At 3:00 pm on St.Valentine's day, the pavement on Marine Drive glistens in the heat. The sun glints through a few trees, and lights up the faces of the innumerable young couples sitting along the promenade. A new batch of youngsters completes the exodus from the newly renovated Jazz by the Bay to the other side of the road. There is a giant hoarding on Chowpatty, covered with red hearts. A few pamphlets lie around. One of these floats in the air, and falls on the face of a man sleeping on the beach. He brushes it away in irritation.
~~
At 12:30 on a rainy afternoon, an office colleague and I hail a cab. We are hardly in, when the driver, a fierce-looking sardar, demands to know whether we "work in service." We say yes tentatively. He looks back at us briefly and then turns to face the traffic. The rain is steady and light. He says he can help us make 40,000 in a month. "All your own money. No boss." He then launches into a detailed plug for Amway. He is an Amway manager. I cut him off midway and say that we are not interested. His face falls. "At least come to the meeting on Sunday," he says, "It will be at the Wadala community center and all the big shots will be there. Samosas and tea." We nod wearily. He truly believes we will come. The rain continues, unhurried.
~~
At 11:00 pm one New Year's eve, two girls on a bus to Vashi struggle to find a seat amidst a horde of shifty-eyed men. There is one woman sitting with an empty fish basket. She helps them find a seat and keep away the groping hands and the piercing stares. She offers the girls paan. The girls readily accept. Soon their lips are paan-stained, and look incongruous with their tight yellow and blue t-shirts. The woman who offered the paan is clad in red and green and is beautiful. The bus stops at a junction, and the girls get off, smiling a goodbye to the woman. They head towards the first party of the evening. There will be fireworks.
~~
At 1:00 pm on a road in Fountain, I buy a book on Photoshop 5.0 from a roadside bookseller. It costs me 15 rupees less than the one in the bookshop and comes with a guarantee for the CD. After my sale is completed, the bookseller hands me his card. It is simple in design and bears the road name but no house number. He tells me to visit again after six months. That is when, he says, Adobe will release the next version of Photoshop, and he always wishes his customers to be up to date.
~~
At 8:00 am every morning, a lad in the guesthouse opposite begins his daily chores of washing the bed sheets. He spreads out the sheets on the terrace and arranges a few bricks to hold them down. The sheets were once white, now they are the colour of Bombay walls. The bricks leave reddish stains at the corners. He must sit and keep watch until one batch dries - lest the pigeons "create nuisance," as they say in Mumbai.
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It is 7:00 pm on a busy Thursday evening, and my cab swerves into a Worli by-lane to avoid the traffic. The lanes are dim and dingy. These are slums, I think to myself absently. The cab takes a turn to the right and suddenly there are larger huts and lots of people lined up on the street. It is some time before I realize that there are only women. They peer into my cab, and turn away when they see that I am not a man. They wear silk clothes and garish make-up. I am shocked and embarrassed by them. And then I am ashamed of myself.
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