Troublesville

Cultural curiosities, clandestine treasure trails, and seemingly cool purpose, for what else do we have.

5 years later I wake up old like a slab of cheese, in this cauldron of a Parsi house in Malabar Hills, overlooking a crescent shaped Bombay road, with old colored olden cars. Taupe and daisy, garish yellow and beige. I still call Bombay as Bombay. I am not a colonial nostalgia humanoid, I am not neck deep into Russell peter’s contrarian jest, or Suketu Mehta’s romanticism. Maybe Jeet Thayil and his headlong raves and rants about this tropical paradise of the middle-privileged. I don’t know. It’s just that I don’t want to call it Mumbai. I like to remember one place as one thing, until it morphs, wrings itself dry, and becomes something else, entirely. For a week it is humble diurnal living. I sleep at 9 pm, I wake up and I run. I eat baked potatoes with rice and curd and soak in the past few crazy years across the big pond. Then one day I am jolted out of my bed by the thoughts of the old coffee table and the old magazines and that life.  It’s both a Geographical fact and a cultural statement that Bombay is India’s Western most city. I know what you’re thinking. Bangalore has long, long roads laden with those long veggies and the crusty flowers, breathtaking. It has clean tarmac, clean buildings, glass on glass, and people in ATMs speaking of UCLA admissions on the phone. Also some darn good bakeries and some good looking women definitely from Delhi they look like. The gentrification and the start up pitches at your next table can be both a business prospect and a murder plot in progress, but at least it is not boring like a coffee place in Manhattan where all you hear around yourself is weekend plans and wedding buffet budgeting. It is definitely India’s most modern city. Western identity, I don’t know so much. Delhi, you know how it is. It has Lutyens’ Delhi, the Delhi of the Mughals, and the neo classist bureaucrats, but it still is an eyeshore, despite of the metro and the food and the ultra smart college going hipsters. It has too much history on its hands, and too much weight pulling it down from being completely free, free enough to be what it wants, a free thinking, intellectual all in all powerhouse that doesn’t care about anyone. Bombay, on the other hand, is a bustling, mad city, as Alastair Cook on his first tour. You can go out and just run on the boarwalks get your clothes fixed, eat whatever, be anyone, be anonymous. It could be Montevideo, Vina del Mar, Barcelona, Yokohama, Cape Town, or Auckland. People couldn’t care less about where are you from. It’s an individualistic society ensconced in the collective fabric of India, and it is not nearly as bad as it sounds, at least to me personally. And the one thing you can’t miss about this city is Bollywood. It’s just there. There’s no board staring at you here like soCal, but the films are everywhere. From the curry you eat for breakfast, to the weddings at midnight. It’s all prevailing, and all encompassing. It’s easy to pass Bollywood as a third earth movie industry, as a garish pink money laundering slot device, as a rundown hot gravy mesh of tomatoes and old ground meat. But it did and still captures the imagination of society and youth like midnight highs.

The turnstiles and the patios and the windows in the buildings here are so much like Miami. I really can’t tell on some mornings which is which, but they tell me it’s art deco architecture, I don’t know what that means really. I want to speak of this place as a sultry town with people that Danny Boyle said beat that statue he had in his hand at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but that has been done and read countless times before. So what am I doing here, in this behemoth of a peep mesh, sticky as a salesman in this sun, and lost as a Nebraska town. What I want to elicit, like David Foster Wallace would say, is why, why we are, the way we are. I want to excavate, no, I want to feel, in those cafes that look like museums, and the bakeries with plexiglass casings with teenagers with behemoth books on their backs, I want to feel something that’s nothing been felt before, and I want to put it down here. It’s something that seems easy, yet very complex at the same.  I want it to be about newness, about realization, about love, about something that means something.

Before that, I am famished. I go to Colaba and sit near those palm trees and have meat stuffed in breads,  and splashed down with kokum shakedowns. We do circles around town on an open-tab cab, and slowly I begin to see it as it is. As a simple proposition, if you take the economics, sociology, and the math and the emotion out of it and mash it together, you realize the city is not because of all of those, but in spite of it.

The news has been talking about Khalistan. Kashmir has never not been there. I don’t want to get to the wherewithal of it. That is not my job, strictly speaking, I am going to speak of it from where we have been. We take Bombay. This city has been of the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Cholas, the Marathas, the Portuguese, the British, and the Indians. The Indians. Yet you barely feel anything else here, for all that history, big whoop. Recently there’s been contention, there’s always been. British men with overacting thyroids and a penchant for afternoon tea have always wanted to stick it to us about being the birth fathers of the idea of India. UPSC 101 even in the least popular coaching center in Delhi says Ashoka did it, he unified and created the idea of India, 2000 years ago. And they’re right. I’ve never been to Delhi. The Mauryans gave us great roads, our emblems and advanced architecture, which is interesting, yet beyond the dope(yes) of this piece. We may come from the Persians and the Central Asians and the African Tribes that inhabited the land thousands of years ago, but our identity since time, before time, has been that of a unified people. If the British did anything, they helped us realize we do believe in this country, as Ghalib might disagree, and we love each other enough than a foreign tyranny occupying us. As I look at the meter at the cab I get a feeling it is overrunning, it couldn’t be that high. Then I realize I am in Bombay, of all places, where everything is exorbitant because the rent is exorbitant, and the rent is exorbitant because of the Bombay hotel and house rent control act of 1947 put a cap on rents, for the war veterans and freedom fighters moving there, and that stayed forever until a couple of years ago,  for vote banks, ruining everything good along the way.

I meet my PhD contact, Saba. She comes from a family of professors and bureaucrats. She has spick and span hair wound tightly by a sharp pin and round glasses and crisply ironed clothes. We shake hands and decide to wind back home and rest. I feel tired like an old man waiting for his dead pet by this point. I hit the bed and sleep and sleep, with no dreams and dead to myself. When I wake up I feel reborn.  We decide to take a hike across to Rajgarh, the old fort. It felt warm, yet haunted. Just like Target. Colorful attire, water on the tarmac, bangles until elbows, kids screaming, college field tours. They have them all. The antiquities of India, and the ancient treasures, are not really talked about as much in mass media as they are in balance sheets, and diversionary rants on primetime tv whenever they want to take the focus off things. But the thing about treasures, and lost treasures, mostly, is not just their monetary value, but of whole chapters torn off history. Just like your jewelry says a lot about you, apparently. The air near the ground is dense and heavy and cool. And it looks like it will rain in a few, just like in the old days. The Persians were here, and also the Mughals, and the British, and all the others. I talk to Saba about the intricacies of finding one of these things. “It’s hard to get to a treasure that even the people who buried it couldn’t”. I know what you’re thinking, metal detectors. But I also happen to have studied a drab science called Geology for a couple of years. “Too many false positives”, she says. “The ground is highly mineralized, Iron deposits from higher land pushed down below by rainwater into the flatter plain below the fort.” She looks to the side at the ice cream guy fighting with a man. “No one will ever find it”. Ground Mineralization, as it is called, is basically the contamination of the ground with high concentrations of metal, like Iron. So the metal detectors would always fail, as common sense. “But if this was a test for you to get into the Indian Armchair Services, how would you do it?”  … “ I don’t know but I will think about it in my room post-dinner”. From where we stood you could see the whole city from there. So much I have missed the land and the air and the long, long days under the sun. That’s for another day. We cut into dinner, the flatbreads and the sharp curries, and the open sky. Both of us are looking directly into nothingness, thinking of that lost treasure. “If you cannot find something, then you have to dig up the whole of the earth,” Saba says. “Sure”. “No, if you need something in life, you have to dig up the whole of the earth until you get it.” “ I’m sure ”.

Some things in life start to make sense only when you know you can’t have them. There were no metal detectors then? Why couldn’t the people who buried dig it out? No way they didn’t know where it was. They definitely did. Maybe it was like a cricket ball you throw into the roof that you cannot access, you know. Probably deep in terra firma and inaccessible by a landslide, as we look up into the mountains. Without further winding, we start off that useless 2004 Hyundai Sonata we had got for rent and drive to the geological survey of india office. We meet some people and get some maps, looking for underground caves and pathways and crevasses. We found there are at least a hundred. Some kilometers long. Navigating each one, given the time for clearances and manpower, and safety,  takes at least a month. We can’t afford that. Not in money or patience, but in time. We have to optimize it. Technically, if you treat it as a graph algorithm problem, the one with the highest probability of having it would be the one that is the easiest to travel. We take the width, the height, the vegetation, and the metal and moisture content et all of the routes and load them into a neural network to find a navigation matrix. Then we start walking through the top five. It takes us two months, of endless bread omelet breakfasts and reading maps over projector movies at night, but we finally get to it. There is a beep and a hue, and we ring an alarm and breathe in relief, but we do finally get to it. 300 crore worth of treasures in today’s money, hidden inside a neural network. We want to get published in the local publication, but maybe that’s for later. We don’t seek glory, we just want this money not to end as rent in an upper east side Manhattan flat paid for their sons and daughters by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and that is going to take some doing and scheming and writing, you know what I mean. I recall something that Saba said unless you make changes to this world, there are no changes. I think that was pretty good. I wish I could do that for love lost like forgotten time zones, and stuff, but now is not the time to do that. Now is the time to go. Like, go. Yellowknife. XXO.