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Bollywood Boy
Extract - Part 2
Infatuation Continued...
Sweat and blood run together down the arms of the butchers who cut and fold, strip and rip. Necks of chickens, throats of goats, mutton anuses, eyeballs and ears, nothing can be spared, every inch can be eaten, every sinew chopped and bargained for, sliced and packaged.
In Crawford Market the air smells of the shit of dead and dying things, but there is sweeter stuff to breathe up on Pali Hill, high above the stink of downtown sweat. Mercedes and BMWs glide around the streets where bougainvillaea grows in pretty bright pinkness over the tall walls of big houses. Every bonnet is buffed to a crorepati’s shine, a millionaire’s gloss, each almost as shiny and polished as the expensive hair on the sleek heads of the women who recline behind darkened back-seat windows on their way in and out of large driveways. Shopping is the local sport in the hills of Bombay, but it is not the sort of shopping that takes place in Crawford Market’s bloody brawl.
From high up in the sweet hills Bombay falls back down to the water, to the old arch beside the sea. Here hundreds of honeymoon couples gather as the sun sets out on the water, a crowd of brand-new saris in fruit-pastille colours, armfuls of wedding bangles, nervous bowed heads beside proud boys in tight jeans and cheap jackets. The scent of jasmine garlands, wound into oiled plaits and knots, floats out with the dreams of young brides over the spangled water, while beside them their new husbands wait to pull the delicate flowers from fine threads, to unwind saris from nervous bodies, to touch fresh, warm skin, voluptuous as fig flesh. Just like in the movies.
Welcome to the capital of Hindi film, the studio city and fantasy fodder factory of the Subcontinent, an industry that pumps out twice as many pictures as Hollywood to satisfy the romantic cravings of its billion-strong audience. Welcome to Bollywood, the celluloid city that hides its alchemy among the alleys that smell of rotting flesh and star jasmine.
Down those alleys, past where Mrs Nirmal throws stones at the pi-dogs to keep them away from her husband’s bhelpuri cart while her snack man sleeps under a rain tree, beyond the relentlessly tatty tourist shops on The Causeway, is Colaba, named after the original inhabitants, the Koli fishermen, who were plying the waters before records began. A few of them still remain, clinging with the determination of ancient limpets to their pockets of inner city land, to their boats, their nets and their gutting knives. But all around them rise up the symbols of the modern city, skyscrapers etching their jagged silhouette over the harbour, throwing their mirrored images into the water where the Kolis cast their nets in the reflections of modern might and asset management-on-sea.
Right in the thick of this newly risen cool quarter is heat street, Battery Road, the one downtown spot where the stars from the high hills sometimes come out to play. The cars that line up along its length give it away, low-slung, sleek, squatting on fat tyres, shiny boot to glossy bonnet. A tourist carriage rolls past on clattering wheels, its flea-bitten grey horse and driver nodding in time with each slow step. The happy loving honeymoon couple behind the driver stare up at the steps beyond the line of cars and into Bar Indigo – white-hot Mumbai-Bombay, the thrust and grind of the cutting edge, a sea of gym-honed, belly-ringed midriffs that sway as the boys go by. As the carriage clatters on past, the happy loving couple take in each detail and store it away for the moment when, back home over family chai, they can wow Mummy/Daddy with their brush with Bollywood.
Inside Bar Indigo the hot stagnant street air is chilled and repackaged. Here the air is designer-scented, courtesy of the perfume houses, courtesy of a hundred Non-Resident-Indian stopovers at Dubai Duty Free, and here it mingles with Marlboro Light smoke over a sea of gleaming heads, cut in London, set in LA and now swinging on Friday night in Colaba. The bar itself is long and low, longer and lower than most bars I know. In London I am average to short. In India I am tall, and bars seem perfectly constructed so that I can prop myself at just that beautiful-people angle. Even so I am still about as wrong as you can get for Bar Indigo. I am over thirty, the wrong colour, the wrong type and definitely in the wrong clothes.
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