When you first get onto the beach after fighting your way through from Charni Road station, it could be any other balmy evening at Girgaum Chowpatty, if an absurdly busy one. People queue up (im)patiently for vada pav; kids hurl glo-in-the-dark toys twenty feet in the air; chaiwallahs pour five rupees’ worth of tea into a tiny plastic cup, so full you can’t hold it without scalding your fingers.
The first visible sign that something’s different is that the beach seems to extend much further than usual, the crowds stretching out a long way into the distance. Except the masses of people furthest away aren’t actually on the beach at all: they’re in the sea, they’re slowly, almost imperceptibly getting deeper and deeper in to gradually immerse their idols, and they’re bringing a week and a half of festival to a close in a way that makes “taking down the Christmas decorations on Twelfth Night” seem pretty lame.
Yesterday saw the end of Ganeshotsav, which is essentially an epic annual birthday party for Lord Ganesha, the god of prosperity, good fortune and moral support for anybody who’s concerned that they might look like an elephant. It’s been an entertaining eleven days, with Mumbai jumping to the sound of endless tiny mobile parties. These normally involve a small van, the back doors open with a Ganesha idol looking out, garlanded with flowers; in front there are about twenty or thirty people, a few bashing rhythms on drums, the rest dancing with a delirious, spaced out expression that might be what your parents looked like the first time they took weed in 1965. Up in the cabin, next to the driver maintaining a steady 200 yards an hour, is a guy playing unchained melodies on a tiny Casio keyboard, hooked up to a loudhailer that’s got stuck on the thousand-decibel setting.
And it all ends with the enormous Visarjan or immersion day, when everyone has to find a body of water to dunk old Ganesha. Hence a few lakh people on the beach, and rather a long queue. In many areas of the city people come together with enormous collective community idols, hundreds of the Ganeshas arriving for the immersions on massive trucks and dressed up to the nines, one appearing under a giant frilly orange parasol, another being carried in what looks like a rickety wooden sedan with a large blancmange on top. Apparently the whole process takes till about four in the morning, but in sharp contrast to ordinary Mumbai life it’s bizarrely well-organised and nobody seems to mind taking their turn.
Walking the five miles home (it’s quicker than a cab) you encounter the famous Trance Ganesha inching its way up the road: four flashing coloured lights, one DJ, some massive speaker stacks, three hundred kids off their heads in a slowly-moving outdoor nightclub protected from the traffic by a couple of guys with a rope, and one happy, trippy, elephant-headed god. What a dude.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Hair apparent
Fort Cochin – outside tourist season – offers a much-needed break from the chaos and cacophony. It’s the kind of place you can wander around aimlessly, avoiding the goats and the puddles from the intermittent drizzle, the only hassles coming from the ageing hippies in colourful trousers and the small children whose English vernacular consists entirely of ‘One Photo!’.
A couple of miles from the legendary Chinese nets and the stallholders merrily pointing out thirty different types of fresh fish lies Jew Town, the gaggle of shops and cafes that surrounds the Paradesi Synagogue, the oldest in the Commonwealth. The synagogue’s got an excellent blue and white tiled floor, where the tiles appear only to feature three different basic pictures, until you realise that all several hundred of them are unique thanks to tiny, subtle differences: a different tree shading here, a full moon on the horizon rather than a crescent there.
There’s a little display with the history of the Cochin Jews, some of whom came to India about two thousand years ago, not long after another Jew was causing all manner of discombobulation elsewhere. It occurs to me that all my stereotypes and perceptions of Jewishness are just the Europeans, the Yiddish, the Ashkenazim, my grandparents. Surely these guys – who, while everyone else was meandering all over Europe for centuries, were just pottering around in Kerala all the time – are completely different?
We wander into a few of the shops, but as the Rough Guide points out, in spite of the stars of David and menorahs everywhere they’re all run by Kashmiris now. Being Kashmiri they also try to sell a lot of pashminas, which seems strange in a place where it never falls below 25°C. Anyway, there’s one that’s clearly a bit different: a quiet, poky little embroidery shop with entirely different patterns and styles. And just inside, sitting in a tatty wicker chair by the front door, there’s a little old light-skinned lady with my Booba’s hair.
Encouragingly, what she lacks in youth and mobility she makes up for in her sharp tongue and Jewish granny wit. “You’ll have to speak Malayalam!” she barks, before I’ve said a word. The newspaper cuttings on the wall tell us she’s called Sarah Cohen and she’s run the embroidery shop here for decades: suddenly I feel like I’m not in India at all but in Golders Green in the 1950s. But it is India, of course, and it’s as Indian as anything else in this ultimate collage country. Gandhiji would definitely have approved.
I keep looking at her hair, the wispy grey curls bringing all manner of memories from the old house in Muswell Hill flooding back. It almost tempts me to start growing back my jewfro, until I’m reminded that my hair is receding so I’d just look like a weird geography teacher. She tells me this is the last Jewish shop in Jew Town: everyone else left for Israel long ago, and there are only a handful of very elderly people even left living here. Before too long the synagogue will be kept open just for tourists at five rupees a pop, and a little part of the embroidery on India’s patchwork quilt will be no more.
A couple of miles from the legendary Chinese nets and the stallholders merrily pointing out thirty different types of fresh fish lies Jew Town, the gaggle of shops and cafes that surrounds the Paradesi Synagogue, the oldest in the Commonwealth. The synagogue’s got an excellent blue and white tiled floor, where the tiles appear only to feature three different basic pictures, until you realise that all several hundred of them are unique thanks to tiny, subtle differences: a different tree shading here, a full moon on the horizon rather than a crescent there.
There’s a little display with the history of the Cochin Jews, some of whom came to India about two thousand years ago, not long after another Jew was causing all manner of discombobulation elsewhere. It occurs to me that all my stereotypes and perceptions of Jewishness are just the Europeans, the Yiddish, the Ashkenazim, my grandparents. Surely these guys – who, while everyone else was meandering all over Europe for centuries, were just pottering around in Kerala all the time – are completely different?
We wander into a few of the shops, but as the Rough Guide points out, in spite of the stars of David and menorahs everywhere they’re all run by Kashmiris now. Being Kashmiri they also try to sell a lot of pashminas, which seems strange in a place where it never falls below 25°C. Anyway, there’s one that’s clearly a bit different: a quiet, poky little embroidery shop with entirely different patterns and styles. And just inside, sitting in a tatty wicker chair by the front door, there’s a little old light-skinned lady with my Booba’s hair.
Encouragingly, what she lacks in youth and mobility she makes up for in her sharp tongue and Jewish granny wit. “You’ll have to speak Malayalam!” she barks, before I’ve said a word. The newspaper cuttings on the wall tell us she’s called Sarah Cohen and she’s run the embroidery shop here for decades: suddenly I feel like I’m not in India at all but in Golders Green in the 1950s. But it is India, of course, and it’s as Indian as anything else in this ultimate collage country. Gandhiji would definitely have approved.
I keep looking at her hair, the wispy grey curls bringing all manner of memories from the old house in Muswell Hill flooding back. It almost tempts me to start growing back my jewfro, until I’m reminded that my hair is receding so I’d just look like a weird geography teacher. She tells me this is the last Jewish shop in Jew Town: everyone else left for Israel long ago, and there are only a handful of very elderly people even left living here. Before too long the synagogue will be kept open just for tourists at five rupees a pop, and a little part of the embroidery on India’s patchwork quilt will be no more.
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