i sought a jam.

“…monsoon and summer. It’s hot and humid during both.”
- Anna

I’m sitting in my Grandpa’s living room, under the ceiling fan listening to the sounds of my family talking and the traffic outside. Some call this season winter, from December to February, but now we know better.

At 8 o’clock my brother is falling asleep against his will. He tempted fate by not taking a nap in the afternoon. As we adjust to the climate, the heat and humidity tire us out quickly. It makes sense to me now that our family plans everything around meals. You can only go so long here without a boost.

Being a connoisseur of sound I am amazed by the ever present din in this residential neighborhood of Chembur. We are right next to the highway, just like in Sunnyvale, but the other sounds are more interesting to me. My favorite sounds have always been the calls of the bhajiwalas that come in the morning. I never knew what they were saying but I listened intently. They have such wonderful intonation.

From sunrise to sunset the tree outside our window hosts several species of tropical bird. They hold loud meetings all morning, break for lunch and resume in the evening. After school the children of the neighboring housing compound play gulli cricket, carefully avoiding parked cars and two-wheelers. They shriek with joy and yell appeals to their umpires. The neighborhood beyond the park that I see from the window must be populated entirely by marching bands, masjids and home theater systems. Five times a day the namaz comes over the loud speakers, filtered through the trees of the park that separates us from that mysterious place.

Mysterious because it has always been just beyond the park, yet I’ve never been there. I’ve watched the neighborhood grow for twenty years over successive visits. Corrugated iron turned to brick turned to steel girded cement. At some point, the marching bands moved in along with the home theater systems. I’ve always wondered what it was like over there, but not enough to walk through the park and find out. In fact I don’t know if I’ve ever been inside the park. My personal Mumbai starts from this window and extends in the opposite direction. I watch this window like a TV and in a way it has taught me a lot about Mumbai.

When I was a kid the park was a swamp. Reeds and grasses grew out of the stagnant water that filled the space. I associated with it mosquitoes and threfore discomfort. But slowly the swamp was reclaimed with dirt and trees until it became a park with a thin path winding around its edge. Now those trees are home to hundreds of birds that chatter all day.

Back in the day the housing compound next door seemed dusty and dirty, ill-lit at night. And the fence separating the compound from the swamp was topped with exposed shards of glass. Eventually they finished the carpark with cobbled stones and its walls got a fresh coat of beige all-weather paint, dur be gone. They replaced the crude shards of glass with barbed wire hidden by a row of tropical trees.

The neighborhood beyond the swamp used to seem ever so far away. All I could see were corrugated iron roofs that reminded me of the squalor outside Chembur station. But those made way for brick walls and eventually cement and plaster. The skeleton of a new office building now sits unfinished, its steel rods reaching up to the sky like the tall reeds they replaced. Though the mosque was always there I realized it only recently. Unconsciously I heard so many prayers, but now I listen to them. They seem almost impossible to ignore.

Over there feels like it has come over here. I have never seen it but I know it well.