Fifty years ago I was 20. And Bombay was a different city than it is today. We lived at Pali Hill with the stars; Nargis, Dilip Kumar, Usha Kiran, Meena Kumari, Sadhana, Kalpana, Saira Banu. I saw them all in person and was besotted with their glamour. I learnt the shenanigans of celebrity.

Our house at Pali Hill was by the sea. The music of the ebb and tide seeped into my dreams and came out in my poems two decades later.

The trains crushed my body but liberated my soul. These were the gay love-factories. Bollywood taught us how to make love on Bombay beaches or walk under one umbrella in the rain like Raj and Nargis. The poems were sure to follow.

At Kala Ghoda’s Wayside Inn, Nissim Ezekiel held court. I’d see him towering above the railway crowds, commuting between his New Marine Lines office and Jogeshwari College. With him, having tea at the central table, were the young Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Adil Jussawalla. Once I teetered on the threshold, wanting to enter their clique, but when they invited me I ran away, followed by their guffaws.

At Bandra’s Turner Road were two Parsi ladies, Hilla and Dosan. Since ‘Dosan’ means ‘old lady’ in Parsi Gujarati, Hilla would invert her name and call her ‘Sando’ and Hilla herself would become ‘Lahi’. They’d put up art-reproductions in their walls and give us tea to talk about ‘Pablo Piccacio’, as they’d call Picasso. They remembered me as ‘that boy who asked such intelligent questions’.

My teachers at school weren’t impressed with my pretensions. ‘What will you write?’ they’d sneer. I longed to write a middle for a daily. I christened myself ‘Bronco’, but all my articles were returned. However, I kept at it.

At Samovar the barefoot MF Husain would be seen. I would walk through the Jehangir Art Gallery or the Museum. My last talk for the AIR was on the Museum’s exhibits, most of them from the Ratan Tata Collection of Chinese Art. I remember little figurines of Chinamen depicting hell’s torture. Demons pulling out your hair, poking you with hot pincers, gouging out your eyes. ‘I’ll be good out of fear,’ prayed the 16-year-old Parsi boy that I was in those days.

My college-mate Saleem Peeradina had become guest editor for a newspaper. I reviewed Mishima for them. But readers from the south found my sexy reviews too much for them. So I was blacklisted.

At their auditorium, the Film Finance Corporation would show their funded art films. My sister and I wept at Shabana Azmi’s Ankur . I hated Smita Patil’s looks. Where had Meena’s glamour fled? It was cinema vérité India-style all the way. Much later, Patil redeemed herself as Gopi’s raped wife in Chidambaram . I loved her in that film.

Thacker and Co had lovely books at throwaway prices. I read EM Forster, Aubrey Menen and Herbert Marcuse on Epicureanism. What an amoral lot! Lovely, really. Taraporewalla’s had old books. Strand’s Mr Shetty sold my first books and netted me ₹400. I never went to take the money. So busy was I in that city!

Ezekiel presided over PEN and declared me not a poet. Was I not only dying to be a celebrity? That stuck. Bombay’s literary mafia still has knives out for me. When he finally wished to feature me in a ‘New Poets’ column, I declined. When I wrote Ezekiel’s obituary, I prayed, ‘O God, give every poet an adversary of Nissim’s calibre.’

I last visited Bombay for a lit-fest to hawk my autobiography, which details how I became India’s first gay poet from a Bombay childhood. The shocked Parsis have made my book a Bombay bestseller. I went early morning, saw Malabar Hill’s skyline spoilt by Antilla, epitomising new Mumbai’s vulgar wealth. And left by the midnight’s Air India flight to Hyderabad en route from New York, full of Telugu NRIs. I loved the Bombay art on the walls of Sahar airport: the Bombay artists, all of them big names now.

Earlier, I had been in Bombay during the 1993 bombings. I was having tea and cake for old times’ sake when I ran into my college crush. Bombay’s landmarks were falling like nine pins: Stock Exchange, Air India building, Passport office, Mahim Dargah, Chandivali Studios. I fled to the suburbs and into the mouth of newer bombs. The city had changed. I had become a poet. My tribute to Bombay is in my book Sufiana .

Hoshang Merchant is a poet, critic and gay activist

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