OFF AND ON

This morning I was woken up to a call on my cell phone. A male voice was informing me that they were all going off to their native place for a couple of days as his brother’s wife was….. I could not catch the remaining words. I realized it was my maid’s husband calling to inform me about their sudden trip to their favourite place-‘gaon’. For the information of my readers any place outside Mumbai is ‘bahar gaon’ be it Kolkata, New Delhi, Pimpri or London. I knew that his brother was sick but could not understand what had happened to the brother’s wife. I repeated my query only to be stalled by the finality in the words ‘off ho gayi’.  No, no more questions. Only one mystery remains…it was the brother who was sick but his wife was the one to be ‘off’.  I was reminded of a poem we had read as kids ‘And they buried brother John…..’

By now I am quite accustomed to somebody or the other becoming ‘off’. This was not the case some thirteen years back when I landed in Bombay, sorry, Mumbai. Once, on entering my mother-in-law’s room, I heard the maid pointing to a photograph of my father-in-law and asking whether he was ‘off’. My horrified ma-in-law, having just moved in from Delhi after living there for half a century, was completely taken aback. For a moment, thinking that the maid was hinting probably at the poor man going off somewhere, she was about to begin expostulating with her when I thought it best to intervene. I explained to the maid that my father-in-law was no more and that he had passed away a couple of years back. This was my first encounter with the ‘off’ word and, as the maid continued about her own in-laws being ‘off’ too, I allowed the thought to gradually sink in.

Having moved to Mumbai from a city where it was necessary to add a ‘ji’ after every word or sentence-  ‘haan ji’, ‘namasteji’, ‘shukriya ji’ ‘Arora ji’ ‘mousa ji’ ‘uncle ji’ and even ‘sir ji’- it was a bit of a culture shock to hear twenty year olds in the Mumbai office calling out to men in their fifties as ‘Tare’  and ‘Gokhale’. I still stuck to my ‘ji’s’ just in case I again landed up in the Hindi belt due to the company’s Transfer and Mobility Policy. After all they say old habits die hard. I had dismissed the maid’s reference to ‘off’ as coming from someone who, having picked up a few English words, was trying to show off. Soon I realized that it was not so. In the office too colleagues spoke about Kulkarni’s uncle ‘off ho gaye hain’ or the Regional Manager’s mother being ‘off’ too. This was usually followed by the whole office trooping in to Kulkarni’s cubicle or the RM’s cabin with outpourings of condolences.

I take this as an example of cultural shock. Having moved to Delhi from Calcutta, where the dear old bongs had coined their own unique Hindi words….’ektho’, ‘shoobista’ and where the ‘ling’ was thrown out for a toss and the ka’s and ki’s went gallivanting as and how they wished…., and after having been re-educated on more or less shudh Hindi of the North for a while, I was in for more shock as I set foot in Mumbai. One young lady at a well known jewellery shop in Lokhandwala, Andheri  even asked me  whether I lived ‘pass by’- what a neat fusion of Hindi and English! Nobody here writes ‘& family’ on the envelopes of invitation cards, it is always ‘& fly’. So wherever the mister goes we accompany him as the flies! The first time when you see or hear it, it jars on your senses and sensibilities but as time passes you get used to the many idiosyncrasies of each city.

But the ‘off’ word still jars. Give me a couple of years more and I am sure it will become a part of my system too and maybe I won’t wince anymore. Coming to think of it, it conveys a sense of finality, a sense of everything being over, it tells you to accept and move on. It means the end. In this city, which they say never sleeps, everyone is always on the move, everything is always on, if one thing stops, the other starts moving, I guess only death can be the full stop. This realization hit me the hard way a few years back.

It was the 11^th of July 2006- serial blasts shook Mumbai’s lifeline, the Mumbai Locals. A series of blasts took place in different trains on the Western Line. Within a span of 11-12minutes hundreds died and many more were injured and maimed for life. They were ordinary people like you and me who had left home for work. The masterminds behind the blasts had chosen the perfect time- when men and women would be returning to their homes after a hard day. I had reached Churchgate Station just in time for my usual train to take me home. On the platform I met an old colleague from Delhi who asked me to join her in the next train, which was a ladies’ special, and was scheduled to leave a couple of minutes later so that we could catch up with all the news. I agreed. We had not even gone half way when our train stopped. For some time no one knew what had happened. Since her house was not too far from where the train had stopped she decided to get off and walk down. Soon she was back to the window asking me to join her saying her son, who was watching the news on television, had just called to say there had been some blast or explosion in some train near Matunga Road. We were just on the outskirts of the same station. I asked her to continue but she insisted on leaving her address and landline number with me. Soon others in the compartment started getting similar calls before the networks were jammed. Little did I know at that time that I would not be able to reach home that night, since the trains would never move and a few hours later I would arrive at the same colleague’s doorstep with another girl in tow. The first class compartment of the train I had not boarded that evening had been ripped off completely by a bomb left in a pressure cooker.

A couple of days later, the people of Mumbai gathered their wits and lives and once again moved to the same stations to board the same trains and move on with their lives. Two young men always boarded the general compartment, next to our ladies compartment, for all the years that I had been travelling from this station. They were always there together, and somehow were noticed because they were always the first to get a whiff of the approaching train. They were always brightly dressed and you could never miss them. They were the first to move and would be followed by others to take position to jump in just as the train slid into the platform. Somehow, they had made it a habit to be the first to step on to the 9.01 Goregaon Local. I really admired their timing and precision- never a miss, never to falter. But this morning only one of them was there. For a week or so we saw only one of them. Another week passed and there was still only one of them. Finally, one lady in our group went up to him and asked where his friend was. His reply was- “ Woh toh off ho gaya… blast ke din”. But life has to go on……………

Salaam Mumbai!!!

DS