The Spirit of Bombay Past: Book Review of Saleem Peeradina’s The Ocean In My Yard
This review first appeared in HT.
The Ocean in My Yard
Saleem Peeradina
Penguin India; 230 pgs; Rs 250
Books on Mumbai are rare; books on Bombay are even rarer.
The Ocean in My Yard is that rarest of rarities: a well written book on Bombay, the city that was and in some ways, is no more, subsumed by the garbage-strewn, slum-overrun, Share Bazaar and Bollywood-bullied megapolis by the sea that has sprung up in its place like a toxic weed that overwhelmed an untended garden.
This memoir by poet Peeradina, best known for his anthology of Indian poetry in English as well as for his own verse, is a welcome addition to the small but growing sub-genre of ‘growing up xyz in Bombay in the xxxties’.
(You substitute a descriptive term such as Parsi, Anglo-Indian, Female, Gay, Rich, Ugly, etc in the first blank and the decade in the second.)
Ardeshir Vakil’s Beach Boy is one of the better examples of this category, and comes repeatedly to mind while reading this slender, exquisitely detailed, poetically prosaic account of Salim Peeradina’s childhood and adolescent years in the western metroplis by the sea.
There are several others that also come to mind, notably Rushdie’s repeated mining of the same territory, in Midnight’s Children, and in the same locality in sections of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but Rushdie stands, as always, in a class of his own.
In any case, the superficial similarities extend only to the neighbourhood in which other authors of similarly autobiographical novels spent their ‘coming-of-age’ years: e.g. Juhu-Vile Parle, in Vakil’s case, and Juhu-Versova-Andheri in Peeradina’s case.
Like Vakil’s charming Parsi-bawa-boy autobiographical romp, Peeradina’s graceful memoir is as much about himself as about the neighbourhood and the city within which he grew to adulthood.
And Peeradina being a wholly original person with a uniquely poetic point of view, Ocean turns out to be a delightfully quirky and invidualistic work which stands up in its own right.
The cover, beautifully designed and illustrated, perfectly illustrates the languid ‘old-Bombay’ feel of the text, split into numerous little chapters with quaint poetic titles.
Starting with an entire chapter on his feet and its various inefficiencies and deficiencies, he sets the tone for a highly introspective series of episodic reminiscences, coloured by an unabashedly self-aware perspective.
As with all memoirs of this kind, you have to like the person telling the story.
Peeradina’s style helps somewhat; sprinkled throughout with quotations from old Hindi film songs and verses or even entire poems from his own ouevre, it stays almost entirely in the author’s head.
This is a first-person book like a film shot entirely from a single point-of-view.
At no point does Peeradina ‘cut away’ to more panoramic ‘shots’ or more sweeping ‘scenes’ depicting the city, or aspects of life in the city. It’s entirely ‘I went there, then did this, and then I felt that.’
For this reason, it’s a book best dipped into, or read at leisure, Sunday-afternoon reading, with a cup of tea by your side–paani-kum chai, preferably, like the title of a chapter in the book.
Or even better, a perfect book to read in one of the city’s old Irani cafes, if you can still find one, where another late great Indian English poet, Nissim Ezekiel, was wont to do his reading.
I won’t try to summarize all the stories and escapades Peeradina describes.
His was not an atypical childhood: middle class, suburban, Muslim but quite cosmopolitan in social interaction, stricken by the usual boyish and adolescent pangs of lust, longing, and alienation.
Nothing truly extraordinary happens, and the only ‘adventures’ that young Salim experiences are the kind most of experienced: climbing on a stool to fetch the ilicit copy of 1001 Nights hidden on top of a cupboard by his father, reading through Carter Brown novels for the steamy bits, admiring girl-conquering young rakes like his uncle, and the already-notorious Alyque Padamsee, watching his uncle photograph nudes surreptiously.
This is an artist’s and poet’s memoir, so in place of the heated masturbations and lustful encounters you might expect, there’s a gentleness pervading the whole text, an inward-turned consciousness that is less preoccupied by salacious details than the feel of young female buttocks under cotton panties in an erotic encounter than by the emotional and psychological effect of those experiences.
Peeradina details his pain at his father’s growing alienation from him, and from the family, and later, the self-motivated decision to rise above his roots and inherited emotional liabilities to strike his own path.
In the end, he ‘comes of age’, quoting Alfred Adler and taking the almost-cliché flight to the promised land, USA, where, one notes in his brief author bio at the start of the book, he lives and teaches even now.
Perhaps it’s necessary to have flown away to be able to look back with such tender nostalgia, mercifully devoid of sentimentalism, and write about past decades spent lounging about lazily in a city that seems now like a distant relative, thrice removed, from the Mumbai we now inhabit.
Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vakil, Mistry, and most other Bombay novelists all had to leave physically before they could ‘return’ through their writing.
One wonders whether, if Peeradina had been still living in today’s flood-ravaged Page 3-maddened Mumbai, he would still be able to cast such an unblemished gaze at the past, eschewing the gritty, sodden reality of the present to dwell nostalgically, wistfully on those bygone days.
One doubts it.
But on the other hand, since that Bombay is truly dead and gone, at least we can revisit it, however briefly, in books like this one.
