In 1950, Gulzar arrived in Mumbai. The 16-year-old had been put on the Frontier Mail from Delhi with strict instructions not to get off the train before he reached his destination. A day later, he remembers in Aamchi Mumbai, a new volume of poems and stories about the city, destiny deposited him at Bombay Central.
“From that moment on,” he writes, “this city held me by the hand—and became my partner.” It frightened him, admonished him, made him run around in circles, but “it never dropped me from its lap.” He has slept with his head on its shoulder. He has heard “the lullabies of its footpaths.” He has tasted the salt of its sea. “What all has it not given me?” A home, a wife, children, dreams, a livelihood. This book collects the receipts.
Born as Sampooran Singh Kalra in Punjab’s Jhelum district, he hid behind the name “Gulzar” because his father didn’t approve of his being a writer. Starting out as a lyricist for S.D. Burman in the 1960s, he became one of the country’s most eminent poets, authors, lyricists, screenwriters and filmmakers. His shelf boasts of National Film Awards, an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and the Jnanpith Award. The city, it may be safe to say, approves of the writer.
On a rainy afternoon, I sit across from the 92-year-old maestro in his Bandra home, a charming old-world bungalow indifferent to the towers-to-be climbing noisily alongside, through this neighbourhood and every neighbourhood. Calling the city a partner instead of a muse makes the dynamic feel equal. It implies negotiation, disagreement, shared labour, shared credit. A muse is worshipped. A partner can, and will, argue back.
When I ask what the city has demanded from Gulzar, he says it expected only that he should, somehow, record the Mumbai he found, “its culture, its character, so that it would become history.” True, it is perpetually a work in progress, making room for more people, more dreams, a city expanding and heightening, a city as unlikely as it is unforgettable. “Perhaps it expects you to take down its lanes, its buildings, its culture, to preserve them, so that the people who come here to live do not somehow cause this living culture to disappear.”
“Otherwise, what could that city really expect from me?”
It is a deceptively simple answer. What Gulzar has been recording—in this significant volume, and through his career—can rarely be called the city’s greatest hits. He is drawn, microscopically, to the details deep inside of it: a tram conductor recognising a young writer, a glass of water waiting in an Irani café, a man sending a money order to his hometown, a tree being spat on, a bridge changing the time it takes us to cross the sea.
“There is this fluctuating, migrating population which comes here, a very huge one, every day, which comes and goes,” he says. “Aur woh kuchh na kuchh residue ki tarah chhod jaati hai. Kuchh reh jaata hai.” (And some or the other residue is left behind. Something stays behind.)
Something stays behind. That is what Gulzar says he has noted, while I note the exactness and specificity of the word “residue.”
I find it impossible not to think of his 1987 film Ijaazat. Mera kuchh saamaan tumhaare paas pada hai (Some of my things have stayed behind with you).
It is one of Gulzar’s best loved songs. What begins as a request for the return of belongings gradually reveals that the belongings are memories: rain, a letter with a night folded inside it, the remembered details of another body, the fragments of a relationship that cannot actually be packed or posted. A romance is too unwieldy to fit inside an envelope. The song’s radical trick is to turn memory into property, emotion into luggage. It won Gulzar the National Award for Best Lyrics, and it seemed so densely wordy—and even, at first glance, prosaic—that composer R.D. Burman joked that the lyricist might next hand him a newspaper and ask him to compose that.
Mera Kuchh Saamaan turns the detritus of intimacy into poetry. These Mumbai poems and stories sift through the detritus of a city. The residue is the story.
*****
The young Gulzar moved through a literary Bombay. He tells me about attending meetings of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). It was the famed writers of the time—Sardar Jafri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Rajendra Singh Bedi, Krishan Chandar—who held court and spoke at the meetings, even as the younger, hungrier ones learned simply by being near them, warmed by their fiery rhetoric. Charged and inspired, Gulzar and his young radicals had to find somewhere to put all the arguments they were carrying home.
So they took the tram. A one-anna ticket was good for the day, as long as they didn’t get off. They would board at Khetwadi after the PWA meetings, scramble on to an upper deck, read each other their words, argue about them, travel across the city. One by one the young writers would get off, but the conversation stayed hot. Words, words, words, all the way home.
The city started eavesdropping. Passengers, sitting below, became curious, waiting to know where the words will lead. The meetings would happen every week, and the same commuters would gather to listen in. “You meet the same conductors again and again, and they become so friendly,” Gulzar remembers. The ticket of that time was a single-punch ticket. “I have preserved that single-punch.”
It is difficult to think of a more perfect Gulzar object, a scrap of paper carrying the shared history of a period in Indian storytelling. The Progressive Writers Association is history. The tram is long gone. Yet what Gulzar has held on to is not an abstract account but a highly specific one. Something that has stayed behind.
*****
In Aamchi Mumbai, the city is rarely described from above. It’s always encountered at shoulder height, from a pavement, a bus stop, a railway crossing, the window of a taxicab. I ask Gulzar whether that is an ethical choice as a poet, whether taking a skyline view of a city is less honest?
He corrects me immediately. “Main iske footpath par leta hua hoon, isiliye my view comes from there.” He is not one for the grand theory. “It is not a philosophy saying this is the right one, and that is the wrong one. I have not made any judgement in my writing,” he says emphatically. “I have just preserved the life which I saw here.”
“The way the big and the small raise one another, take care of one another, threaten one another, demand from one another, and then feed one another.” The point, he says, is not to make a sob story, never to make a sob story. “This city feeds everybody,” he declares. “You may get less to eat, but if your hands and feet work, if your eyes are open and the antennae of your mind are open, you will not starve in this city.”
“You have to keep your gun loaded,” Gulzar says, casually slipping into dialogue. “Opportunity will pass by your side every time. It is up to you how you gun it down.”
*****
“Dishkiyaaaon.”
Gulzar’s song Goli Maar Bheje Mein from the 1998 film Satya is a brilliant, linguistically vivid song about the fundamental mechanism of street-survival: keep moving and don’t think of the consequences. The problem isn’t the world, the problem is thinking about the world. The moment the brain starts making noise, you hesitate, and you’re gone. “Tu karega, doosra bharega,” the song goes, gangsters philosophising without knowing they are philosophising.
The song is a sociological take on a very specific ecosystem. “Din mein kholi raat teen batti pe guzaar di; Thodi chadh gayi toh teen patti mein utaar di (Home by day, the streets by night. Alcohol gets you high and the cards get you down).” The underworld provides a bewildering and barbaric life, but it is a life. An authentic life that the poet records without judgement.
The city in Aamchi Mumbai can be extraordinarily playful. In Bambai, it lies in the water “like a long fish”, its head in the sea and its feet on land. The sea curls around its feet. At high tide, it sneezes. The sun is drunk from the shore like cough syrup. It becomes, finally, a magical island. Elsewhere, the sky is made from the skin of a chameleon; the city turns like a roulette wheel; dreams sprout legs.
I ask him about the gorgeously childlike aspect of his imagery. Buildings wearing steel girders, the sea catching cold, trees developing eczema. Has he consciously guarded this wondrous imagination from the demands placed on writers to become respectable, solemn, serious?
“I wrote that the tree developed eczema because people rub against it before getting on to a bus. They tear off bits of it. Someone chewing paan hurriedly spits it on to the tree. Now personify it and look at it from the tree’s point of view.” He takes a breath. “It is not childish,” he clarifies. “I call it the most responsible thing a human being can do, to understand. The image that seems childlike to you comes after great maturity.”
“There is another poem. A single leaf hangs on a tree. For days, its face has become pale, yellow. A tree with one lone leaf on it. That tree is half-submerged in floodwater, and you do not know how much higher the water will rise. That one leaf says to the tree, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, I am here, don’t be afraid, I am here. Wo ek akela patta uss ped se kehta hai, darna mat, darna mat, main hoon na, darna mat, main hoon na.”
It becomes, then, about the distance between the observer and the observed. Several poems begin with him watching someone on the margins, but somewhere along the way the gaze reverses. The beggar judges him. The footpath judges him. The city appears to be looking back.
“For a writer,” Gulzar says, “it is not only observation. It is living another man’s life, another man’s moment too. Unless you own it, you cannot write about it. You are a writer yourself, you would know. How can you write about a hungry man if you have never been hungry? Your experience is not only yours. It cannot be.”
“It is your medium, and it is your own sensitivity too. How do you own that? Now if you are not a writer and you see a hungry person, will you not help him? You do not have to be a writer to be empathetic.”
*****
When I ask how he sees the city having changed, he smiles. “The police uniforms of that time were blue, which were not very good looking. So we have given the city better-looking uniforms.”
Then, he laments. “The rallies here, the workers’ protests, people like the great trade unionist (Shripad Amrit) Dange sahib used to lead them. There would be workers on both sides and just a line of police. Those peaceful rallies, where workers protested in a city known for its textile mills that supplied textiles to the whole of India, are gone. Even those mills are not there anymore.”
“You might call it progress, industrialisation of another kind. But in those peaceful rallies, poverty was not a source of shame for the workers. There was dignity in it.”
At a time when all our cities are beginning to resemble one another, with the same shops and the same high-rises and the same malls made by the same people, are we in danger of losing the personality of the city? “You are becoming global,” he says, wryly. “You want to be a New Yorker, you want to see New York here. That was not the case earlier. Earlier the city was a beauty in itself. With its own culture. The Irani cafes were a culture.”
“In Delhi, for example, you always had these hand-pumps for the public, for drinking water. Somebody starts the pump and a friend drinks water from the other side. That was daily life. Now in Bombay there were no public drinking fountains or taps where you could go to drink. I never saw that here. But in Bombay, every corner had these Irani hotels, and in those hotels there would be a table with a tray full of glasses. If you were thirsty, you could walk into any Irani hotel, pick up a glass of water, drink it and leave. There was no transaction involved.”
“There were certain things here that other cities did not have. I remember seeing it in films, for instance, that double-decker buses ran here. It was a big thing, yaar, that even a bus had a first floor.”
“Whoever went to Bombay, you were going out to fight, to make a life. Bombay had a sign, a character, a seal. People used to say ‘What will you do after college?’ ‘I want to go to Mumbai.’ And that city has remained progressive all along. If you came as an elder, it treated you like an elder; if you came as a younger person, it treated you like a younger person. It is that kind of a city. It bears with you.”
The idea of this city becoming shorthand for ambition is best explored in Gharaonda, the film he wrote in 1977. It is a film about housing, but that isn’t quite the same thing as saying it is a film about real estate. It is about what happens to young people when a city makes privacy unaffordable, when romance comes easy but a room does not.
The film is crowded with small, sharp observations. Young couples hunt desperately for private spaces where they can be intimate. Strangers on buses casually put arms around one another’s shoulders because the city has made physical proximity routine. Owning a flat in Pali Hill acquires the glow of an almost mythic ambition —one that stays aspirational to this day. Romantic encounters happen on the railway bridge connecting east and west across the Western Express Highway, the city itself becoming part of the courtship.
And then there are the letters home. New arrivals write long letters, full of details, dreams, assurances. The men who have been in Bombay longer know the drill. Don’t waste your time writing so much, say the cynics: eventually you’ll be sending a money order and adding, love to the children.
Bombay takes over. It alters not merely your address but your grammar. A city that changes what you are capable of imagining.
Then, two sides of the same song. Do Deewane Sheher Mein turns togetherness into an urban dream. Two people in a relentless city searching for shelter, for food, for a place that can become an aashiyana. The fantasy is modest, within reach: perhaps two people can make a bustling and sleepless city their own merely by being together.
Then comes Ek Akela Is Shehar Mein. The same city, but experienced solo. The first song imagines the city as a place in which love can create a home. The refrain understands that even in a city packed with people, loneliness can be brutally, all-encompassingly complete. The paired songs are an unusually precise portrait of Bombay’s central contradiction.
It crowds people together. It keeps them apart.
The one. The many. This contrast is explored powerfully—and patriotically—in a new song the poet has written for musicians Sourendro and Soumyojit. It is called Ek Akela Hindustani, Do Mile Toh Hindustan. “Two hands make a clap,” he says, emphasising how India needs to stand together. “One farmer, and one soldier. One Indian feeding another Indian. This should be our voice. A voice for the new India.”
Gulzar remains astonishingly prolific. In one of his rooms, I spot a cardboard box labelled ‘a poem a day.’ He is currently at work on a collection about the environment, called The Book In The Sun, scheduled to come out next year. The stories, after all, will not tell themselves.
*****
In the poem I Am a Mumbaikar: Mumbai Aamchi, Gulzar says he is not the city’s sultan. He has grown up drinking tea in Irani hotels and eating keema pav. He has slept on the steps of Town Hall. When he sleeps face down, the footpath takes him to its breast, and tells him he belongs to Mumbai. “When there is a strike or a hartal,” he writes, “I have played cricket on its empty streets, I have scored sixers in its lanes.” At the Gateway, the sea becomes a playmate.
Mumbai is not his. He is of Mumbai. That distinction becomes important when he talks about what the city has lost.
His poem Skyline looks directly at the new Mumbai. Flyovers rise from the sea as though blue water has grown branches. Machines “darn” the sea with highways. Bridges hang their lace of waves over the water. And after all this, Gulzar says he still likes the old fisherfolk villages beneath the coconut palms. In Haji Ali, the transformation becomes violent. The sea has been broken, like glass. Iron rods cut into it. Cranes tear up the shore. The old vermillion evenings that once lingered on the rocks are carried away with the rubble. “Now flyovers fly past!”
In 2009, when he wrote Dhan Te Nan for Kaminey, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link was coming up, and so in a song studded with observations about the city’s breakneck rush, we have the gorgeously Gulzar-ish idea of “samundar bhi pul pe chale”, an inversion imagining the sea itself above the bridge and the city below it. “Phir tu chale ispe yaa main chalu, sheher ho apne pairon tale.” The fantasy becomes even more interesting. Suddenly the city is beneath your feet. The song becomes about the exhilaration of mastering or temporarily transcending the city.
As a poet, Gulzar has always looked at infrastructure with interest and affection. From trams and double-deckers to railway tracks, footpaths, bridges, windows, signals, waiting rooms. There is a fixation with things that connect, and people being connected by them. In the poem Sea Link, Gulzar turns that infrastructure into one of his strangest emotional metaphors.
Three-and-a-half minutes. That is now enough to cross the sea.
In the poem he imagines what else can happen in that time, that Gauhar Jaan once sang the entire Jogiya raag in three-and-a-half minutes. Minutes that can be enough to end a relationship that lasted years. One person in America, another in India. One telephone call. A minute, a minute and a half. “When I talk about time, I also mean distance.”
“The seas can be shortened sometimes,” he writes in the poem.
I ask if infrastructure might change a city’s emotional tempo, whether speed has changed the way we behave. He refuses the word. “It is not speed,” he says. “There is a hurry, yes. Hurry, hurry, hurry to stay alive.” Living hurriedly, however, is not the same thing as speed. The important thing is not to let an observation disappear.
“I am in a hurry not to let any moment go away.”
Gulzar is careful, however, not to claim innocence. In one of the most moving exchanges in the book, he turns to Mumbai and accusatorily says, “This is not that city where I had come sixty years ago.” To which the city simply points its finger back at him: “You are not the same person who had come here sixty years ago either.”
“The city has a right to tell me that.” This is what saves the memory from sentimentality.
*****
Not a sob story, never a sob story.
Besides the poems, Aamchi Mumbai contains several short stories, most of them bittersweet, several of them heartbreaking. Yet what is remarkable is Gulzar’s restraint. Even when speaking about Partition or riots or death or poverty, trauma is never turned into a spectacle. Emotion is handled with a quiet dignity, never a wail. He is vehemently against mawkish shows of sentiment.
“There is no need for it,” he agrees. “Be realistic, and be realistic from your own point of view. If someone has a great habit of crying, and I do not offer them a shoulder, they can find a pillow to cry into. Yes, I do not over-sentimentalise. Life is so full, there is so much around you. You can go on living every moment.”
This is where Gulzar course-corrects. Wherever there is the tendency for the poet to become grandiose, he finds something small, a light or a clarinet or a coin. A prosaic, specific totem that can hold something meaningful. An object. Kuchh saamaan.
*****
“Literature is a part of history,” Gulzar says, “because literature is a perspective. When I call it history, it is because, as I said earlier, you are not an individual. You are revealing or putting down time from the perspective of the period you are living in. One should be able to feel that in Meera’s era, how the bullock cart used to move on the roads, and the way its whole wooden structure would shake as people sang. If you can do that… Reading should bring that immediacy.”
“Literature is a social history of the people, not of kings and rulers. That is the most important part,” he emphasises. “History is not made only by the lives of the emperors. You cannot understand it unless you know the history of the people of the time. So I am one of those people who will put back whatever has been lost from the room.”
We belong to the city like it belongs to us. It has fed us, bruised us, housed us, changed us. And then, if Gulzar is right, it has one final demand: Look at me. Before I change again. Before you change again. Before all the Irani hotels become photographs. Before the mangroves become towers. Before the football grounds become convention centres. Before the person beside you walks out of your life. Before the moment disappears.
Gulzar has not tried to preserve Mumbai as a monument.
He has spent a lifetime preserving the things that history is most likely to discard because they seem too small to matter. The punched hole in the ticket. The private joke. The pidgin phrase. The hand on a stranger’s shoulder. The room somebody could not afford. The long letter that became a money order. The memories that spilled out of the envelope. The things people leave behind. The things a city leaves behind in you.
Raja Sen is a Lounge columnist.