There is a certain hour in Bandra, roughly between the second espresso and the first grievance, when the whole suburb seems to sit for its portrait. The light comes in low off the Arabian Sea and it gilds everything it touches without favoring any of it. It falls on the fishermen's nets drying at Chimbai and on the Range Rover idling outside a café that serves avocado toast at the price of a fisherman's week, and the light, being light, does not care. Only the people care. They care enormously. They have built a civilization on caring.
Introductions and Pedigree:
Take the introduction. In Bandra a person is not introduced. A person is annotated. "This is Tanya. She was at Cathedral, then Wharton, she does something with sustainable luxury." Each clause is a small velvet box, opened briefly to show the jewel inside and then snapped shut before anyone can check whether it's paste. Tanya smiles the smile of a woman who has heard her own footnotes recited so many times that she has come to mistake them for her face.
You will be annotated too, and you'll feel it happen: the quick, almost tender glance at your shoes, your watch, your accent, the vowels you were careful to send to finishing school. The glance isn't hostile. It's taxonomic. Somewhere behind Tanya's agreeable eyes a small, diligent clerk is opening a ledger and asking the oldest questions on the subcontinent, older than the Mughals, older than the British who taught us to ask them in English: who are your people, and where do you stand in relation to mine?
What does your father do? Where did you study? Which side of the Link Road, so to speak, were you born on?
Being Served:
Now, the beautiful absurdity, and I insist on the word "beautiful," is that none of this is necessary for survival. Everyone in the room has eaten. Everyone in the room will eat again. The building's watchman has saluted each of them on the way in. He's a thin man from Gorakhpur with a moustache of almost military optimism, and he salutes the way a sunflower turns, out of an instinct no longer connected to any sun. A driver waits downstairs in a white sedan. Upstairs a woman named Lakshmi, whose surname nobody in the household could produce under oath, is slicing mangoes into geometric perfection.
This is the great invisible scaffolding of the Bandra soul: being served. Being served is not, here, an event. It's an atmosphere, like humidity, and like humidity it's noticed only when it fails. The tragedy, or the comedy, and in Bandra they share a flat, is that a person raised in this atmosphere comes to believe the atmosphere is their personality. The ease is taken for grace. The schooling is taken for intelligence. The leisure is taken for depth.
The tail is everything. A Bandra peacock knows the exact provenance of its feathers. This one is the Jesuit education, this one the summer in Provence, this one the cousin who produced a film that nobody saw but everybody "loved." Here, iridescent and slightly moulting, is the Pali Hill address, held onto through three generations of property disputes and one spectacular uncle. And here, best of all, is the faint association with the film star whose bungalow stands on Bandstand like a white cathedral of the self.
The difficulty, you see, is that it's hard to get ahead in India. It's hard in a way that a person who has never stood in a Railway queue at Bandra station, at 8:47 in the morning, in a monsoon, cannot properly imagine. There are 1.4 billion people, and every one of them has a mother who believes, with the ferocity of a minor Hindu deity, that her child is exceptional. Arithmetic forbids this. The country therefore runs on a vast, elegant, mostly unspoken system for rationing exceptionalness. Caste was one version. The colonial club was another, with its "Indians and dogs" signage still faintly visible, like a watermark, under the fresh coat of paint on some of our nicer gymkhanas. Today's version is softer and wears linen. It's called pedigree, or exposure, or, in the dialect of the young, "vibe."
The point of the system isn't comfort. Comfort was achieved long ago, somewhere around the second air conditioner. The point is position. To be comfortable is merely to be alive. To be positioned is to matter.
But here is the last irony, the one that makes the whole elaborate edifice tremble like a wedding pandal in the first monsoon gust. Significance can't be manufactured alone. It's a currency, and a currency is only a currency if other people agree to hold it. Tanya's footnotes mean nothing unless someone at the party nods. The industrialist's 1974 is a ghost town without a listener. The film star's bungalow is only a house, admittedly a very large house, until the crowd assembles at the gate and agrees, collectively, in the salt wind, that it is more.
We are each other's mint. We stamp the coins for one another. The whole glittering, ridiculous, gorgeous society of Bandra is in the end a vast cooperative of mutual belief: a few hundred thousand people agreeing, every evening on every rooftop, to take each other's tails seriously, so that their own might be taken seriously in turn.
It's absurd. It's also, I've come to suspect, the most human thing on the hill.
Down on the rocks below Bandstand, as the light finally goes, a fisherman's boy is skipping stones into the sea. Nobody is watching him. He counts the skips aloud anyway (four, five, six), and when he gets to seven he turns, quick as a bird, to see if anyone saw.
That's the whole of it, really. Seven skips, and the turning.
