My earliest memories of Haji Ali are beautiful. The ones dipped in the nostalgia of an eternal dreamer.
He happened to my local barber, who used to sit outside a string of shops most of the time, jobless, resigned to his own self and a cruel sense of fate. His face would light up at the prospect of a customer, and more importantly , a fellow friend who would accompany him in this silent but lonely journey with only the whirring sound of an old fan for company. The barber would rummage through my ragged hair in minutes, and then save most of the time for sharing his million such dreams.
One such story is that of his younger days, a time when he says he escaped to Mumbai, to live what was then the great Indian dream of struggling on the seashores of Mumbai for a glimpse of stardom and an eventual rejection. His tryst with glories remind me of a black blotch of ink in a vast canvas of colours splattered all over , the one that is the city of Mumbai. It is here, that he says, though, that he spent some of the most enjoyable moments of his life. Absolute poverty led him to work as a waiter in an Iranian Coffee restaurant right opposite Haji Ali. The owner used to make him work all day, with the expense of his daily meals thrown in and a roof to sleep over. Not exactly a roof, but something else that he calls 'Jannat'.
He tells me of a night spent on the irregulary shaped black rocks just behind Haji Ali. The nights where a bunch of men like him, all men with an undying lust for life and hopes in their hearts, used to sit around together after a hard day's night and for most of the time, sit silently. Sometimes the stillness of the moon sweeping over its silver grace over the waters accounted for this state, but on most days, it was just their own reflections in these dark but murky waters, that actually did it.
Unfortunatley for me, I haven't seen him in a long time, but with these impressions, I made one of my first trips to this place, ironically on a day, where I celebrated the spirit of my lust for life, sometimes called as a 'birth day'.
It was quite pleasant despite it being that time of the afternoon when parched throats are around in the form of beggars and ragged women with urchins who roam around aimlessly. Their desire, sadly is not quench their thirst, but a hunger to which they have pretty much become oblivious. I do not have to try much to be numbed with a sense of absolute chill, now that I have been living in the city for around 2 years. So I try to turn my back to them and look forward to see a minaret dressed in resplendent white, and a sea of people passing by.
IMMERSED, TOGETHER IN PRAYER, ALL IN DIFFERENT FORMS.
Some of them used to be absorbed in a reverie of their own with their eyes closed while some had nothing but open eyes, lost and amazed at the vast stretch of blue enveloping this tomb.
A little behind, a bunch of white Siberian Cranes are here for their retreat,
accompanied by a flock of pigeons. Over them hovers a royal eagle, hovering around for signs of life, ironically to end it all for his own survival.
But in the midst of this intense scramble to exist, today, all of them show a understanding of a deeper calm. Each one of them is effortlessly gliding around in the sky, whether that be the pigeons and the cranes in their rhythmic flight across the fresh air and back in their shaped V positions, or the eagle with its royal guile.
Meanwhile, back somewhere, just below where I am sitting, ladoos are strewn all over the place and a bunch of crows and dogs share their bits of morsel for the day. In the midst of absolute filth and garbage, a dark man, with hollow gaunt eyes, and ribs drawn in, carves a beautiful peace of marble. The beggars and rag pickers are now sharing their lunch with what I suppose is their own domestic dog.
The celebration of my birthdays these days has been restricted to talking a walk around such picturesque streets of Mumbai in the absolute light of the day, and sometimes, in the glimmer of the dark silent nights. And on a day where I was celebrating my rendezvous with life, somewhere, in the visions of each of these frames of being sewn together, a beautiful truth was understood and savored.
EXISTING IN PERFECT HARMONY,
DESPITE,
ITS GREATER ,
UNDERLYING SENSE OF IRONY.
