A New York state of mind

Many years ago, almost serendipitously, I decided that Mumbai and New York were sisters under the skin. And, for Mumbai, the skin could be seen and heard and felt and – ha ha! – smelled as one rich, complex, stunning experience. I flew into New York for the first time at some unearthly hour of the morning, jet lagged and blown out of my just-teenage mind with the exhaustion, the excitement and the endless inhalation of airline atomosphere tinged with air freshener and dirty diapers so characteristic of an Air India long-haul flight. But I knew I was on ground that I could like, very quickly, since it had that instant and unmistakeable feeling of home. Over the next few years, visit after visit, that impression was set in concrete and, today, grown up and blasé as I may be, I know that New York is, in some odd and un-explainable way, just like my own home: Mumbai.

The reverse journey, made another day, another time almost another life, assured me that first instincts never lie. I knew as I flew home, back into the city I was born in and that is mine for good now, that Mumbai was just like New York, in ways that went beyond the sights, sounds and smells that gave it its character. It shared a similarity of skyline, for one, with the high towers of Nariman Point or Bandra seeming, through sleep-swelled eyelids and the discombobulation of time zones, to be the sky-scrapers of the central business district in Manhattan. There was a lovely pong of fish nicely blended with the ordure of rotting garbage, the sharp twinge of chlorine, the sinus rattle of sulphur and the snap of human odours – sweat, frying in oil, detergent and, somehow, jasmine.

The sounds, too, are the same, varying only in intensity and pitch, determined by technology, zoning law and civic awareness. In Mumbai you have cars honking, engines buttering at different decibels and drivers impatiently revving as they wait at traffic signals and at the command waved by sweaty policemen. There are invariably children and their not-much-older minders at every street corner, whining for handouts and “Just two rupees, please, aunty!” There are the sellers of magazines and books, of sing-chana, of fly swatters, even of fluffy hand puppets that squeak when they are waggled, all importuning you at increasing volumes through the closed windows of your car. And everywhere there are the autorickshaws, putting in tones from the gently peevish to the aggressively strident, puffing out white or grey-black clouds of smoke from exhaust pipes in various stages of decrepitude.

And then there are the sights. You come into JFK airport in New York from a long swoop over the Atlantic, the coastline below striped with landing piers hosting beautifully sleek boats, some tiny and bright, some enormous and intrinsically upper-crustily snooty. Landing in Mumbai is about the same approach, but with a slight tweak in the execution – there is the sea, the coast with its fishing boat stripes, the buildings, the silver streaks of the main roads…and then there is Dharavi, the unending stretch of slums, undulating over a huge and somehow neatly arranged swathe of the city, its low makeshift roofs almost reaching up to the wheels of the plane as it drifts down onto the runway.

I am home.