Bombay/Mumbai: Beloved Moloch

--by Dilip Chitre

Moloch, as we all know, was the Canaanite idol to whom children were sacrificed, often
as burnt offerings. In 1996, when my German friend Henning Stegmuller and I made a
film on Mumbai for Second German Television for their series on emerging megacities,
Henning thought of the title Geliebte Moloch to evoke the spirit of Bombay.

Yet this title is not how he, a sympathetic outsider, saw the city. While making the film, I
interviewed on camera a cross-section of Bombayites asking them very simple questions:
When did you first come to Bombay? What made you come here? How do you find life
here? What do you think of the future of this city? As we went around the city, capturing
its hyperactive spirit in its myriad moving images, we accosted vendors, small
shopkeepers, bollywood superstars and film directors, prostitutes, business executives, ad
film makers, writers and intellectuals, hospital nurses, butchers, fishmongers---an entire
random cross-section of people at work and people on the move, and some temporarily
resting. Most of them were unanimous in expressing their fatal attraction to India’s Big
Apple. Or should one change the metaphor and call it India’s Hapus Mango?

I myself have had a lifelong love-hate relationship with the city. I was not born here but
my father was. My grandfather made a fortune here in his rather brief life that ended
abruptly in the early 1920s. He was the only one in my family (--- that hails from the
Konkan coast but sought to make a living in the princely state of Baroda where my
grandfather, faced with the prospect of feeding a large family on a small piece of land
granted to his ancestors by Shivaji the Great, migrated--)-to make a financial success.

My father re-emigrated to Maharashtra from Gujarat, to Bombay which then was the
capital of both the present states and parts of Karnataka as well. Anyone who is nearly
broke anywhere in the subcontinent thinks of resurrecting personal fortune in this
legendary city. It 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 adolescence. I came to
Bombay with my younger brother in advance of the rest of the family to start schooling in
a new 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 ‘Pinto Villa’ after the
building that housed it. This was near the magnificent landmark Portuguese Church, a
heritage building since replaced by one of Charles Correa’s early architectural
experiments. The next year, my family moved into Bombay in a flat in a newly
constructed building at Sion, which was then in the process of rehabilitating partition
refugees from Sind. Sion and Chembur were then small outposts on the fringe of the
compact island city, still very colonial in its downtown twilight of British India’s Urbs
Prima Indica. The population of Bombay was then barely around 300,000, less than a
fourth of the current figure.
Until then, I had seen Bombay with only the eyes of a visiting child from the idyllic town
of Baroda where we owned a large house on a hill, walled by a circular vada housing our
poorer tenants who made us feel rich and aristocratic. In front of our house was a
majestic aged banyan and a tall, flourishing neem. Adjacent to it was my father’s printing
press. In front of the vada was a predominantly brahmin middle-class neighbourhood,
mostly R>S.S. and Hindu Mahasabha types. Behind the vada was a colony of bhois,
fisherfolk who spoke their own mixed Hindi-Gujarati dialect. Baroda was then the
beautiful capital city of the progressive Maratha chieftains, the Gaekwars. It had palaces,
museums, public libraries, playgrounds and parks, and some of the finest colleges in
India. It had a lively cultural life but had a leisurely pace and a rare sense of communal
amity.

Coming to Bombay as a visitor from Baroda was like entering a foreign city. One arrived
by railway, by what was then the Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway---the
B.B.C.I. for short. It is now the Western Railway. When we took the night train from
Baroda to Bombay, we stayed awake and glued to the window seat if we were lucky to
find one vacant. The stations slid past in succession with brief halts. At Broach (the
British spelling) we crossed the great Narmada river; at Surat, the Tapti ( again the British
spelling). Then Bulsar, and Palghar, where passengers had their morning tea. Soon, as it
started getting light, began the prelude to Bombay. Electric suburban trains shot past us
after Bassein ( Vasai) and Borivali. We passed creeks and salt pans. Then we passed
Andheri and Bandra and started getting ready to get off at Dadar, where our relatives and
local hosts lived. On the platform, we found people whose body language was strikingly
different. All of them were in a hurry and all of them were very decisive and directed.
Sprawling chawls loomed into view as we, wide-eyed and feeling like country bumpkins
lost in the disciplined jostle of the big city, stepped outside the station.

Rides on the suburban trains, the electric-engined ‘locals’, were a thrill. Going to Marine
Lines to see an English movie at the Metro Cinema, with its MGM lion roaring at the
start of the main movie, was a highlight. Visiting erstwhile British department Stores such
as Whiteway and Laidlaw, Evans Fraser, The Army and Navy Stores was dazzling.
Going to the Brabourne Stadium to watch the West Indies play India was like witnessing
a great Shakespearean production in London. Eating cakes and pastries at Mongini’s or
snacks at Bombelli’s and bhel at Girgaum chowpatty was something to write home about.
Rding the top deck of the famous red double-deckers of the B.E.& S.T.. was another
thrill, as was the tramcar ride from King’s Circle or Dadar Tram Terminus all the way to
the Sassoon Dock. During the last fifty years, most of these features of the Bombay of my
childhood have disappeared or have changed beyond recognition.

Growing up in Bombay was another experience that was, in future, my education for
being able to handle any city anywhere in the world: and among them some of the biggest
in the West and the East such as New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again), Hong Kong,
Bangkok, or Tokyo; and smaller ones like Frankfurt, Munich, Nantes, Kiev, Tblisi,
Budapest, Addis Ababa, Venice, Brussels, Amsterdam; and most major cities in India
itself with the notable exception of Kolkata that, my Bangla friends would say, still leaves
me uneducated.

By the time we moved from a fairly spacious flat in Sion to part of a small flat in a lower
middle-class building in South Dadar, my mother gave birth to the last of the seven
children headed by me, a brother who is almost seventeen years younger. Including my
paternal grandmother, we were ten people living in one large room, a kitchen, and a
balcony, and sharing the bathroom and the toilet with a bachelor friend of the family who
practised criminal law and had desperate clients mostly from poor backgrounds. For
some time, I missed the luxurious privacy and leisurely pace of my pre-pubertal life in
Baroda. Bombay shrank my personal space to a critical minimum.

The Dadar Hindu Crematorium (it is actually called the Mahim Hindu Smashanbhoomi)
was a few minutes walk from my house. From the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-
two, this was the place where I found the peace and the quiet to read books, and even to
write. Occasional funerals, sometimes with noisy mourners, brought me out of texts into
the real world. At night, burning fires looked deceptively like distant bonfires and one
was often reminded of the Bhagvatgeeta’s assurance about the immortality of Self-
Awareness,”Weapons cannot cut it up; fire cannot put it out” while the mortal remains of
another human individual turned into smoke and withered away, leaving enough ash to
perform the next rites. My college library and the university library by the Rajabai Tower
downtown were somewhat less funereal places of scholarly refuge for me. No wonder I
dropped out of my Masters course and plunged into my life of a rolling stone, a nomad on
his own with no tribe to accompany except the girl I married and carried along with me
as I moved from one job to another, one country to another, imagining myself to be a poet
and a writer and an artist with an inexplicable mission.

The very first friends I made in my first school in Bombay at Dadar, revealed to me the
fascinating underworld of Bombay. Though I was no sexual innocent since the ripe age of
three, having played all sorts of naughty games with like-minded kids of either sex,
Bombay brought home to me the sordid, exploitative, sinister aspects of the human trade
called love. Some of my older schoolmates showed me my first dirty postcards and
pornographic books and told me about their adventurous visits to brothels in Central
Bombay or about their clandestine affairs with horny females whom they screwed in such
unromantic and unlikely places as common toilets and bathrooms in chawls, behind water
storage tanks on the terraces of buildings, dark corridors or deserted lanes, stairwells,
warehouses, milk-booths, and yes---even crematoriums. The slightly more pleasant but
risky venues were seashores, family-rooms in restaurants, cinema halls, unrepaired cars
in garages, and some unvisited public parks in distant suburbs. The kind of sex they had
constantly on their minds was like chronic starvation in a city full of eateries. So the
sexual dhabas in the red light neighbourhoods like Kamatipura were places that made
them, in a manner of speaking, drool. This revolted me. Even today, when I tour these
areas with friends like the poet Namdeo Dhasal who grew up in one such neighbourhood,
instead of feeling sexually aroused, I feel humiliated and depressed and experience
overwhelming compassion and helplessness at the same time. I had my first glimpses of
this side of Bombay as a schoolboy.
My second school in Bombay was in Sion but just at the edge of Dharavi, which was then
more like a dalit village with leather-craftsmen from rural Maharashtra and other
labourers mostly from the South lived. More than fifty per cent of my schoolmates were
from the low castes and the working class while the rest were rich or middle-class
Hindus. There was a built-in polarity in this mix, but I had a marginally greater number
of friends among the Dharavi dwellers. My family never practised untouchability. We ate
meat and fish at home and had non-Hindu as well as low-caste Hindu visitors with whom
we shared food and fun. Dalits who went to school were all inspired by their role model,
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, who was then alive. They were serious about learning as the
only means of self-liberation and transformation into members of a modern, equitable,
integrated society. My Dalit friends showed greater social awareness and purposiveness
than their upper-caste counterparts and discussed current politics and issues about which
they eagerly sought information.

As the cliché goes, Bombay is a cosmopolitan city, and it is perhaps the most
cosmopolitan in the whole of South Asia, if not of all Asia. Marathi chroniclers and
historians of Bombay have left well-informed and perceptive accounts of the city’s
evolution ever since it was a Portuguese colony in the 16th century, a mere village
inhabited mostly by kolis, aagris, bhandaaris, and paachkalshis---all of them coastal
communities who lived off the sea and its backwaters on these richly forested tropical
offshore islands with a natural port that proved a turning point in its destiny. The Suez
canal was the big break Bombay needed. It brought it close to Europe and it also boosted
its traditional sea-trade with the Arabian sea and the Persian Gulf countries as well as
with the entire East coast of Africa. It became the Gateway of India and the premier city
of the entire subcontinent, linked already with Central Asia beyond the Khyber Pass and
to Tibet across the Himalayas. Bombay’s commerce attracted people from all these near
and far points of contact, creating its unique multi-ethnic social fabric and its fascinating
culture of a port and a modern trading centre. But this is no place to succumb to the
temptation of going to the city’s vivid and revealing history. It is enough here to define its
ethos and its spirit that has seduced many and among them writers and artists, too.

The commercial film industry of Bombay, of late given the semi-derisive name
‘Bollywood’, has lured talent from the East ( its one-time rival Calcutta), from the North
( Lahore, for example), and the South ( its former follower Madras that has now
surpassed it as a technologically and commercially competitive rival) and that includes
some outstanding literary names such as S’aadat Hasan Manto and Rajinder Singh Bedi,
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sahir Ludhianvi, Ramanand Sagar ( whose Aur Insaan Mar Gayaa
remains one of the most memorable literary documents of the Partition), Kaifi Azmi, Ali
Sardar Jafri, Abrar Alvi---to name just a few. The world-class film-maker Ritwick Ghatak
worked briefly for Bimal Roy in Bombay as a screenplaywright. Although there is no
native F.Scott Fitzgerald in this list, Bollywood can claim a few literary victims too;
writers whom the fatal attraction of a mass-appealing, popular, new medium destroyed.
Manto was saved.
But Rajinder Singh Bedi was not. And K.A. Abbas succumbed. The literary promise of
Bunny Reuben remained unfulfilled.
Next to Bollywood, the other fatal attraction in Bombay for creative writers has been
Bombay’s advertising industry and its state-of –the art electronic boss---television.
Making a fast buck has its Mephistophelean gurus here who were once promising writers
and poets but soon opted to be star copywriters or swift serial-churners. This list is long
and could have contained some might-have-been illustrious names. It only hurts me to
think of them all as a friend and a fellow-Bombayite ( I quit the city sixteen years ago,
literally by accident, but I remain within commuting distance, thanks to technology).

Among the two gifted creative writers whom neither Bombay nor its rollercoasting
advertising world could demolish are Arun Kolatkar, and Kiran Nagarkar, Anglo-Marathi
poet and novelist respectively. Arun remains a pioneering Marathi poet and a major
English poet in that language with the fuzziest of literary frontiers. He is still writing,
though not publishing much, and like the Marathi novelist Bhalchandra Nemade, has
acquired a J.D.Salinger-like reputation for remaining in hiding and giving rise to much
speculation about his rumoured work in progress. Arun is not only a Bombay poet but
also a poet of Bombay. If a Mumbaipurana were to be compiled in the future, his literary
re-creation of the city of his own time is sure to find a prominent place in it.

Kiran Nagarkar’s first Marathi novel (since translated into English but the venture was
like an attempt to translate James Joyce or G.V.Desani) Saat Sakkam Trechaalis is an
amazing tour de force. But despite its highbrow publisher and heavyweight blurbwriters,
it failed to make an impact comparable to, say, Bhalchandra Nemade’s Koslaa (again,
indifferently translated into English so the reader cannot understand why it is a
contemporary Marathi classic), which has been a cult classic and twenty-five years after
its publication, now even a best-seller. A lukewarm response from the Marathi literary
world may not have been the only reason why Kiran focussed on his other-tongue,
English and recently produced in succession Ravan and Eddie and The Cuckold. If Coke
and Pepsi were invented in India and if Thums Up or Duke’s Soda were its American
competitors, you know who would be a marketing success and why. That is our position
in the global literary market, not our real stature in the world of literature. I hope my
fellow-poets and writers in Bombay, and elsewhere in India, are listening.

There is another pair of Anglo-Marathi writers from Bombay, whose cases are worth
noting here. They are Vilas Sarang and Damodar Prabhu. The Marathi literary world is
still not really ready for them. Sarang’s short fiction was admired by no less a writer than
Samuel Beckett; and when his collection Fair Tree of the Void was published by Penguin
Books(India) some years ago, Vikram Seth spoke highly of it in a popular English
newsmagazine published from Delhi. The book is out of print but no reprint seems to be
in the offing. Sarang’s book is a translation of his short stories originally written and
published in Marathi, and published only recently as a book in Marathi, long after the
publication of the English edition! Damodar Prabhu’s case is even more revealing. His
Marathi poems and short stories appeared in Marathi little magazines in the late 1960s
and in the 1970s. His original English fiction made a brief flash in Debonair in the 1980s.
He has two outstanding novels in English that remain unpublished. An Anglo-Marathi
writer of original and engaging fiction, bizarre but extremely funny, and deep without
being overburdened, is not even in a street-map of literary Bombay. As a matter of
information, he lives in Kurla East which is not to be confused with Key West.

Bombay has writers in its nooks and corners and some of them are damn good. They
write in English, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Panjabi,
and many other Indian, or perhaps even foreign languages. But Bombay has no lively
literary scene, unless mournful or despondent congregations of poet’s clubs and painters’
literary seances are seen as signs of life. To me it looks like rigor mortis---that clenched
fist being no revolutionary gesture.

But it hardly matters. Bombayites, even writers, know how to survive even if, at times
they cannot choose what to survive. Fatwah and exile notwithstanding, isn’t Salman
Rushdie still the secret role model for Bombay’s writers? I am now in Pune, having made
my peace.

I grew up in Bombay and Bombay kept growing on me in turn. The city of my

adolescene has aged despite cosmetic surgery and architectural rejuvenants. But I have
aged, too, and cannot complain. Landmarks vanish from one’s life like old flames and
remembered mistresses.

At one time, Bombay’s working-class and filthy-ghettoed neighbourhoods were at its

centre, around the big railway stations of Bombay Central and Byculla, to the East of
Charni Road station and upto Masjid Bunder. The Marathi middle-class created its rival
of Pune around Girgaum; the Gujaratis created their substitute for Ahmedabad and Surat
around Kalbadevi. The Muslims congregated around Bhendi Bazaar; the Anglo-Indians,
the Bene Israelis, and the Catholics as well as the Protestants huddled together at
Mazgaon. But the working –class that consisted largely of textile millhands spread
themselves out around those textile mill chimneys at Lalbaug and Elphinstone Road. The
Victoria Gardens Zoo, now renamed Jijamata Udyan by patriotic Maharashtrians, was a
ghetto for an exotic ensemble of animals other than humans and the poor of Bombay
flocked there to feel momentarily superior to other species, taking a break from the
human condition.

As a youngster, I learnt Bombay on foot. Walking around in different neighbourhoods

was my great pastime. This has produced continuing resonances in both my poetry and
my fiction. At the age of seventeen, I embarked upon a work of fiction inspired by James
Joyce, a stream-of-consciousness novel evoking the diurnal rhythm of life in Bombay. It
was called the galloping god. I haven’t yet abandoned it though now only fragments of
the manuscript survive in my literary junkbox. The central metaphor and leitmotif of that
novel was that of the sacrificial horse of the Hindu Kings of yore, who was to be
executed in the ashwamedh yajna. The human narrator-protagonist of the novel walks
around the city for twenty four hours, roaming to claim territory on behalf of an invisible
God-King who would be ruler of the whole earth He surveys, an almighty samraat.

My early Marathi and English poems too evoke the island city in oblique or more direct
ways. I was a street-smart city boy who studied English literature in the company of
assorted upper-class chirpy females some of whom oozed inaccessible sex; but at night
the same kid, in the company of his home-grown plebian and pure desi
contemporaries,clandestinely combed forbidden territories.

Bombay has a daunting text and hazardous sub-texts. Like all great cities, Bombay is a
many-layered city or, to change the metaphor, a labyrinth, or a maze. It has its own myths
for both insiders and outsiders; it has its own legend and fiction.

When my German photographer friend Henning Stegmuller conceived a book of black-

and -white photographs of Bombay, he wanted me to comb my city with him and guide
him through it. Then he developed the idea further and decided to include some of my
own poems, and some of Namdeo Dhasal’s, as an integral part of the projected book.
Finally, we decided to include, by way of an introduction, an interview of Namdeo and
me on the future of Bombay after the terrible pogroms (riots is a euphemism of all who
know what really happened or can read the Shrikrishna Commission Report) and the
political swing towards fascism that followed, and the counter-terrorist bombings that
shook everyone who had believed in the resilient cosmopolitan spirit of their city.

Ironically, Namdeo Dhasal became a political ally of the Shiv Sena after the book was
published in Germany under the title BOMBAY/MUMBAI Bilder einer Mega-Stadt
( BOMBAY/MUMBAI Picture Book of A Megacity.). The same Namedeo Dhasal was
hounded, hunted, and stalked during those riots by people supposedly swearing
allegiance to his future political big brother. I have faced many awkward questions about
this from friends in India and Germany whom I have a hard time explaining that I am a
close friend of the outstanding contemporary Marathi poet Namdeo Dhasal and not a
political spokesman of the Namdeo Dhasal whose politics are no different from those of
his political contemporaries with very few exceptions.

My wandering with Henning from Sassoon Dock Colaba to Film City Goregaon was,
however, a journey through the city’s present to my personal relationship with its
landmarks recorded four decades earlier. Some of what I remembered had simply
vanished. Some of it was in a state of irreparable decay. Some was ruined ; some
dilapidated. Some was being vigorously demolished. While neighbourhoods like
Mhatarpakhadi near Mazgaon had somehow withstood the ravages of time, the working-
class neighbourhoods of Lalbaug, Kala Chowki, and near Worli were already being
replaced by posh high-rise buildings, both commercial and residential. Their identity was
being altered. In the process, thousands of families seemed to have evacuated their homes
of generations. The textile industry itself was decamping after more than a century,
making way for offices and shops and even bowling alleys and pubs. My German friend
had not seen the Bombay in which I grew up. He was witnessing a city under
reconstruction. We photographed the wholesale vegetable market at Byculla, still
swarming with people, when it was already announced that it would be shifted. This
meant that the thousands of mathadi workers whose makeshift huts and tents stood on
D’Mellow Road and elsewhere nearby, would have to move,too. They would be driven
out of the centre of the old city like herds of animals. Another demographic miracle of
development would be accomplished. Another political restructuring of a major
constituency would be achieved. The ubiquitous poor would be made to disappear from
an emerging Singapore-like spit-and-polish urban landscape. In its sociological
implications, this was no less catastrophic than a severe earthquake shaking a dense
population out of life itself as they had known it. There would no longer be the smell of
sweat and the stink of exploitation here, to be sure. But they would only be shoved under
some other carpet in the expanding megacity.

People keep arriving in Bombay from all over the subcontinent all the time in search of
bread. Look at the Bangladeshis, not with Bal Thackeray’s baleful eyes but with whatever
human sympathy left after the massacres of the 1990s. Since then, poor Muslims from
Uttar Pradesh in neighbourhoods like Madanpura have dwindled in statistical terms and
remain unaccounted in records. Those riots were the biggest blow struck against the
Indian Republic, and it was not the work of the notorious “foreign hand” that was
responsible for the retaliatory bombings that shook the city later. I am no politician and
no historian either. It was not that the face of Bombay was scarred or her anatomy
excised. Bombay’s soul, Mumbai’s spirit, received a mortal blow then. It will not be the
same city again.

What has always struck the more perceptive among the visitors from affluent countries to
Bombay is not the obvious contrast between the city’s upbeat modernity of architecture
and its goal-directed businesslike bustle on the one hand and its obvious poverty and
squalor on the other. They are struck more by the almost cheerful energy of the city’s
poorest, the smiles on faces that you don’t see in the tenser faces you swim past in
crowds in America, Europe, and Japan. No doubt they also see the unforgettable
expressions of despondency and surrender to the onslaught of circumstances that are
endemic to our cities, including Mumbai. Our picture storybook of the megacity captures
both the faces of Bombay and they get effortlessly juxtaposed. A nocturnal tour through
the brothels of Kamatipura makes all illusions of sensuous thrill and erotic indulgence
instantly evaporate. These brothels are like shithouses and pisshouses where people
relieve themselves because they have nowhere else to go and because go they must. And
the women? They look middle-aged in their teens and become old hags before forty Yet
the same men who are voyeuristically aroused by Bollywood’s glamour queens, land up
here as customers because the prices are comparable with the box office prices in the
nearest cinemas. Not for nothing that old Bombay’s cinemas sprang up around nearby
Grant Road. Poverty is easily aroused to the pitch of instant consumerism as even our
vibrant middle-class has proved to us. We devour with fervour and disgorge with greater
flourish. Mumbai is certainly a vivid example of suppressed starvation and vulgar hunger.
Men feeding on helpless females are themselves victims of an exploitative system.

Our Virgil through Central Bombay’s inferno was Namdeo Dhasal, the poet who wrote
Golpitha---one of the literary landmarks of the 20th century. This is the area in which he
grew up among whores and petty criminals, watching the lords of the underworld and
their clients indulging in illicit trades such as smuggling, drug-trafficking, loan-sharking,
gambling, selling hard currency at a premium, prostitution, and supari murders With
mobile phones, faster vehicles, state-of-the-art firepower, and global criminal networking
the underworld itself has been upgraded since. It has found a willing bedfellow in
politics. Namdeo was a cabbie in Central Bombay when he was a teenager writing his
first poems. He was a hustler here a little later. He said to us that he believed the whole
system to be criminal and corrupt beyond redemption and that the top crust of societty
consisted of the worst criminals who always went scot free. This is simplistic, cynical
rhetoric unlike his complex and well-knit, profoundly disturbing poetry which we admire
for its originality and power, its avant garde flair, and its prodigious turn of phrase.

Within a short time of the publication of BOMBAY/MUMBAI----Bilder einer Mega-Stadt,

Henning was commissioned by ZDF ( Second German Television) to do a film on
Bombay for their proposed series on Mega-Cities that included three others assigned to
other producer-directors: Mexico City, Cairo, and Shanghai. Henning stipulated the
condition that I would be his scriptwriter and co-director. In the event, we made
BOMBAY: GELIEBTE MOLOCH that was released on German television in 1997.

The book on Bombay and the documentary feature on Bombay were made almost back-
to-back. The making of a film is always a hectic and breathless process, and it leaves no
time for catharsis in another medium ( my own film GODAM and my series of poems
THE MOUNTAIN were almost simultaneously created, but I cannot conceive of
repeating that excruciating schizophrenic act). After I made that film, I helped an English
and a German translator of my Marathi book Chaturang which consists of four works of
short fiction set in Bombay which I call The Bombay Quartet. Two of these novellas were
written and published in the late 1960s and the other two in the 1980s----about two
decades apart. Like my Bombay poems in English, they are my very own mythopoetic
vision of the city in which I grew up and began to age.

But in my considered view, for whatever it is worth, the greatest Marathi fiction-writer of
the 20th century is Bhau Padhye; and I also consider him the greatest writer of Bombay in
any language. I am conscious as I say this that this is a huge complipent. Every great city
creates its own great writer and Bhau Padhye was created by Bombay.

(ENDS)