Before that I'd always been a votary of Bombay's kaali-peeli auto-taxis, but, all too soon I got used to the air-conditioned business of arriving at a destination with hair in place
Illustration/ Ravi Jadhav
When demonetisation struck us all cashless, I, who had previously resisted app-cabs, went over to the Uber side. Before that I'd always been a votary of Bombay's kaali-peeli auto-taxis, but, all too soon I got used to the air-conditioned business of arriving at a destination with hair in place.
Then, the other day, too rushed to wait for Uber's false promises in which 6 minutes always become 26, I took an auto over a long, sweaty distance. Suddenly I remembered everything I'd forgotten for the last so many months about longer auto travel. It is too noisy to make phone calls, too rattly to text or tweet or even read (especially, when some people — didn't say it's me — are in denial about needing reading glasses). So you do what people alone in autos do — either drift away or look at people in all the other autos alongside.
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I remembered then how mesmerising it is to watch other people, in passing rickshaws. I saw the usual quota of cute boys going to work, their earnest shirt sleeves, their scruffy laptop bags, their ubiquitous earphones; rickshaws stuffed with children, a bunch of grapes in raincoats; a girl in a stylish burkha, with dark gold embroidered herring-bone pattern from tight wrist to fitted shoulder and ad-film sharp kajal, totally absorbed in her phone; two older ladies whose once-neat hair had been destroyed, shopping bags on floor, totally immersed in chatter, looking very friendly. As if mirroring their connection, their salwar kameezes were a matchy matchy peach and green. I wondered if they had noticed. I saw a young man knitting. Wait. Did I just see a young man knitting? My eye had passed over him casually and stopped at the unusual sight but he was gone before I could make much of it, one part of many moving parts and stories in a city on the move.
But rickshaw drivers sometimes waving to each other or exchanging hellos when alongside in the traffic jam, suggest a continuity even in the midst of this constant temporariness.
This idle people-gazing from autos is similar to another now vanishing Bombay practice — hanging out of the balcony watching the world go by for no good reason except that you are a part of it. In the balcony, as with the auto rickshaw's not-quite window, you are neither inside, nor outside, simultaneously private and public, both watcher and watched, an individual, yet part of a mesh of individuals.
In these in-between liminal spaces, it is quite enough just to be. You are not quite required to account for your presence in any way, nor require to have strong opinions about all that passes by — although you might well do so. It is a loose connection that simply reminds us of co-existing with diverse people and constantly overturns our expectations.
Windows to the world — modular balcony-less high-rises, whose windows let you watch without being seen, the virtual windows on devices and social media — hint at a similar diversity and flow but are fundamentally dissimilar to these other windows inside the world — where the watcher and watched are held together in a certain fleeting intimacy, in constantly shifting contexts, equal or similar just for a moment, before diverging, free of each other's gaze, free to meet other gazes.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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