Tha house of my childhood by dilip chitra the them of tha poem
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Moloch, as we all know, was the Canaanite idol to whom childr en were sacniced, often
as burnt offenngs In 1996, when my Geman nend Henning Stegmull er and I made a
film on Mumbai for Second German Televiion for their series on emerging megacities
Hennang thought of the title Geliebte Moloch to evoke the spint of Bombay
Yet this tatle is not how he, a sympathetic outsider, saw the aty While making the fim, I
interviewed on camera a cross-section of Bombayites asking them very smple questions
When did you first come to Bombay What made you come here? How do you find life
here? What do you thunk of the future of thas caty7 As we went around the caty. captunng
its hyperactive spinit in its myn ad moving images, we accosted vendors, small
shopkeepers, bollywood superstars aænd film directors, prostututes, business executives, ad
ilm makers, wnters and intell e ctuals, hospital nurses, butchers, ishmengers-an entire
random cross-section of people at work and people on the move, and some temporanily
resting Most of them were unanimous in expressing their fatal atracti on to India's Big
Apple Or should one change the metaphor and call it India's Hapus Mango0?
I myself have had a lifelong love-hate relationship wth the city I was not born here but
my father was My grandfather made a fortune here in his rather bnieflife that ended
abruptly in the early 1920s He was the only one in my famaly (-- that hals from the
Konkan coast but sought to make a living in the pnincely state of Baroda where my
grandfather, faced wath the prospect of feedang a lage famuly on a small piece ofland
granted to his amcestors by Shivayı the Great, migrated-)to make a fínanaal success
My father re-emigrated to Maharashtra from Gujarat, to Bambay whi ch then was the
capital of both the present states and parts of Kanatakca as well Anyone who is nealy
broke anywhere in the subcontinent thinks of resurecting personal fortune in this
legendary aty t is the poor man's ultimate casino and his last roll of the dice
I came to Bombay in 1951-52 at the age of twelve, on the verge of adol escence I came to
Bombay with my younger brother in advance of the rest of the famaly to start schooling in
anew environment I lived with my father's elder sister's family in Dadar and went to the
Indian Education Society's Boys' High School known simply as 'Pnto Villa' after the
building that housed it This was near the magnificent landmaæk Portuguese Church
hentage building since replaced by one of Charles Corea's early architectural
experiments. The next year, my family moved into Bambay in afat in a newly
constructed building at Sion, which was then in the process ofrehabilitating parttion
refugees from Sind Sion and Chembur were then small outposts on the fringe of the
compact isl and aity, still very colonial in its downtown twlight of Bntish India's Urbs
Prima Iindica The population of Bombay was then barely around 300,000, less than a
fourth of the current sgure