Tell me a great story

Cities are built from concrete but held together by the mortar of desire - the nature of that desire determines how they will hold

Cities are built from concrete but held together by the mortar of desireu00a0- the nature of that desire determines how they will hold. Over them we throw the cloak of our stories. Then, even though we sweat in the local train, in our heads we tread fabulous dreams. Along with its economy and infrastructure, every nagri is also a maya nagri, city of illusions, temptations and myths, the stuff of possibility and hope. So we can walk on streets made unimaginably filthy by the monsoon, yet live in the imagined romance of Marine Drive mist. Both things are real in their way.

There's always been something industrial strength about how stories of Bombay have got told - earlier, there was always the pulpy pulchritude ofu00a0 Hindi films, but we also knew there were the political satires of Vijay Tendulkar, the bardic songs of Amar Shaikh and other shahir's of the working class, the poetry of Narayan Surve and the English poets of the 1970s such as Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar. All of these things merged with each other in our heads, to make the multi-stories of Bombay.

Of late, stories about Bombay are so au courant -- as the city re-fashions itself, new myths are spun, and a new migrant labour of Fullbright scholars, researchers, writers, filmmakers, performers throngs to work in this growth sector. Ever so often you wake up to a newspaper that hosts a conclave of these storytellers who tell us a tale of the city as they think it could be.

In the English papers at least, these tales are usually from one language - English. Many narrators have appellations mystically alphabetical - MLA, CEO, MD. Some have spelt-out but brief titles, strong and definite, like the barking syllables of Mills & Boon heroes: Producer, Head, Owner. Maybe there are others present, but they are not the protagonists of these reports. If they are in the crowd, only they know they are there - but who will believe them?

At such conclaves builders and developers say the city must grow horizontally, not just vertically - peripheries must develop. I don't suppose there is any self-interest there. In these peripheries they want low cost housing (in which I don't suppose the alphabeticals would be living) for people who would commute on strong transport links to keep our city clean - partly by clearing out of it - plants watered, and our children's hair neatly combed. Stars say audiences want new stories but do not say anything about whether they'll be dropping their prices a little so those new stories could be made more easily. Filmmakers say people don't want intellectual bullshit, only entertainment. As we know all things intellectual are bullshit and romantic fantasies are the thing.

We know that from the 90% flop rate of Bollywood productions and the worldwide success of Indian writing, right? All of them are agreed - we need a new man to control Bombay - a CEO, a manly mayor like Rudy Guiliani I guess. Ladies, you may now please go to the club and order a cosmopolitan and hang with Carrie and her girls.

Though different people tell these stories - they all seem so agreed on the plot. When stories do not contradict each other, they start sounding less like mythical illusions of which we might make our own different meanings and more like collusions. This is no Mahabharat - a sea of many people's stories, but a school report by the teacher's pet. Whose stories we hear, who tells those stories, tells us whose city it is. I'd pay good money now, to hear a really mixed up tale in many tongues about this place where I live called Bombay.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction.u00a0 Reach her at www.parodevi.com

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