, armed to their teeth/ Slipper-clad feet will kick in your main door And catch you spilling your seed
Before the video of an American brunette named Christy Sucker Taking a two-foot-long wiener Up her pink shitter.

No, Altaf’s Mumbai is not a pretty place.
More pungent observations follow — the beggar lying inert but with a big erection in his crotch, the lawyer who sticks his tongue in a maid’s mouth and is surprised by her reaction, the Russian girl serving two men drinks in a bar; Tyrewala, like a poetic flâneur, wanders through this throbbing metropolis, his eyes wide open, his bitter cynicism always at hand. Tyrewala’s Mumbai has hardly any redeeming features, which does tend to get depressing and, occassionally, seems over the top:

Those who’ve enlisted to defend and die for it are right The nation state IS an ungrateful pile of shit Because those who live within its squiggly borders Would sooner their country ceased to exist Than to have to pick up a gun to protect…
What?
Courts that dole out dates in lieu of justice?
Successive governments that rape the republic?
Traffic jams that stretch from here to Jupiter?
So-called water that would make a dead person sick?

That just sounds like a rant applicable anywhere really.
Still, this sometimes meandering, occasionally inchoate but compelling book, somewhat like the city itself, has the ability to hold your attention. Like his first novel, No God in Sight, which too was slim yet ambitious, Ministry of Hurt Sentiments is a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in the urban condition — specifically Mumbai — in modern India. Don’t look for plot, characters or even rhyme; just soak in the reality behind the glittering towers and the shiny malls as seen through the eyes of an angst-ridden poet. In today’s India, where literature tends to traverse safe ground and artists and writers are often bludgeoned into silence, it is heartening to see someone who has an alternative gaze to offer.