Last afternoon my friend Rahul and I were killing time as we awaited the opening of a friend's art show in Colaba. We spoke of our hopes for the future, our dreams. I said to him something I've thought about for a few months, maybe a year now: I don't want my children to live here. In this city. Maybe even in this country.
My friend is
expecting his first child, and he said to me: My wife and I had this
same conversation today. But what do we do. Where do we go?'
Why did we say what we did?
I
said it because I see with my eyes and in my work, and so it comes
through in my writing: in a city where the young, the able, the
educated, do not have a chance, what chance will the the helpless have?
Our children, our elderly parents? The animals we love?
And
in Bombay, a city which is dying, I said to Rahul: where will my child
study? which libraries will he or she go to? I said to him, I wanted to
buy your wife a pram. But what roads will you push that pram on, which
garden? There are no sidewalks in Bombay anymore. There is no clean
air. People stone the dogs I feed outside my house. My neighbours say
'No Muslims.' When I landed in the city last week I thought to myself:
This looks like Kabul before curfew.
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