THE HEART OF THE FLAME
Shot over the last four years on Ritesh Uttamchandani’s iPhone, this photobook features 98 images that reveal Mumbai’s pounding, generous heart
Young men exercise with cinder blocks, two grinning horses roll their eyes gleefully as they swim, a dog carefully urinates on a pole in the middle of a playing field, cubes of ice sit like a glacier in a restaurant urinal, two Ronald McDonalds gaze at a wall marked ‘TV’. Ritesh Uttamchandani’s images in The Red Cat and Other Stories are ironic, funny, touching and most of all, they fill the viewer with a longing for Mumbai/Bombay, its madness, and its stories, for the savage, grimy beauty of that city and the dogged cheerfulness of its people. And what a diverse bunch they are – there’s the tattooed dad whose story almost makes you weep, the cheerful Bihari auto driver who is inordinately proud of his vehicle, the Anil Kapoor lookalike, the hijra who dreams of giving her daughter a better life outside Kamathipura (“I hope she marries a nice man, raises a happy family and builds a home of her own.”), the Bohri photographer who has taken to wearing the traditional rida, and the man who sells donkey milk on the streets. There are dreams here and aspirations, struggles and slights, sorrow, great drama, and the will to overcome.
Then there is the startling image of a woman in a mudbath that looks to you like a Mumbaikar parody of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia that hangs a world away in London’s Tate museum. The pictures often work together and play off each other like the ones featuring an acrobatic cat and a parkour practitioner heaving himself up onto a wall that provides a view of the spectacular Worli Sealink. These lead to pictures of courting couples against the sea and among the rocks in that urban jungle that affords no privacy. And so they go on, each image linked to the next in a subterranean way that draws the viewer into the teeming, dreaming mind of Mumbai. Shot over the last four years on Uttamchandani’s iPhone, this photobook, that seeks out the freakish in the ordinary, that is serious and funny all at once, features 98 images of urbs prima in Indis that are tied to a metaphorical fable his mother narrated to him as a child. The tale, included in the book, focuses on the friendship between a young man and a talking cat. A red cat does make its appearance in a picture alongside a vintage ‘Bombay’ manhole. You stare at it awhile and feel a deep longing for the city whose streets you no longer know but is forever
home. I have four children, but my favourite is my four legged-baby, Hansa.
When I was 11, Hansa’s mother and I would set off before dawn with my father, exploring a new suburb on foot every day, selling spoonfuls of milk. Donkey milk is good for the immune system, but it should be consumed immediately or it gets spoilt. Some doctors recommend it to senior citizens and some parents believe that feeding it to newborns makes them smart. Immediately after a child has consumed a spoonful, I hold the baby upside down and twirl the little one above my head with a hand firmly holding the ankles. I then pass the baby between Hansa’s legs making a circle, like devotees doing parikramas, to ensure that the child doesn’t choke on the milk.
I used to have a bigger herd, deployed at construction sights to haul building materials. Rendered useless by machines, I sold them off at the annual animal market in Jejuri.
Demand for milk too has nosedived since the government began relocating slum dwellers to low-cost apartment projects. In a shanty town, information spreads horizontally. Hansa’s ghungroos and my calls would lure parents of out their huts, but it’s impossible to get that kind of attention in these concrete, vertical slums. Anyway, my children aren’t interested in the milk business either.
I cater to everyone, irrespective of caste or class, but I know they mock me behind my back. For them I’m just a donkeyman. - Somnath Jadhav
CREATING A WHOLE WORLD TO ALLOW US TO KNOW WHO WE ARE TODAY
ture with the ease of a master puppeteer, controlling the pace with which he allows the reader to know each person in his created world. He stops at painting a historically accurate picture of Old Delhi but spends ample time in the minds of his characters. So it is that a novel spanning over half a century of Indian history is told through the eyes of nearly a 100 characters. The reader shares an intimate moment with each whether it is Mange Ram, who degenerates into an arthritic old man or his youngest daughter-in-law Omvati, who dreams of a life better than that of a family servant for her son. Similarly, in Motichand’s family, we get to know his two sons — Dinanath, the prodigal babuji willing to kiss anyone’s ring to further his business interests, and Diwanchand, a sensitive neglected boy who leaves his inheritance behind to become a teller of tales, in particular, the Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas. The readers are ushered into Bagchi’s world like a spirit watching the characters lay down foundations that’ll become our present.
The novel’s interlaced threads are soaked in different emotions. The pre-Independence story is calm like a boat floating on a tranquil lake. As much as it highlights painful facets of Indian society, including the treatment of widows, through characters like Lala Motichand, Mange’s Ram’s son Prasadi and his wife Omvati, Motilal’s mistress Lajvati and his illegitimate son Makhan Lal, it also highlights crucial Indian traits: our capacity for tolerance and our reverence for loyalty. This thread also shows us the similarities that bind us. Through Vishwanathan’s letters, dated 2008, the reader discovers India during the 1960s and 1970s. Guided by the writer through post-independence India’s frustration, idealism shattered like cheap glass, Bagchi reminds us of the Indian capacity to revolt, which in many ways is tied to our sense of tolerance — for peace is as vital for survival as freedom. Bagchi’s prose is reminiscent of 90s classics like Cuckold and A Suitable Boy. The author presents the harsh realities of our caste system, patriarchal social structure, and feudalism.
And yet, in making his readers deeply invested in both the stories with their flawed characters, Bagchi challenges the reader to look at people as more than the sum of their good and bad parts. He allows room for fondness to creep in for the Motichand siblings, who never experience the pure joy of brotherhood, or for the bitter Vishwanathan who is still using words to try and correct past mistakes. In allowing for these cracks in the otherwise airtight snow globe he’s created, the author invites his readers to remember a trait that is not country-centric, but decidedly human: our ability to forgive, move on, and our capacity for acceptance. Avantika Mehta is an independent journalist. She lives in Delhi.