Thirteen years ago, I stood at Churchgate station, the last stop (or first, if you’re a ‘townie’) on Mumbai’s Western Railway line. With the goggle-eyed wonder of a child witnessing his first horror film, I’d wait for it. The show played on loop: seasoned commuters sounded off war cries, guttural shrieks of conquest, as they boarded and leapt off incoming trains. “They’re called ‘locals’,” she instructed me. It was my first year in the city. This wise girl, one of my new ‘local’ classmates, was accompanying me back to the suburbs. “Let me guess. You live in Vile Parle?” How did she know which precise city suburb a Gujarati boy would occupy?
Hold your pockets, don’t stand at the door (“what door?”), notice the first-class stripes, don’t enter the ladies’ compartment, she reeled off, as if I were a pale-faced Eilis Lacey (an Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan, in Brooklyn ) to her experienced Georgina (Eva Birthistle) on the stormy ship to 1950s America. For that hour, I belonged; I wasn’t a geographical orphan anymore.
Deep inside, though, I knew that — to paraphrase Eilis, the bright-eyed Irish migrant in New York’s titular borough — my body was here, but my soul remained halfway across the country. Back in Ahmedabad, back…home. No amount of violent train rides and cool colleges would change that.
Mumbai still felt temporary; like one of the 13 stops on that local. It was only the place I was studying in, soon to work and evolve in, soon to build a life and future in. But it didn’t have a past yet.
Hindi cinema of the 90s, my loyal comrade, invariably backed my brooding perspective on homesickness: Mumbai was, at that point, the metaphorical equivalent of Bollywood’s ‘America’. In Rishi Kapoor’s Aa Ab Laut Chalein , New York is the quintessential anti-home; a culturally devoid space positioned to drive home India’s inherent earnestness. Ambitious protagonist Rohan (Akshaye Khanna) is turned off by gold-diggers (Suman Ranganathan) and rampant capitalism, only to return, baggage and lady love (Aishwarya Rai) in tow.
But the other end (and most common angle, I suspect) of the immigrant story lies in the tragicomic plight of Rohan’s generous hosts, an Indo-Pakistani cab-driver duo (Kader Khan, Jaspal Bhatti). Forever wistful, not entirely happy, and in their struggle to survive, they’re yet to discover that — like every misty-eyed expatriate veteran that Eilis volunteers to serve at an Irish charity dinner — their beloved roots have quietly blossomed into American trees. They could well be residents of London’s Southall or Toronto’s Scarborough, clinging onto illusions of home, not realising that trailing the umbilical cord takes them nowhere; it’s the incubator that truly sustains life.
While Amrish Puri belts out ‘ Yeh Mera India ’ in Subhash Ghai’s chest-beating Pardes , America is personified by the loose NRI, Rajiv (Apurva Agnihotri), who smokes, drinks and likes his ladies. Village belle Ganga (Mahima Chaudhry) is confronted with stiff brown Californian faces, before being whisked away by Arjun (Shah Rukh Khan) to the fields of Punjab.
Soon, every seemingly sorted NRI would succumb to the earthy scents of the patriotic powers that be: from the coming-of-age Mohan Bhargava (Khan, again) in Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Swades to an irritable Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) in Delhi-6 . Even supporting characters would lose out to home-grown romances: smiley-faced Ajay (Akshay Kumar, in Dil Toh Pagal Hai ) fails to break the Rahul-Pooja stranglehold, and boss-man Prem (Bachchan, in Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon ) is unable to penetrate hyper-lovesick Prem’s (Hrithik) immortally loud courtship with Sanjana (Kareena Kapoor).
Mumbai, therefore, had to lose out eventually. Ahmedabad was my hero, the mother, the ‘ desh kimitti ’, and the familiar winds of un-change I’d return, nay, escape to, when the big bad city overwhelmed me.
On an unplanned trip back, Eilis meets wealthy Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), an Irishman whose greatest fear, and comfortable reality, is never leaving Ireland. “You must think we’re backward now,” he remarks half-jokingly, eliciting from her the kind of modest shrug I, and many who shift base to explore opportunity, am all too familiar with. Whenever I’d return, it was with a preconceived aura: of embracing, and ‘surviving’, a mythical life few others knew of, like a scarred soldier revisiting civilian ways. Friends looked at me differently, which made me feel different and not quite local anymore.
As I drifted further, I’d find excuses — like Eilis searched for, with Jim, despite secretly marrying an Italian-American plumber (dewy-eyed Emory Cohen) — to call Ahmedabad my home. I’d occasionally find long-distance love, my conscience made fragile by the solitary existence of a parent there. I fretted about my father’s suppressed sense of martyrdom, best represented by an isolated shot of Eilis’s brave sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), silently weeping through her letters at a park bench. “I have nobody left,” sobs Eilis’s grieving mother (Jane Brennan) after Rose’s death — every displaced child’s worst nightmare — in a voice that suggests forsaking selflessness isn’t the same as exercising selfishness. Abandonment guilt is oft a one-way street, until the fear of irrevocable loneliness quashes unconditional motherhood.
Eilis is finally reminded of why she originally left Ireland, and what “this town is really like,” when her nosy ex-boss threatens to reveal her hidden identity: that of a married American. It’s the stifling tone, the aimless small-mindedness that tips her over. Similarly, I discovered on a recent visit why I simply go (and don’t ‘go back’ ) to Ahmedabad lately; all it took was a set of gossipy backstabbing housewives. Echoing Eilis’s clear words, I caught myself thinking about something else, someone who had no connection to this past. “I’m going back home tomorrow,” I had declared. Because, right then, as now, for as far as I looked back, my history — my memories, moments, successes, failures, advent of adulthood — ends here, in this city. It was never Mumbai that needed to accommodate me, but Ahmedabad that needed to stop doing it.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the two biggest hits of my teen years had, surreptitiously, slipped in fleeting glimpses of contemporary progression. In Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge , Raj yanks Simran onto the train after a happy ending, and they’re actually heading back to London, his home, their real and only life. In Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai , Rohit’s hunky doppelganger, Raj (Hrithik), takes a wilting Sonia (Ameesha Patel) back to New Zealand after avenging her ex’s death. In both cases, they return to adopted environments, without patronising the home-away fissure. This isn’t modernity trumping tradition, simply practicality unlocking the shackles of nostalgia.
Recently, a nervous-looking newbie boarded a Churchgate-bound local with me. He asked around about the sequence of stops ahead. I knew that face. For some reason, I felt protective of him. For some reason, akin to Eilis’s hardened advice to a frightened girl on the ship ‘back’ to Brooklyn, I wanted to tell him: Visit home, only so you can make another. For this is where your life will be; only because your heart won’t belong elsewhere anymore.
The writer is a freelance film critic and habitual solo traveller
