TUMMY TRAVELS. Kipling, Manto and Conrad in Mumbai

“It was a dirty, smelly, overcrowded place where the floors were slippery with animal ooze and vegetable waste, where the cavernous hall of meat was dark and forbidding, with huge, wicked-looking meat hooks hanging from the ceiling...” This isn’t Dickensian London, but a famous passage from Rohinton Mistry’s classic novel Such a Long Journey , in which Crawford Market represents the chaos of Mumbai — or Bombay, as it was called then. The market (nowadays Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai) is described at length as menacing, unhygienic and completely charmless. But unlike Mistry’s protagonist, I love poking my nose into stalls that sell just about everything edible from everywhere, and I find imported pâté in a tin as well as other interesting ingredients to take home. The author, incidentally, studied at nearby St Xavier’s before emigrating to Canada, so to the timid college boy this crowded market may have seemed too intense.

Tour de force: The murals at Crawford Market were made by John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling

After foodstuff shopping, I admire the 19th-century murals on the outer wall — depicting peasants producing fresh food for the city’s citizenry — that reminds me of Victorian-era Bombay and decide to take a stroll in the nearby compound of the Sir JJ School of Art, whose alumni include the poet Arun Kolatkar and the painter FN Souza. Few tourists bother to visit it, even though the school’s garden is a veritable sculpture show with amazing works by students. It was the former dean who painted those murals at the market (and designed its sculpted fountains) and his name was John Lockwood Kipling — but he’s today best remembered for having fathered a son, Rudyard, who was born in Mumbai in 1865 and who, in 1907, pipped Rabindranath Tagore by six years to become the first Indian-born Nobel Laureate. Rudyard’s birthplace is marked with a plaque at the bungalow where the Kiplings lived and, some years later, Rudyard rhymed his remembrances of Bombay:

Mother of cities to me

For I was born in her gate,

Between the palms and the sea,

Where the world-end steamers wait.

The madly lively Bombay of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories lies north from here, around Byculla, where he lived on Clare Road in the 1940s and ate kebabs at the local canteen Sarvi, which in fact remains a legendary non-veg destination. (Nandita Das’s freshly released film Manto was, however, mostly shot around the Marine Lines, while Byculla apparently stood in for Lahore.) Byculla Boy is, incidentally, the title of popular writer Ashok Banker’s heartbreaking coming-of-age novel set in the same area.

To walk through the pages of Mulk Raj Anand’s 1940s novel Coolie , one just needs to head a few hundred metres south from the arts school, to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. As poet Adil Jussawalla, who used to be Anand’s neighbour, writes in a short essay, The Reader As Tourist : “With a few minor changes, the place Mulk described, the scene he drew, remains the same.” The now highly-offensive, English-invented word ‘coolie’ is believed to derive from the Koli fisherfolk after whom Colaba, as well as the delicious dish prawns koliwada are named. Heading further down south I see fishing boats in their village still located in the heart of the city, where women dry shrimps on the sidewalk between bus stops, and I instantaneously find myself in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children : “...follow Colaba Causeway to its tip — past cheap clothes shops and Irani restaurants and the second-rate flats of teachers, journalists and clerks — and you’ll find them, trapped between the naval base and the sea.” And as he’s eulogising these original inhabitants of Mumbai, Rushdie writes one of the tastiest sentences of his collected prose: “They caught pomfret and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all.”

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Mumbai is full of literary secrets, if one only knows where to look. Rumour has it that the Asiatic Society (housed in the old town hall) has one of the few original copies of Dante’s early-1300s epic La Divina Commedia , which is worth millions of dollars, though how it ended up in a Mumbai library would be a suitable plot for a bibliomystery. (The 1830s’ library was one of the only buildings that author Aldous Huxley found impressive when he visited in the 1940s.) The now disintegrating cast-iron Watson’s Hotel is where Mark Twain stayed when he came in the 1890s on a lecture tour (which he undertook to save himself from bankruptcy). Although he never set any fiction in India, he wrote about Bombay in his travelogue Following the Equator : “I seem to have a kaleidoscope at my eye; and I hear the clash of the glass bits as the splendid figures change, and fall apart, and flash into new forms, figure after figure, and with the birth of each new form I feel my skin crinkle and my nerve-web tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight.” Around the same time, having been thrown off a ship by a nasty captain in Madras, Joseph Conrad, who’s best known for his novel The Heart of Darkness , travelled by train to Bombay and checked into the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home, which now houses the state police headquarters. While he hung around in 1894, he came across a ship called the Narcissus, which inspired him to write the autobiographical The Nigger of the Narcissus .

Where giants roamed: The now disintegrating cast-iron Watson’s Hotel is where Mark Twain stayed in the 1890s

This downtown area also occasioned potent poetry in the 1970s, somewhat fuelled by a scandalous 1960s visit to town by the American Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. The subsequent literary golden age was chronicled in The Book of Chocolate Saints by Jeet Thayil. Ginsberg, in a letter posted after a reading at poet Nissim Ezekiel’s flat on Warden Road in 1962, wrote to fellow author Gregory Corso about the affordable Indian food: “Hardly been diarrhetic here even as much as Paris and I’ve really eaten the worst. Maybe I’m immune, immunized by Peru, Mexico, Tangier. But ritzy restaurants are cheaper than Tangier even. Bombay has great food all over... Come here and have a ball in the greatest, weirdest nation of history.” Ginsberg also tried to convince writer friends Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to join him, but only Gary Snyder turned up.

No service The quaint Samovar, where everybody who’s anybody went for tea, has shut down

In any case, one could say that Mumbai ought to be hallowed ground for any writer. Yet, its veneer is fading fast. Of literary hangouts, there are not many left. The quaint Samovar (across the street from the venerable Sassoon Library) has shut down. This was where everybody who’s anybody, including detective novelist HRF Keating (creator of the popular pulp series about Inspector Ghote), went for tea. Mumbai-based writer and pop-culture historian Sidharth Bhatia tells me, “The cultural community met in Samovar and also in The Wayside Inn, which is right across from the Jehangir Art Gallery. That is where Kolatkar sat with friends and wrote his poems. That is also where BR Ambedkar wrote parts of the Constitution. Writers also sat in various Irani restaurants, where you could get by with a cup of tea and sit for hours. I used to go to Samovar all the time and run into artists, writers, journalists and filmmakers. You not just arranged to meet people, you ran into them and shared a table and solved the problems of the world.”

Good company: Cafe Military is the place place to enjoy the atmosphere of old, and linger for hours and write (or read)

One literary haunt that remains is Leopold’s, which features prominently in Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram , but today it is nothing like in the book — a downmarket Irani café that served cheap muggy beer, where one could afford to sit all day. Nowadays it’s too posh for comfort. Incidentally, these Irani cafés were an imperative part of the rich texture of the city as described by Mistry, Rushdie and others too, such as Manil Suri — whose novel The City of Devi interestingly also starts with a weird symbolic scene set in Crawford Market. But sadly, most Irani joints have vanished in this day and age of snazzy gastropubs. One of the last to have retained its ambience is the 1930s’ vintage Cafe Military in Nagindas Master Road (a few steps away from Flora Fountain), where one can still enjoy the atmosphere of old, linger for hours and write (or read) a book, and sample Parsi specialities such as dhansak washed down with chilled beer or raspberry soda (which is only found in such ancient places). Whenever I visit Mumbai, I make it a point to spend at least one full day at Cafe Military. There may not be any of those literary brains around at Cafe Military now, but their curried goat’s brain makes for stimulating table company if one is a foodie.

Zac O’Yeah

Zac O’Yeah is a part-time travel writer and part-time detective novelist ;

Email: zacnet@email.com

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