The Hindu Business Line : Here yesterday, gone today

They dug out coins from the insides of their torn and dirty dresses, placed them on their open palms and counted loudly. One of them laughed after the audited figures showed a catch of Rs 10 while the youngest had just a one-rupee coin; her elder sister consoled her with a wet biscuit.

From a distance one watched as the street kids made for the nearby wada pav joint and placed their funds on the counter to have a wada pav each, probably their first meal of the day. The incident clanged in one's mind for long and comes alive during morning walks when one's mood is stirred, as if stuck in a Sumeet Mixie.

Of a piece with the street children is the husband-wife family who lives in a plastic chawl into which they crawl, as they cannot stand tall. This family, along with many others, settled at the far end of Linking Road leading to Shanti Ashram. The road is being widened and concretised and the poor had to make way, except this family.

At about 5.15 a.m., the woman can be seen patting extra-large chapattis on a wood-fire to be consumed with raw onions and green mirchi. On Sundays, she scrubs and massages her husband as his lordship takes bath in water brought from a nearby pond. With rains over the last three days, she does not go on a long water trek, as rainwater gets stored in plastic oil cans. Through the week they work at construction sites and by September, may not be around — like my friend, the 60-and-something-year-old one-eyed milkman from Benares who has left Mumbai forever. Every morning he would greet me with a "siya Ram ji ki" as he struggled on his cycle loaded with milk in bottles and plastic packets. A few months ago he told me he was waiting for a replacement, and now a young fellow rides the same cycle selling milk to the same clients. They come and go; anonymity comes and goes leaving neither footprints nor shadows.

On Marine Drive, they have all gone — the chanawala coming from Bihar, the narielwala from Kerala and a couple of cold drink kiosks manned by Marathi youths — as the rich of Malabar Hill and Nariman Point wanted a clean promenade to walk in the mornings and evenings. A citizen's association has clean swept every small trade, and now the curving walkway collaring the Arabian Sea is being re-laid.

Last week one had an early appointment, and started early to avoid the morning crowds and was at Churchgate by 8 a.m and took a walk till the end where the walkway sinks into the sea. The regular walkers were probably having their breakfast, leaving the promenade to oneself; the air was dry with no wind or rain.

At odd times of the day and night, Marine Drive is a good enough place for a walk and a talk to oneself. The stretch is relatively safe and one got into the habit while working on a newspaper at Nariman Point in the 80s when the area was not filled with badly designed and risky buildings.

If the ruling Page 3 elite of Mumbai has its way, Mumbai could become a Singapore or Hong Kong with the ordinary Mumbaikar out. In about 10 years from now, the super-rich of Malabar Hill will not eye anymore the poor, though one wonders who will wash their cars and toilets. At that point of time, the poet Kolatkar will become relevant. Not many are aware that some of the city's finest songs have been scripted by the poet Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar in his recent collection, Kala Ghoda Poems.

In a way Kolatkar details the leper and the wretched at a traffic island at Kala Ghoda, a mythical place in the city as there is no Kala Ghoda anywhere.

"Boy, am I glad they've left/at least/this one tiny traffic island alone; haven't landscaped it to death,/put a fence around it,/and slapped logos all over it, " writes Kolatkar, in a way afraid of the day when Mumbai will be a designer city, a xerox of some foreign capital.

A few sharp lines in, say, Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda set the mood which becomes the message. "Lovingly, the blind man/strokes/his vaguely military-looking moustache/with divide-and-rule fingers;/caresses/both the twirled ends,/forever jealous of each other/by turns,/giving equal attention to both;" goes Kolatkar, making him my favourite Indian poet.

In Jejuri, his first collection, Kolatkar writes of the place: "No more a place of worship this place/is nothing less than the house of god."

The lines could fly over Gateway of India sometime from now when the poor will be robbed of their inheritance.

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