| Aditi Dasgupta | April 2025 | Non Fiction |
I know it is not 1939. I just need it to be.
“The city was well-planned in places but equally squalid and congested in others. Today, as I walked through the large-bodied, grander taxis plying on the road, I was clear about my destination—the vada pav stall called Aram.
The taxis were not yet compact, black-and-yellow Premier Padminis that would later define the city’s streets. Instead, they had sweeping fenders and an elegance borrowed from the British influence that still loomed large over the city. Their bonnets were long, sloping downward like a gentle wave, with a front grille that gleamed under the gas-lit street lamps, polished to perfection. The headlights jutted out slightly, perched like the observant eyes of a thoroughbred, ready to navigate the cobbled roads and tram-lined streets with measured grace. I caught the twinkle of the cars’ brass handles and remembered how my master’s car clicked open with a satisfying weight, nibbling on my vada pav. The feeling was still familiar. Sitting on plush, buttoned-leather interiors and the luxury of driving him around on large spoke-rimmed wheels during the monsoons that turned the roads into treacherous pathways was a part of my misplaced ambition — I had really miscalculated my dream. Stuffing the last bite of vada pav, I wiped my hands in my master’s hand-me-down khadi kurta, inhaling the scent of burning petrol mixed with the salt-laced air of the Arabian Sea.
The sun was about to set in the next four hours. The silhouettes, at night, would merge with the flickering streetlights, ghosting through Ballard Estate and the Fort area. The frying vada pav’s fragrance had settled well around me by now, as I stood at the edge of Marine Drive.”
I read my grandfather Dattatraya’s diary for the hundredth time. The finality of gathering that Bombay was a different creature back then sank in yet again. The city lacked the hunger of modern congestion. The Gothic buildings of Fort must have been newer, their stone faces not yet weathered by a century of monsoons. The sea must have smelled cleaner, freer. And most importantly, the vividity of Bombay’s description written by freckled hands when, on the contrary, memory is supposed to fade, was grappling. I tried to imagine him as a boy—barefoot, mischievous, darting between vendors in Crawford Market, perhaps stealing glances at books he couldn’t afford and sweets he could. The neon glow of the billboards might have been absent. My grandfather must have also learned the weight of responsibility early in life.
I want to tell him—write, Dada. Show me more of what you saw. Tell me you wanted to be a writer. Write more before your hands are too tired from accounts and ledgers, before you forget how words used to dance for you. Instead, I closed the thick, bright yellow leather diary with a layer of foam between the cardboard and the leather cover. I then eased into my rubber slippers and decided to walk down the streets. I know he is there, somewhere in that Bombay. I imagine him, a wiry teenager wearing a white traditional Gandhi cap, his skin baked to perfection under the strong Bombay sun. I touch the old walls of the Asiatic Library, the very steps where students in starched khadi once debated freedom. I pass by Kyani & Co., where the feverish smell of bun maska and Irani chai still lingers, unchanged through the decades. The city truly had deep pockets of memories if one glanced long enough.
My feet, then, take me to Lower Parel—where the city’s heart beats in a different rhythm. Under the Elphinston flyover, makeshift beds of cardboard and tattered sheets shelter those who have nowhere else to go. Further down, as I cross Tata Memorial Hospital, the scent quickly changes to that of antiseptic and unwashed clothes, mixed with the aroma of street-side chai vendors serving tea to exhausted relatives who whisper prayers between sips. I quickly pick up on the measured urgency of the streets coiling around the Hospital; I see people clutching medical files like talisman muttering numbers that shouldn’t define the worth of a life. Grief is a language that is spoken fluently here. Just around the corner, I see a chaiwala joking with a ward boy, a toddler chasing pigeons near the canteen shed, a street musician playing an old Lata Mangeshkar tune on his flute.
I walk into the abyss of the crowd. I fleetingly imagine that my grandmother is still a girl with ink-stained fingers, filling the margins of her schoolbooks with secret poetry. She perhaps doesn’t yet know the man she will marry or the sacrifices she will make. She doesn’t yet know how a war will change everything, how ration cards and curfews will become her new reality. She is still whole, still free, but written outside the pages of my grandfather’s diary, like an apparition. The diary holds her only photograph where she has draped a nine-yard saree. The colours are in monochromes but I have often imagined them to be green—like new paddy. I imagine her speaking in softened tones but she perhaps thinks in sharp, unsparing clarity. She must have moved through the world with the resilience of a woman who had memorised the rules only to find dignified ways to bend them. Perhaps she learned English in secret? Or perhaps, she didn’t need the language of the coloniser to command a room? Her face is poker in the image; I think she never apologised for the space she occupied. I want to smell the scent of her amti, the cadence of her prayers, and how her voice rested on quiet kitchen afternoons.
Just then, a self-important blare from a kaali-peeli halves my trance into two. I sip my cutting chai at the local tapri, I begin to notice the traffic blur past listening to the melodies from a time that feels closer than it should. Maybe, in some way, time isn’t as linear as we think. The past lingers in the corners of this city, waiting for someone like me to reach out and touch it.
But for now, I sit here, in the city that is and isn’t the same, and I let myself believe—just for a moment—that it is still 1939.
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An ordinary feminist, a storyteller, and a researcher at heart are the words that define Aditi. An MPhil scholar in English literature from Jamia Millia Islamia, India, her intellectual inquiries have consistently focussed on and engaged with postcolonial traumas in Indian literatures in English. She completed a Diploma in Translation and Creative Writing program at Ahmedabad University. Aditi is an IWL (Institute for World Literatures, Harvard) alumnus and completed a residential program at Yale University to understand the nuances of modern storytelling. Apart from that, she has authored Silencing of the Sirens, which has been critically acclaimed in literary circles in India.
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Feature image by Sidharth Sabu via Unsplash
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