Driving to Dahisar
Driving to Dahisar is not as daunting as I had imagined. The road surface is surprisingly good, given that the monsoon is resident and brings with it unwanted gifts of potholes that make our roads into very close facsimiles of the lunar surface – perhaps I’m just lucky and the roads have been freshly patched up. The traffic is mostly disciplined, and sticking to the outer lane on the highway is a strategy that works to bypass service lanes, bus stops and other irritants. Once the airport passes by on the right, it’s mostly unknown territory to me. Andheri. Jogeshwari. Goregaon. The highway is humdrum as highways go. There is a daunting absence of greenery but the mushrooming highrise buildings that flash by seem very self satisfied. The national park and Aarey Colony are mere signs pointing right but no physical sighting back up these claims. Do these fabled forests really exist? The Metro sheds and parking lots currently threatening their existence may have already done the damage and I am none the wiser as I drive past. I imagine the dense, cool forest and the very thought brings comfort, even as the highway before me stretches away into a bleak wasteland of cars and construction.
There is a strident claim to cityhood in these parts. A certain impatience with the gentler things in life perhaps? Here, there is no history. No binding to what was. Nothing old survives here. The past is decrepit or being demolished. Ambitions and aspirations rage against the neglect and decline. The road ahead may be bare and lined mostly with plastic, but it is broad and six laned. Mumbai is on the move, at a frightening pace, moving inland and away from the sea. Moving forward without a second glance at what it leaves behind.
Shiny and new billboards advertise shiny and new buildings. The actual buildings I glimpse look unoccupied with that peculiar blind look about them. No clothes fluttering on laundry lines. No pots of tulsi or curry patta. These are the proof of life in old Mumbai. Instead, these buildings are grilled, barricaded and bare. But I sense the life they harbour all the same. It has just become used to hiding away in plain sight. The billboards boast of a reassuring amount of promised greenery in the artist’s illustration, albeit in the form of palm trees and lily ponds. The reality is, well, starker than even cynical me has bargained for. The compounds are concreted and tiled, there is no hope of any green thing surviving here. Even so, the doughty peepal and banyan have wormed their roots into the cracks already appearing in brand new construction. Ah Mumbai!
On the way to Dahisar, I see an empty shoe amongst the hibiscus growing along the road. A dented helmet on a flyover. Hills covered in blue tarpaulin and human growth. A very few still crowned with trees and shrubs. Hills with their sides gouged out and collapsing on themselves. Malls and outlet stores where not long ago stood marshland and mangrove forests. This is where I’m headed. Into the future of this city. The shiny chrome and glass facades of myriad buildings offer a cold and clinical comfort – no dirt, no green, nature banished to some distant dreamland. There is nothing to hold the earth. Dust swirls along the sides of the road, one miniature storm after another. What will happen to the rainwater when it falls on this bare earth? There is nowhere the water can seep into the ground, no way for the earth to renew herself. Perhaps it will again empty itself into the gaping maw of the ocean, while convoys of tankers are deployed to bring water from elsewhere to pour down thirsty throats. This is the Age of Tankers and Drying Borewells, of Waste and Want.
Coming back, leaving Dahisar behind, I am enchanted by a microcosm forest of weeds growing in the divider between Goregaon and Andheri. Tiny herbaceous trees and towering creepers, wildflowers beautiful in their minuteness, startling sightings of wild rice and betel leaf. I stick to the right lane closest to the divider, traffic is crawling. My eyes need the respite from the unrelenting chrome-glass-plastic desert I have just left behind. There is plenty of time to concentrate on the greenery. A graveyard of broken helmets and scooter parts suddenly jolts me into reality. Is this where inconvenient debris from accidents is abandoned? Closer to the airport, beautifully artificial lawns sweep down to the roadside where champa trees bloom. Now the divider is suddenly bereft of the friendly weeds. Instead, a profusion of spider lilies hide the pipelines and electrical cables and cesspools that abruptly appear in the middle of the road. An old suitcase lies forlorn amongst the evil looking lilies. It is half filled with water. No time to peer in for signs of aquatic life but here too, I know that life flourishes. Like the blind buildings, it is just more comfortable playing dead.
Though the road is now more potholed than further out, I drive with greater confidence, undisturbed by signs of death and decay. I have left the borderlands behind. The future is receding into the background. The city, as I know it, infused with nostalgic evidence of a gentler past and a not so gentle present, surrounds me and I am back home.