Bombay

Trying to understand the glorious, anarchic megapolis that is Bombay.  This is my city as much as it is Fede's, but if I revel in its frenetic charm and exuberant cosmopolitanism, Fede has engaged with this city at a much more visceral level, and knows its vital organs.  From his time spent in Achanak Colony, once a typical Bombay slum with flowing gutters and makeshift shanties, to his work  with Jeevan Nirwaha Niketan, the pioneering "School for Life", to his ministry of the sick in Holy Spirit Hospital, to his other endless projects, Fede has lived and breathed this city, and his love for it is self-evident.

It is an interesting experiment revisiting a city you love as an alien.  Cruising its coagulated streets in our little craft, we are trailing invisible threads of experience behind us, connecting all the seeming contradictions that determine this city in a gossamer web of not quite comprehension, but dim appreciation. 

Two mornings ago we started the day with Rashida.  Rashida is a friend of Fede from his days in the tenements.  She has a tough life but a ready smile.  Together we take a rickshaw to her mum, Ayesha's house in Marol.  It is a run-down building, with cracks along it's side, crying out for maintenance.  The apartment is a single tiny room with a kitchen and a bathroom.  Her mum lives here with her three sons and her daughter-in-law.  As cramped as it seems, this is luxury beyond imagining for Ayesha. Two decades ago, her reality was quite different.  In order to experience that reality, we walked just a small distance from her house, across the huge pipes that traverse Marol, taking water from the reservoirs to the city.  Here, in a thin line, were 4m by 4m shacks made of broken bits of wood, plastic, corrugated tin, and whatever else people could get their hands on.  These flimsy spaces outline brief sketches of entire lives.  Ayesha lived in conditions just like these not very long ago.

That evening we took two taxis and drove to "The Blue Frog" to listen to a jazz concert.  Jazz bands from Germany, Norway, England and the USA.  The place is as crowded as a Bombay train, although looking around in the dim orange light of the psychedelically designed bar, I could not be certain how many of the audience had rode in a train in the recent past.  The jazz was overwhelming, and the audience was overwhelmed.

Somewhere between the plastic-bag house and the jazz concert, lies the essence of this city.  Fede sees no dichotomies here - they are all part of a necessary and, above all, exuberant continuum.  The city would not be the same without either and you can find, if you have to believe Fede, a certain spirituality in both.