I have always thought Mumbai, or Bombay, was the better city. As a student there, briefly, it seemed public transport was super, people let you be, there was food and shopping for every palate and pocket, taxi-drivers respected long and short distances, the streets were safe whatever the hour… Then of course, there’s Bollywood, dabbawalas , nightlife, Tendulkar...

None of this finds a place in Naresh Fernandes’s eloquently written biography of Bombay, City Adrift . The title, in fact, aptly reflects the essence of the book — one in a series of city-stories being published by Aleph. To be honest, I was dreading the nostalgia trip because there’s nothing so frustrating as being forced to follow in someone else’s way-it-was wallowing. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen in this small-sized, dinkily produced book.

In fact, halfway, the book stops being a biography; it becomes an exposition of land-grab and exploitation of the voiceless majority by the political and powerful, a hint of which the reader gets right at the start. It makes me wonder whether, despite the seamless lucidity of the prose and the persuasive passion of the author’s arguments, this may, just may, put off some readers.

Not that that matters, nor should we worry. It’s just that the series seems to target the young, upwardly mobile, always on the go, getter-abouters. But Fernandes’s writing is so felicitous and Bombay’s story so intimately told that anyone who picks up this book will stay with it.

Bombay is revealed in two parts; Part One is actually mostly a recap of the birth and nurturing of the city from the earliest times through the Ashokan period right down to the time of the last contingent of British soldiers exiting through the Gateway of India “to board The Empress of Australia, ending the British presence in India. The islands their countrymen had acquired 282 years earlier were unrecognizable. So too were the people who had come to inhabit them”.

While the content is mostly historical in nature, the kind of observations the author chooses to bring to the reader’s notice are refreshing and insightful. Talking about population, for instance, he says: “In 1780, the population had touched 113,726 — a precise figure that had been established by a survey to calculate how much food would be needed in that year of scarcity.”

He talks about something Bombay pretends it had nothing to do with: opium and the China Traders. “Between 1830 and 1860, there was a tenfold increase in exports of the narcotic through the city’s bustling port. Over the next few decades, China … would be the making of Bombay…” Opium trade, however, also spawned acts of great philanthropy. Commenting on the role of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, “a poor Parsi who came to Bombay to work with his uncle, a bottle seller”, Fernandes writes that “Jejeebhoy and his peers constructed a tradition that set Bombay apart from other Indian cities: jaw-droppingly munificent public philanthropy”.

But where did this public spiritedness go? “Though Bombay is now home to nine of the fifteen richest Indians and has the world’s seventh-highest concentration of high-net-worth individuals,” he writes, “these newly minted billionaires have made little effort to improve the quality of life in a city they share with twelve million others…”

City Adrift most reflects the author’s own concerns and interests and that’s what, perhaps, makes it compelling reading. I read in an interview how dearly Fernandes holds Gandhi; the great leader of India’s independence movement finds a place in this little book too: “As India journeyed to independence, Gandhi had fundamentally reshaped Bombay. Gandhi had helped the city understand that reform wasn’t a process effected merely by institutions or governments — it demanded individual responsibility and effort.”

It is this concern about lack of responsibility and effort that gives the narrative in Part Two a crusading tone, calling out desperately to save the city before it’s too late. It would seem it’s already too late.

The winding down of the textile mills, once the heart of the city’s economy, and the consequent dislocation and distress of its workers, the reclamation efforts, the hegemonising of open spaces and shanties by real estate developers, the growing number of gated communities, the politics and policies of exclusion… all of this is tackled in some detail. As the author points out, the city offers “each resident about 1.1 square metres of open space — a figure that includes pavements and traffic islands. (Londoners have 31.6 square metres each to gambol about in.)”

When Fernandes recalls a time when compound walls came only knee-high, with metal grilles rising above them so people could see each other, engage with each other, it shakes up the reader. Especially when you read on that by 1991, land-use rules permitted the heights of walls to go up to even 7.4 ft. From a fleeting train, he says, he recalls having “serendipitous visions of Vivian Richards taking guard before the wicket and Sachin Tendulkar (okay, there is one small mention of the Big T) dashing across the field” through gaps between the stands in Wankhede Stadium. No longer.

The much-talked about Bandra-Worli Sea Link, opened in 2009, cost “five times more than estimated and took ten years to build — twice as long as anticipated”. Even as many speak of it with pride, he points out: “While 7.2 million people shove their way into the overburdened train system each day, the sea link is used by only 40,000 vehicles — a number that has been falling since the bridge was opened. Privileging infrastructure for private vehicles over public transport is flawed urban policy and a mockery of democracy.”

Midway through the book, you realise this isn’t just Bombay’s story, it is the story of every city in India, and every town aspiring to be a city. As more and more people jostle their way into urban spaces to make something of their lives, this truth tale of a biography sounds a warning we must heed.

It doesn’t matter if you’re familiar with Bombay or unfamiliar with it, a resident or a tourist. City Adrift demands to be read.

It might have been nice, though, to have had a city map to go with the book.

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