In New Delhi, inside an institution that is three years old, is a library with a limited space. The colour of shelves is dairy milk brown. They carry books, carefully organised, every single one placed according to its Dewey call number. No dust on any of the columns. This is because the cleaner cleans it every day in the morning. On days he doesn’t, crisp flak from the chief librarian is enough. Even though his straight face doesn’t suggest anything, it is only when he gets a mug and a duster, do the workers know that he is responding to the critical reviews of the chief.
But once you were taught to reduce a person to just one piece of their identity, it took a long time to learn to fill in the other details, to make them whole again and see them as fully human.~ Milk Teeth, Amrita Mahale.
In such an
atmosphere, I found Milk Teeth. It is a novel by Amrita Mahale about a changing
place, journey of three decades, asking us, like one of the
character asks in the novel: Who are you? It is the story of a city, its movement,
its buildings, its people, its violence, and also, its skies. The novel is divided into three sections: Ira,
Kaiz and Kartik, from 1970s onwards, to somewhere
in 1998. Much of the story beats here in these 25 years, in the midst of a
place called Mumbai.
The Irani café, on the other hand was designed for leisure. It was a place of loitering, that rare, rare verb in Bombay. The Irani café was enclosed within the brackets of the city, he (Kaiz) had declared, a part of it but also an island.
Ira has lived in
Asha Niwas, Matunga, for 28 years and works as a journalist. Kaiz lives in
Malabar Hill and has returned to Mumbai for a project required for his PhD.
Kartik has moved back from Bangalore, becoming a neighbour of Ira once again as
he starts to work from a hot shot office in Taj, since his company couldn’t afford
to rent an office in Mumbai. Choices
made by these characters rely on not just knowing so much about each other but also on the shifting place they dwell in.
It was clear to Ira that Kiaz’s confidence was developed over not just the twenty-three years of his life but longer. The soft-footed English accent, his choice of books and his turn of phrase, the generous patronage of those who served him, these signs did not just sit on the skin, they came from his flesh and bone. They had to have been accumulated over decades of a rolling inheritance (correct), she had surmised a generation or two of foreign educations (incorrect) and childhood where English came before the mother tongue (correct).
Ira has loved Kaiz;
Kaiz is back and wants to get back with Ira; Ira is rediscovering her
friendship with Kartik; Kartik is proposing to Ira; Asha Niwas and its
residents are deciding on the future of their building, having society meetings on terraces on some days, inviting selected people for chai on some other days.
In some ways Milk Teeth is a love story. In many ways, it is not.
Kaiz never said I love you too, he said it sounded like an afterthought, mere reciprocity. Ira had found that irritating and had slowly made peace with it, that some people were unwilling to be followers, even in declarations of love.
Questions like:
‘Who chooses who and when?’ will keep resurfacing like a mouse in midnight. But
as easily as the mouse came, it will also go away; leaving us to turn the pages
and discover locations of life; to find out that there are other possibilities
and destinations (perhaps) for places and people both. The author of the book,
Amrita Mahale, has described this book in one line as a book about
finding your place in a changing environment.
Generic… No imagination. No soul", Kaiz replied to what school of architecture was that modern office building. "Here was a neo gothic style of architecture, there was Indo-saracenic.
How buildings acquired souls, become interesting? Would Asha Niwas develop a soul one day, or were souls reserved only for buildings in some parts of the city?
One of the aspects
of writing a story is character arc and this book does it beautifully. Ira’s
arc is well tied by bringing us to the centre of what this book set out to
explore: How should our society be?
A question whose answer we both sought in the form and landscape of the city where we met.
The story
emphasizes questions of belonging as well as identity: what you choose to call the
place - Mumbai/Bombay, what that says about you, saffron effect in not just the
sky but also the land the sunrays light up, faint voices of “we are too soft”, writing
the life of local, the ever changing skyline of the city, colonies of 90’s and
the romance we develop over a city as well as the solitude of walking in the streets.
But when a story
starts with a proposal of redevelopment, of housing societies, of people living
in rented flats for 50 years, it was great to come across a story that keeps these
spots tied together even when all the characters were moving in with their
lives. I really wanted to know what happened to Asha Niwas and the future of other
residents in the society. The story does help you in understanding what might
have happened.
…That you needed some distance from a city to be able to worship it the way he did. It had also been his way of belonging: learning its mythology was one of the many paths to calling a city home.
As much as the
book, Milk Teeth, is about three intersecting lives, rooted in the times of
violence, one of the story's main characters is 'Buildings'. My interest area
is this fourth character: The Place We Live to See Change. I have always
wondered what happens to the setting after the character has taken the action
forward. When reading this novel, the city, its streets; Asha Niwas, its
blocks, its houses, its terraces didn’t just
disappear; it detailed itself further, be it terraces or parks, the unflappable
writing style makes it perfectly clear that places continue to speak stories
loud and clear for us to observe.
The city was our common ground, I want to tell Kaiz. Not simply its soil, nor its salt, or tides, not lines on any map, nor buildings and streets. Something else entirely. An image, a dream, an idea that beguiled both of us: a magical place with chaos in its code, where our stories collided briefly. That romance with the city he carries with him wherever he goes. What it means to me, though, goes beyond what we had in common, it can’t be packed up and transported tidily. Mumbai for me is two people who moved from small coastal towns to this metropolis by the sea and made it their home. My home. And that is how the city is different for the two of us: for him both Mumbai and home were abstraction. Abstractions are at once more fragile and more hardy than reality.
He still hopes I will change my mind. A few months ago, he was convinced, now he only hopes. And with time, that too shall fade.
The book has a terrific ending, one that I loved so much.
Do read Krishna Sobti’s The Music of Solitude if writings about places and their people interest you.