I know someone whose best-loved view of the city is from the window seat of a flight about to land — the first sight of squares of tarpaulin spread across its suburban slums; the blue, both calming and deceptive. If the blue of the slums is struggling, the blue of the Arabian Sea is an aspiration.
Bombay belongs to everyone.
As a news chronicler, I saw the city through another lens. I was a crime reporter, and in 2003, I started calling the city Mumbai.
The FIR was once described to me by a Mumbai police constable as a document of greed. “It’s the height of a city’s hunger, its greed,” he had said, with a chuckle. Mumbai doesn’t do ordinary crime. We think maximum in this city. Those are the stories in the summary pages and margins of the FIRs: The stories of underworld. Of the routes weapons take. Of the strange friendships in this city. Of the many ways a wife can kill a husband. Of the boxes of bodies that turn up in its national park.
We were tracking the lives of the 188 people who had lost their loved ones in 7/11, when a widow asked me, “What did I get, speaking to victims about their dead ones?” I still do not have an answer. No crime reporter actually does. None of us enjoy this. Pain is the most difficult to write. Especially, when you are shown a tube of Fair and Lovely, purchased as a gift by the wife for her husband, on the same night that she gets a call that his body will return home. A friend calls me on each 26/11 anniversary. She can still hear the gun shots.
Mumbai, through a crime reporter’s diary, is full of anecdotes, of helplessness, and the realisation that we are all on the edge, and we were always fragile.
Bombay belongs to everyone.
As a news chronicler, I saw the city through another lens. I was a crime reporter, and in 2003, I started calling the city Mumbai.
The FIR was once described to me by a Mumbai police constable as a document of greed. “It’s the height of a city’s hunger, its greed,” he had said, with a chuckle. Mumbai doesn’t do ordinary crime. We think maximum in this city. Those are the stories in the summary pages and margins of the FIRs: The stories of underworld. Of the routes weapons take. Of the strange friendships in this city. Of the many ways a wife can kill a husband. Of the boxes of bodies that turn up in its national park.
We were tracking the lives of the 188 people who had lost their loved ones in 7/11, when a widow asked me, “What did I get, speaking to victims about their dead ones?” I still do not have an answer. No crime reporter actually does. None of us enjoy this. Pain is the most difficult to write. Especially, when you are shown a tube of Fair and Lovely, purchased as a gift by the wife for her husband, on the same night that she gets a call that his body will return home. A friend calls me on each 26/11 anniversary. She can still hear the gun shots.
Mumbai, through a crime reporter’s diary, is full of anecdotes, of helplessness, and the realisation that we are all on the edge, and we were always fragile.