Dear Arun Kolatkar,
Unfortunately, we haven’t met – I will never have that opportunity. Fortunately, we haven’t met – this lets me idolise you a little.
The literary device of writing a letter/email to you, Mr Kolatkar, might have amused you. How clearly is our hometown, Mumbai, visible from above? And how do you accustom yourself to a detached view from the clouds, you being a rasik of daily life?
It is two decades to the year when you left our plane of view. On November 1, on what would have been your ninety-second birthday, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Kala Ghoda, not to make a saint of you – you weren’t one, and wouldn’t have liked it – but only to take the occasion of your death anniversary to celebrate your life through one of your books.
I won’t mention Jejuri, rightly your most celebrated work in English. Your other collection in English, Kala Ghoda Poems (standalone edition by Pras Prakashan, and also included in Arun Kolatkar: Collected Poems in English by Bloodaxe Books), an extended, affectionate and tongue-in-cheek look at life in the art precinct of Kala Ghoda, unsentimental, imaginative, playful, open to wonder. Mr Kolatkar, it’s amazing how much your poems transform Kala Ghoda as an object in the mind, how profoundly in terms of meaning. Your collection may mean many things to many people; to me, it helped make a new city home, to mythologise it, to see it as a rich mine of poems.
But had you seen Kala Ghoda anew today, you wouldn’t have written the same poems. No longer is it what it was. I do not lament the inevitable change. It is less infused with the zest and body and dregs of the mercantile neighbourhood nearby, the international docks nearby, and it is less seedy and shady, with fewer or no drug peddlers and pimps. And even the cheap but nice Irani and other eateries gave way to more contemporary joints, a change that I both rue and welcome.
What would weird you is, the place is ageing in reverse. It’s a kind of Benjamin Button. No, really. The buildings look brand new. Put that in your Charminar cigarettes, which no doubt are cancer-free in heaven as they aren’t here, and smoke it.
The David Sassoon Library and Reading Room (construction completed 1870) where I have been a member, and which appears in one of my favourite poems from your Kala Ghoda Poems? Jail me if I lie, but it was restored in a massive, costly effort, following which it, looking freshly minted, was thrown open to awestruck members, salivating Instagrammers, and swooning location scouts for ads alike, just last year. I think the restoration bent the laws of physics, as DSL, while beautifully reflecting the Victorian Gothic architectural style of its time, makes me mischievously look up the year and date on my mobile phone to check if it’s still 2024, and still this timeline.
The iconic, scallop-like entrance of Jehangir Art Gallery? Check. The spires of Elphinstone College! Yes, sir. And, of course, the museum, now named after Shivaji Maharaj, either all renovated or all but spotless. You’ll do a double take that the iconic music store with listening booths, Rhythm House, has passed into city history and world literature. Someone bought the premises recently, let’s see what it turns into.
For now, one of the grey shutters bears a stencilled black and white portrait of The Beatles, as the iconic lettering ‘Rhythm House’ fades above the shutters. The floor above it houses a newer showroom of a fashion label, Kunal Rawal, which has brought in a sense of freshness with a coat of maroon-red paint on the building.
You’ll sense I’m not nostalgic. I’m training myself to be chill, if a little wistful, about change, as it is inevitable. Embracing and working with it is optimistic and empowering.
Bang next to Rhythm House on Rampart Row, Mr Kolatkar, brace yourself for a gut punch. Next door is a restaurant and bar, The Punjab Grill. Its previous incarnation was a hangout for you and your pals, wasn’t it? The Wayside Inn appears in your Kala Ghoda Poems, unsentimentally and endearingly, as the venue for a dating couple, a ruminating poet, a famished lawyer, and even Dr BR Ambedkar.
Whether Dr Ambedkar visited Rhythm House or not, he did frequent Wayside with a pencil in his pocket. Back then, he was leading the Constituent Assembly drafting the Constitution for India. And although you don’t say it at all, one of the great people who were regulars at the restaurant was you.
I never knew Wayside. I’ve visited its successor, the Punjab Grill, Mr Kolatkar, to unwind after a poetry reading or book launch with a bunch of senior poets from the city, some of whom you knew. On one happy occasion, before the murmurs of ice-tinkly, kebab-fuelled small talk floated to the after/smoke of yours along the ceiling, a poet friend pointed to a corner table, and murmured, with reverence or awe, “This was Wayside Inn.” He paused for a beat to make the point land, which it did, thrillingly. You, Mr Kolatkar, might have sat by the window which, as its arched shape suggests, might have been a door in the Wayside days, and which frames daily life in the Kala Ghoda chowk.
Your poems usher affectionately, unsentimentally into Indian poetry in English, the everyday folks along the square — the kindly ‘witch’ of Kala Ghoda, the young girl affectionately plucking lice from the head of her lover who’s just returned from jail, the young woman combing her wet hair and draping her sari on the footpath, the old man with a wooden leg, the little boy playing with his tyre and pinwheel, the young girl tossing up and catching pebbles as she grows up too soon, the woman who collects trash, the sprightly kerosene-cart man.
By no means is your poetry ‘protest poetry’ or ‘activist poetry’, both being worthy genres of course. It is true, though, that your complex, delicious, affectionate, attentive, magical, tongue-in-cheek poem-portraits immortalise these folks who are often unnoticed with the shorthand label of ‘street dweller’. And the poems are literary, thoroughly enjoyable, usually humorous, and to use a word that’s taboo in ‘high’ art, entertaining. These generous slices from the lives of people going about their day, living, sleeping, talking, being vulnerable with each other!
Today, you’ll see fewer people living, sitting, squabbling, laughing on the footpath than in your time, I can’t say why. Hopefully there’s no need for concern. Fingers crossed.
As affectionately and mischievously, you depicted the non-human residents of Kala Ghoda as persons. You were fascinated by a crow, and made us smile at the slightly neurotic bird, so like us commuters/householders in mid-hustle, seeking a good twig for the nest. How generously if also impishly your crow includes the black-robed lawyers in his world. Smart!
A street dog has a lot to say in your unrhymed tercets, though he’s not a sutradhar. The dog in the poems, whose fur markings resemble a map of Bombay as six islands before land reclamation, is your comment on the city with a plural, hybrid, confluential past, a bhelpuri past, mixed and tangy.
On my ‘pilgrimage’ (poem: Pi-Dog), I saw a cute, amiable mutt lounging outside a clothing showroom, all casual swag. I saw two others on the metal stairs of a shop, looking at ease, well-fed and healthy. A welcome change from decades ago is, today most folks let street animals be or actively help them. There are several reasons, as I see it: the ancient values of karuna and karma generally, but also stringent laws and animal kindness advocacy.
You’ll be happy to know there are vendors of idlis and cutting chai on the street (poem: Breakfast at Kala Ghoda), and even an enterprising tea seller with a little kerosene stove mounted on the carrier of his bicycle. In these respects, Mumbai and generally India, makes the footpath a friendly space, if you’re a guy.
The streets and pavements are cleaner than I suppose they were in your time (poem: Meera, about a woman protagonist working as a municipal street cleaner). Trash cans have grown in number, and people are littering less today. Kala Ghoda has been taken the spotless way of other famous and tourist-friendly neighbourhoods in the city. It could do with a bit of grunginess, if you ask me, so I’d suggest you wouldn’t want to ask me. It would remind us to do something about the mountains of trash on landfills far away from the pretty and clean streets of Kala Ghoda.
Another way Kala Ghoda is changed is by way of context. Beautiful Kala Ghoda Cafe, for instance, opened after your time, warm-lit, its exposed brick walls tastefully coarsely white being a posh interpretation of the old-world neighbourhood. The vibe is old and new, bohemian and comfy, workaday and premium. Kala Ghoda today is about remixing and renewing the old as retro fashionable.
Machinery House is one such building, and there are others with the word ‘Guild’, ‘Chambers’ or ‘Associates’ on their signs tucked away in nondescript parts of their front facades devoted to bigger signs with more contemporary-looking and luxury brand names.
Speaking of vignettes from the street today: Westside store is housed in the heritage structure of the Army and Navy Building, and faces Punjab Grill from the other side of the chowk. It seems 30 seconds back when it was peeled free of gift-wrap and inaugurated, which is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch. In your time, too, aspirational consumerism was a thing, and now, three decades after Liberalisation, it’s bigger and more matter-of-fact.
Facing the cafe is Keneseth Elihayoo synagogue, 140 years old, restored four years ago to a gleaming state. Painted tastefully in white and blue, the edifice reminds me of a cliff of pastry behind a barricade under the watchful eye of a couple of policemen.
The art and culture precinct has also become a fashion hub with a large number, a ramp walk, of showrooms — Jaywalking, Mulmul: Threads of Happiness, Naina V, Suvasa, Payal Khandwala, The Bombay Shirt Company, and others. A lot of folks walking around seem to have stepped out of fashion catalogues, and generally, people here are well groomed and better dressed than before. It is no longer possible, and hasn’t been for decades, to slip into a t-shirt and worn jeans any more if you want to fit in visually. People would stare at you, Mr Kolatkar.
This fashion buzz allows me to segue to a showroom’s name which might be of interest — ‘Gazal Gupta’ — though you eschewed the ghazal or other such forms. One afternoon a few years ago, I was with another bunch of poets, wandering around Kala Ghoda. We came across a restaurant we hadn’t seen before, and were pulled inside by its name — ‘Poetry’. The restaurant had a pleasant décor, and a cosy vibe with wide windows, white walls, broad-leafed plants in neat pots, trendy songs in English playing softly on speakers, a bookshelf with real books. This vibe, now that I think of it, suggests that Kala Ghoda, or large parts of it, is in a Europe-inspired phase. The white walls, broad windows, plants in white pots, prominently grainy wooden surfaces, and a few outer walls with singing pink bougainvillaeas appear to my Instagramming eyes as tributes to Italy or Spain, which are fashionable and aspirational holiday destinations for many Indians.
We went in and had a good time, sharing a couple of wedges of pastry, one sugary white, the other chocolatey. I remember one pastry as just-right sweet and that the other one, while also sweet, had a bold edge of salty. I recall speaking passionately and naively about urban zoning.
This afternoon, I was by myself (on ‘pilgrimage’, therefore sweets were mandatory as prasad). The eatery had been vacated by the lunching crowd. One table was taken by a pair of young women, or young people with female bodies in knee-length dresses. These distinctions are a thing now. They sang along with the English lyrics playing on the speaker. It was a breathtaking sight, poetry in ‘Poetry’, not the kind you wrote, but poetry. It’s the kind of loveliness you see wherever people sit together and open up to each other. The romantic vibes between them were chemical enough to power the neighbourhood.
A massive change does find a mention in your poems – the equestrian statue that gave Kala Ghoda its name is gone. Removed in 1965 in a wave of patriotic sentiment, the statue of an English king, the then-Prince of Wales, was moved to its present spot, a corner of the Byculla Zoo. In 2017, its place was taken by the statue of a riderless, unsaddled horse, ‘The Spirit of Kala Ghoda’. It’s a pretty enough sculpture, and would benefit from a plaque on its pedestal for newcomers to the city, who might mistakenly think the area was named after the riderless statue, which actually got its name from the older, equestrian statue.
A lot of Kala Ghoda is very upscale now. Most of the dives have glammed up, and some have become family friendly. To find the old-style ones you have to go deep inside Fort, whose walls are adorned with at least four pretty murals of horses rearing up on their hind legs. Hidden away beside these are mundane, necessary support systems: Nagori tea shop and chicken shawarma joint, the small stores. I sense you’d be at home here. In a prominent and glamorous lane, you see the office of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) sandwiched between an aspirational fast food outlet and a posh fashion showroom, a sight which I relished. This sharp juxtaposition, a Mumbai trait, keeps people nicely mixed together, keeps opinions moderate, and makes neighbourhoods interesting and more broadly grounded. You would relate to this.
But you transcended it, because you saw enchantment in the everyday. You sat with (as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has written) Kala Ghoda, which suggests to me that you saw it as a person.
Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.
