Melting pot, cusspot Mumbai

mumbai: mumbai, city of difference and diversity, converges at the most unexpected points. people from varied cultures, professions, and that ultimate dividing factor, economic class,become suddenly alike in the strangest ways. recently, a single word jumped me with a startling sense of deja vu. i had certainly heard this one before. here’s my story.on a hot day in the summer of 1999, i was reclining rather uncomfortably on a classroom bench at a santa cruz municipal school. i should have been listening to my social-worker friend and her team of teachers discuss the ups and downs of non-formal primary education. i was watching the kids instead. between the age of five and 12, the skinny scholars wriggled in restless groups on the floor, lying on benches one minute, jumping off them the next, running up and down, in and out the door, dimpling, giggling, screaming. it was a pandemonium that only the very young, turned completely loose, can create. it raised the roof of the dingy green-walled classroom we were in, in which, apart from a hand-drawn poster of an unusually fat and misshapen india, was a board with this cryptic declaration—a dog is better than a dead lion. the children, understandably, ignored it. this was a classroom run by an ngo for children who’d either never been to school or had dropped out of the education system, kids who we’d otherwise see idling or earning their keep in slums around this very school. instead, here they were — painstakingly climbing the first hill, scraping a pencil tip up the ‘l’ of learning. as i watched, one little girl with long, scraggly hair, vigorously pummelled a boy smaller than her. rather weakly, he hit back. then her mouth formed a word that life’s censors, had they existed, would certainly have beeped out. i won’t pen her mouthings. suffice it to say it had much to do with a female sibling and procreative action. i didn’t hear the word. the earshattering din of primary school at play rung it out. but i saw the word form a stencilled bubble in the air. it hung over the playingquarrelling children in full view of me. it did a cheeky dance. i kept watching the angry, oblivious child who was its parent. i sat there, my breath held, to see if more expletives would spit forth to sit atop the shoulders of this one, much like gangs of boys who climb onto each other to break matkas at janmashtami. am i a prude? well, i’d never seen a child that small talk that pretty. where i come from, six-yearold speech is pastel-coloured, not suddenly unsheathed in blood red. or so i thought, until a month ago. my niece’s birthday party was celebrated at a large upmarket apartment in the western suburbs. the crowd? mostly adult, upcoming film actors, writers and directors who talked about tv shows and films and compared notes on their kids’ first teething troubles.and then in one of those sudden conversational lulls, a hyperactive three-year-old loudly instructed her parent, “gubbara de, b—— c—-!’’ age no bar. class no bar. language no bar at all. i can see it happening. mumbai’s tiny talkers painting the town from its swish southern tip to its unswish slum toe the same vivid shade of red. (this weekly column aims to capture that quintessentially mumbai state of mind.)