Mumbai, February 6, 2013
Last night, after an exquisite and excessive dinner of
typical street food, Shital Ghia (a friend of my former student Abeer Seikaly
that knows her Mumbai inside out) took me for a ride around the city. At one point we were on Mohammed Ali
Road under the JJ Flyover and I asked her something to orient myself. Shital looked at me, put her right hand on the back of
the driver's seat, and with a few strokes gestured an amazingly precise
map of Mumbai.
"Think of the tip of the middle finger as Colaba"
she said. Colaba is the
southernmost point of Mumbai, so north is down, towards her wrist. Then, running two fingers of her left
hand over the pinky side of her right--her palm was down so she was indicating the wester edge of the city, along the coast of the Arabian Sea--she continued: "this is Nariman
Point, Marine Road, Malabar Hill, Worli, the cosmopolitan Mumbai, where everything happens, where the
educated people live."
Another stroke , this time along the middle of her
right hand: "this is Girgaon--where I grew up,--Tardeo, Parel, the
place of the markets, the factories, the chimneys, the backbone of the city.
All Hindu." Finally, with a third parallel gesture over her thumb, she completed the map: "and
this is where we are: all Muslim." By then, the car was reaching VT (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and I knew
exactly where we were.
When I innocently asked her if there was any part of the city
where Muslims and Hindus mixed, Shital grinned and said, not without a sarcastic tone,
that her mother wouldn't tolerate living next to Muslims "because the kill
their goats."
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