The Candle People

They’re angry about the November terror attacks in their upscale constituency. But, will they vote?

Near the Third Pasta Lane in Colaba, down an alley that may have had a name once, lives a boy. He must be around five years old. Sometimes he can be seen in the arms of a frail maid, both on a slow aimless walk through the backlanes. When people on the sidewalks, or in the ancient balconies, or behind grilled windows see the boy, they cannot take their eyes off him. They point to him and whisper to someone who does not know, “That’s the boy.”

On the night of 26 November, his parents were at Tiffin restaurant inside the Oberoi. Both were killed. They were among the many who died that night, some of whom, as recollected by a fireman, were still seated in their chairs, their food on the table. There are many such stories here in South Mumbai, or Mumbai South in the peculiar prose of the Election Commission. So it is inevitable that these days when a young couple leaves home for a quiet dinner, they hug their infant a moment longer, through an unmentionable fear, a fear that is sometimes relieved through macabre jokes that only a spouse can crack, like say how the army vans will not get lucky a second time in finding parking outside the Taj.

There is a feeling here, especially among young parents because they have a greater stake in returning home alive, that they are unjustly unprotected, that God is more indecipherable than ever, and that voting on 30 April will not alter the fact that the city will be run by short, corrupt, accented fools.

This is the topic of discussion at a dinner in a Breach Candy seaside flat, which, at 2,000 sq ft, is over six times the size of an average home in Mumbai. These are old college friends, now in their mid-30s. Almost all studied abroad. Over a vegetarian dinner, they discuss politics. That is rare. The men talk, the women listen intently, though one of them did compliment the other’s bag. Such a discussion in Mumbai is usually somewhat more naïve than a similar conference in, say, South Delhi. So, unsurprisingly, the men discuss the need for a “benign dictator”. As Vir Sanghvi once said, next they will ask for a virgin prostitute.

There is some talk about how the BJP is the only real hope, and this talk is a complete plagiarism of their fathers’ dinner conversations. How nice it would have been, they say, if the BJP had nothing to do with the thugs who beat up women in pubs. But they do not know who the BJP candidate is, here.

Mumbai South is a newly redrawn constituency, an almost invisible fraction of a dot on the Election Commission’s otherwise colourful map of Maharashtra. Measuring about 14 sq km, it is the smallest in the country in area, but one of the largest in population with 17 lakh voters, 27 per cent of whom live in slums. In the 2004 election, only about 7 per cent from the upper middle-class high-rises bothered to vote. It is seen as the richest constituency, home to the Ambanis, various Birlas, and Ratan Tata.

But, the rumoured wealth of South Mumbai, and its sophistication, are at once accurate and wrong, a reason why Boston University alumnus Milind Deora, the sitting Congress MP, will contest the seat against people like the Shiv Sena’s Mohan Rawle.

In some Colaba flats that are worth crores, old couples live without the means to pay the electrician. A local broker once took me to a flat that a middle-aged woman wanted to rent out for Rs 30,000 a month. After she showed the flat, she begged, “Can I live in the balcony?” On Malabar Hill, the old money has quietly given way to stock brokers and diamond merchants, a powerful Jain vegetarian mafia that does not allow even eggs to be sold in shops and has closed down all non-vegetarian restaurants on the Hill and around.

When hotelier Sanjay Narang opened one in defiance in the ground floor of a residential building, residents stood in their balconies and spat on the patrons. This vegetarian swarm of new money is almost entirely covert and overt supporters of the BJP. In Worli, where doctors, MBAs and other such people live, secularism has the same mythical quality as ‘Truth Triumphs in the End’. Nobody really believes in that. For Outlook, I once visited several such flats as Mohammed Khan, a software engineer in search of paying guest accommodation. Mohammed was turned down by all.

Mumbai South constituency, having been redrawn, now includes areas like Parel, further north in Mumbai, where hundreds of thousands of people live in one-room tenements. Their mass votes will further dilute the collective intentions of the English-speaking.

That is why, in that Breach Candy flat where old friends are having dinner, there is an understanding that it is futile to vote. They can see so clearly, from a mathematical point of view, the imbecility of the Tata Tea commercial in which a self-righteous boy exhorts the youth to ‘wake up’ and go vote. But in such circles there is now a growing curiosity about independent candidate Meera Sanyal, chief of ABN Amro in India, who has taken leave from work, and temporarily given up her office Mercedes, to contest the Lok Sabha election from Mumbai South. The Sindhi banker who is married to a Bengali has somehow eclipsed the ophthalmic surgeon, Mona Shah, the candidate of the Professionals Party of India, an aspiring revolution of those who apparently seek intelligence and honesty in politics, and whose manifesto includes encouraging the creation of golf courses. Also, Mona Shah promises to abolish personal income tax, a proposal that is considered naïve by Meera Sanyal’s inner circle of friends.

Meera Sanyal’s media manager is a business journalist with a smart First World accent. She confirms my appointment with Sanyal at Leopold Cafe, “for symbolic reasons”, and she says, “You have to pay for your own coffee. We want to run a clean campaign.”

At the corner table of Leopold, Sanyal looks odd in a sari and light make-up because this is essentially a pub that serves food. But there is a certain peace in her eyes that makes her endearing. It is the peace of absolute conviction. She says she had been thinking of contesting elections for some time, but the death of her close friend Ashok Kapur in the November terror “was the turning point”. She distances herself from the media perception that she is the face of the graduate Indian. She wants the votes of the poor too. She says that support for her is growing at such a rate that she has received politely intimidating calls. “We want to meet,” they tell her. She won’t. Her fame is worrying Milind Deora, who is believed to be the fountain of mass text messages which indicate that voting for Sanyal will result in a Congress defeat and Shiv Sena victory.

But it really does not matter who wins. Life will go on in Mumbai South, until one evening in a good restaurant when you may have to leave without finishing the tempura.

ColabaelectionsMumbai 26/11South MumbaiTerror attacks