Rooms with a view

I live in a nice apartment in a nice part of the out-of-town suburb of Mumbai that I call ‘home’. The move from being a brat who grew up in the ritzy environs of posh Malabar Hill to the almost-as-ritzy surroundings of where I am based now was not difficult for me, in spite of the prolonged commute and the comparative inaccessibility of the familiar world that had been mine for so much of my life. I missed very little of that world, since I worked in town and still had fairly easy access to all that I knew so well, from bookstores to bakeries, my tailor and my grocer. What I did miss, most of all and still do even today, so many years later, was the view.

I was born – in a manner of speaking, of course, since my parents actually acquired me at the hospital (more on that in a later blog) – in part of a palace in the snob seclusion of Breach Candy, where my pet policeman found me parking spaces for years afterwards. Growing up there was fun, with an outsized lawn for all of us children who lived there romped in. Though we were on the ground floor, with the vast garden just beyond the hedge, the view from the palace grounds was truly magnificent – set right on the edge of the sea, you could sit on the wall (strictly forbidden ever since a girl was swept out by the waves) and watch the breakers crashing against the rocks, or as we played hide-and-seek in the seawater swimming pool (which was always empty), or as we carefully walked the straight chalk lines that marked the tennis courts.

Then we moved to the 13th floor of a 14-storey apartment block set on the highest point of Malabar Hill. The flat sprawled across the building, bordered by huge French doors on the two spacious balconies and dotted with enormous windows opening every room out into open space. On three sides we had a view that was spectacular, right over Marine Drive on one side, the open sea towards Bandra on the other and the vista that was Mumbai through the grills of the drying verandah (or open air laundry room) on the third. I would spend over-long minutes in my bathroom, watching speedboats on the small bay, the birds floating over the air currents and the smoke spiralling up from the kitchens of the Oberoi Hotel. Sitting en famille on the front balcony, we watched endless processions of Ganpatis heading for the annual immersion, the burning of Ravana during Dassehra and the end-of-monsoon regatta of fisherfolk on Nariyal Purnima.

When we moved to our own house, I missed all that, for a long while. There was no sign of the sea, except when I travelled over the long stretch of bridge connecting us to the mainland, and no whiff of the excitement and activity that had been so much an everyday sight all my life. I had no balconies to hang out of, vertigo nothwithstanding, and no vignettes of my city to enjoy as I watered plants or just sat on the windowsill to think about ‘stuff’. Today I watch the grandfather in the window of the apartment across the wall from our complex playing with his baby grandchild. I watch the stray cat downstairs prowling in search of food or amusement and I watch the traffic whiz past on the highway that streaks along just beyond our back gate.

And I wonder if I really do miss the sea. Or whether it was just the freedom of the open air with the protection of concrete wall and metal railing to enjoy it from.