Maps of the mind

Reading Jayant Kaikini’s stories, one feels the pull of Mumbai, a city one can hate but never escape from.

Constrained by lives lived in stuffy tenements, Kaikini’s characters find freedom by the sea. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock 

Each day, as I traverse the streets of Mumbai on foot, I cannot help but take note of the ordinary and the mundane: young boys posing for group selfies after a day of euphoric cricket at Oval Maidan; police personnel feeding stray cats outside the City Civil & Sessions Court; the homeless using discarded barricades from Metro construction sites to create makeshift kholis (shelters). These vignettes of anonymous lives create a psychogeography, conjuring up backstories.

Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories

By Jayant Kaikini, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana

Eka

Pages: 264

Price: Rs.599

It is such a psychogeography that Jayant Kaikini fictionalises in Mithun Number Two and other Mumbai Stories, translated from Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana. In Kaikini’s cosmos, the landscape is not incidental but essential to the narrative thrust. It shapes, even constrains, the characters’ personalities.

All the stories here, written between 1983 and 2020, are set in Mumbai and feature working-class individuals—including daydreamers, drifters, and dawdlers—who are either from the city or from the hinterland in coastal Karnataka and North Kanara, from towns such as Gokarna, Honnavar, and Tadadi. A luminary of Kannada literature, Kaikini lives in Bengaluru now, after having spent two decades in Mumbai.

Hidden cities

In a city made of several hidden cities—the lived realities of Borivali differ from those of Kala Ghoda, which differ from those of Agripada or Geeta Nagar—Kaikini’s imagination constantly reconstructs the trope of locality. For instance, in “Kekoo and Pyarelal”, the fruit seller Pyarelal’s home is under the wooden staircase of a dilapidated building. In “Forest of Disappearance”, Chhotu’s box-like paan shop stands in “isolated splendour”, a world within the world. In “Lanterns in the Rain”, the 70-plus Nana, obliged to leave behind his self-sufficient life in rural Maharashtra to live with his son and his family in Mumbai, feels stifled in the one-room tenement of Chikalwadi chawl. So he sits in the open, on the steps outside.

The Irani café finds several mentions, with its patrons watching the world go by from street-facing tables. Teli Gali in eastern Andheri reappears in this collection; it was a prominent part of the cartography in the story “Toofan Mail” from Kaikini’s No Presents Please (2017), a volume of Mumbai chronicles that received the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2018.

Cover of Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The characters live their lives on loop until punctured by sudden, extraordinary events. They fight their fights, get in the way of their own selves, let fear guide them, and lose often. Their reality is made up of entangled limbs on crowded buses, collective sighs in dark cinema halls, and mundane objects that can give way to something surreal. Here one thinks of the blank sheets of paper in “Spotless” (“Guard its emptiness. Then it will guard you too”) or the mirror in “Threshold” that seemingly contains “all the movement to and from the market in its eye”. The stories have no happily-ever-afters, only the occasional, loose resolution.

Constrained by lives lived in stuffy tenements, Kaikini’s characters find freedom by the sea. In “Kekoo and Pyarelal”, during a city-wide bandh called by the Shiv Sena, Kekoo eagerly contemplates going “to VT and see the Gateway and the ocean”. In the titular story, the cinema-obsessed Chandu swims in the sea near Shivaji Park after playing Mithun Chakraborty’s body double, pondering how the actor is “lifelessly imitating the adventurous actions I performed in real life”.

The characters also try to rearrange their lives around the fractures and fissures of the city. In “News for Sumitra”, the titular character, a delicate yet feisty 60-year-old woman transported from Mundgod to a Mumbai flat, learns to attune her life to the rhythms of her new home. She starts attending matinee shows by herself, finding solace in the company of other women, declaring confidently: “I’ll look out for myself.”

Teetering on the edge

Kaikini has a knack for finding the right metaphors: bags of vegetables in the hands of overworked women on the train are described as “tired” (“The Recluse”); a fruit seller cleans his fruits like “Kapil Dev polishing the cricket ball before bowling” (“Kekoo and Pyarelal”); a person riding pillion is imagined as having “sprouted wings” (“Lanterns in the Rain”). The sentences hit home because they are trimmed of excess. Take, for instance, this harsh truth from “The Recluse”: “Was this how it felt to be afflicted with a disease called Mumbai?” Kaikini refrains from eulogising the hackneyed “resilient spirit” of the city when it is actually teetering on the verge of collapse.

Niranjana says in the afterword that Kaikini’s Kannadiga characters often speak a Kannada with North Kannada inflections. The non-Kannada speakers use Bambaiyya Hindi. To deal with this hybrid lexicon, Niranjana says she adopted a “cultural vernacular of Mumbai—that is, Hindi-Urdu-Dakhani—mixed with Marathi” in her translation. We see how Sumitra uses her broken Marathi to make new friends in Mumbai, while the second-hand goods dealer “Miyan”—whose real name is Pratap Singh—does not mind being called so because it is part of the “unique commercial lingua franca” of Mumbai. Reading these stories, one feels the pull of Mumbai, a city the characters can loathe but never escape from. They reminded me of C.P. Cavafy’s poem “The City”:

….You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Khorshed Deboo is an independent writer and editor based out of Mumbai.