Tag Archives: #mumbai

The Business of Busyness: The Bombay Epidemic

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The words I most commonly find myself saying is “I’m sorry I haven’t called you back/ met you. I’ve been so busy!” Busy, busy, BUSY: everyone in Bombay is inundated with so much stuff that we’re just too busy.

I don’t work and I have domestic help, as well as a joint family in place to be around my child and yet, I feel like I’ve made a business of my busyness. I haven’t read a book in the last 3.5 years (although I’m a student and lover of literature) and I barely watch any TV any longer (although I would be a student of TV studies if someone would start that course). My daughter goes to school for 4 hours 5 times a week and yet, I have no time!

My husband asks, “What are you so busy doing?” The question offends me (also because he thinks that he’s the only one who has the right to be tired or busy) but I can’t answer it. I have no idea what I do! I don’t really have very much home responsibility, but yes, I am around my child most of the time and we play a lot. She also likes me to be singularly focused on her when I’m with her, but I remember being just as busy when I didn’t have a child and wasn’t working!

I talk to other friends and find that I don’t need to be quarantined. It’s an epidemic because the business of busyness is infectious in Bombay. I know friends that moved from Kolkata or Delhi who complain that Bombay people are ‘cold’, ‘self-consumed’ and ‘unhelpful’. The Kolkatan said that it’s impossible to get people to meet you for coffee because they’re always busy. Another complain she had was that in Kolkata, everyone loves inviting friends home. In Bombay, no one does that. People are happier meeting you outside.

I try to defend my city people saying that that’s because we live pigeon-holed existences and so we don’t have the space to entertain. I also put forth the fact that we waste so much time in traveling to places that we become very selfish of what time is left, but I know that she is right. My reasons are correct as well, but the real reason I rarely invite people home is because I can’t control how long they will stay. If I meet them outside, I can scoot when I wish but at home, I can’t shove them out (or even politely nudge them out).

I’m the same way with the phone: when my phone starts ringing, my first reaction is complete panic. I want to fling it across the room and run out screaming, putting as much distance between it and me so I don’t have to take the call. Simultaneously, I will happily WhatsApp people for hours on end, having conversations that could have been completed, by the use of a phone call, in a minute. The reason is the same: in a phone call, I find it rude to hang up so I can’t control how long the conversation lasts but on WhatsApp, I can reply at my own convenience.

It’s simpler to pretend to be busy on message because there are no environmental clues like where you really are or what you’re doing: it’s easy to seem like I’m being mauled by my impatient cub to put the phone down when I’m actually at the gym (loud music blaring in the background), while having this conversation through texting. It’s more convincing to say, “Hey I better attend to this urgent toddler meltdown” rather than saying “Hey, I better attend to this urgent undoing of my shoe-lace while doing cardio (because I’m actually so over this conversation!)” WhatsApp is just a safer option in terms of cutting a conversation without hurting anyone’s feelings while returning to your busy life. My WhatsApp status is quite direct, “Hate phone calls, love texting! Don’t call me!”

When I visit my sister in Pune, my Jiyaji comes home early to be with me; he takes us out and shows us a great time. On the other hand, when my sister visits Bombay, my husband can barely find the time to meet her for dinner. We may just be sitting home on that night, but he’s resistant to step out on a weeknight. My bhabhi, who moved from Delhi, told me that she finds Bombay people very cold. I can understand her point completely but I wonder what makes us this way.

I think just the way Indians are viewed as ill-mannered and aggressive, because we constantly need to push to get ahead in line, something to do with the environ that we live in  makes Bombayites also insecure.

Indians have to compete in life with millions for a handful resources, right from the time we are in our mothers’ wombs; stressing about whether we will get a room in the best maternity hospital to getting an admission into school, college, (list goes on). Life is a race and this gets embedded into our psyche. In Bombay, this ‘Indian’ situation is magnified; with such a disciplined, competitive working culture, long working hours and very less space to live in, breathe in, travel in (whether you’re trying to find a seat on the local or trying to wiggle into the left lane to get one car ahead at the traffic jam), we find that we are fighting to gain some amount of control in our lives and personal space.

Our home becomes our sanctuary and we find that that is the only place where we exercise some control. This is why we are fiercely possessive of it,  not allowing anyone to enter for fear that their visit may reduce our sense of control here.

After all the time we spend commuting, working and fighting for space, we become selfish about what time we have left. We get into a mentality of constantly conserving: from space (I know of a top Bombay architect who was called to Delhi to design a country club and was sent back, as he couldn’t get out of his ‘saving space’ mentality while designing over sprawling acres) to time.

Even in our free time, we need to schedule everything. My husband’s sunday schedule goes something like this:

5:45 am Wake up and go for a long run (only possible on Sundays). 8:00 am Reach home, read the newspaper, chat with the family for a bit. 10:00 am Departure, with toddler and wife in tow, for a swim and breakfast at the club. 1:00 pm Eat lunch. 2:30 pm Take a nap. 5:00 pm Wake up and go out for a couple of hours (without toddler because father-baby time is over). 8:30 pm Dinner. 9:30 pm Off to bed

We (Bombayites) are constantly running: running to work, running to get home, running to take a nap and relax! The ironies don’t escape me when Nandy, despite this Sunday routine, doesn’t wear a watch on this one day because he says it’s too heavy on his hand. I suspect, time weighs too heavily on his mind rather than the certified lightweight watch I have bought him.

Time is the noose that hangs from every Bombayites neck; working, mothering or not! We try, every Sunday, to break loose but we can’t. Even when there’s no noose, we can’t help  but stumble around; still enslaved in our minds to our routine. We have truly made a business of our busyness. So when you call me and I don’t call back, remember the standard reply: “I’m sorry! I’ve just been so busy!”, and before you get annoyed, remember that I’m not lying. I suffer from the disease of busyness (a mental condition where you always feel extremely busy, irrespective of whether you are actually doing anything).

Chai and other lies: The Life of a Mumbai Mum

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BabyA comes, handing me the jet spray, and says, “Mamma, why don’t you wash yourself?” Silly me! I really believed that I can steal a minute of peace to sit and answer the call that nature hollers out to me every morning. I wasn’t asking for newspaper time, or even a peek into Facebook to catch up on the important events featuring on my Newsfeed. I just asked for a minute so that I could feel like a human being with some amount of personal and private space so I could empty my bowels without emptying my self-respect. No such luck!

The other day, my nutritionist tells me, “You’re constantly skipping your afternoon green tea!” She doesn’t have kids, so she doesn’t understand that I don’t have the luxury of mulling over life’s ironies as I sip on chai. Does anyone realise what a long and self-reflective process drinking tea is? I never fully understood this till I had a kid (because earlier, time was commonplace- always there): You brew the tea, and then wait for it to cool down, burn your tongue a few times while waiting, and finally slowly sip through it (lavishly slurping if no one’s around) when it reaches the perfect temperature. This takes time, and feels like ‘living on the edge’ when you have a toddler who loves to jump all the time on anything she can find- be it a pillow or more excitingly, your head lying on that pillow.

Some time ago, there was a tea ad campaign that proclaimed “Chai Time is My Time”. Now that I have a toddler, I fully appreciate what that means. It means that drinking (and really enjoying) tea takes time. It is a meditative experience. Moms don’t meditate because moms have no time! “My time”- what’s that? Occasionally, I do encounter this phenomenon but it happens so rarely that it warrants great excitement, wherein I put updates about the hours I slept or movies I watched or I share Instagram images of my “Daffodils” inspired tea cup alongside my fancy Rose Pouchong tea leaves. After all, afternoon tea for a mum is an event and it must be treated as such.

I read blogs, once in a while, wherein people on the outside, wonder what moms in Mumbai (especially SoBo) do. They imagine us to be much like “moms of the Upper East Side” (did you read that article?) who just sit around spending hours on narcissistic activities like getting manicures, exercising and having shopping-mommy-lunches all day, while our kids are brought up by our nannies. I guess some moms live their lives like that (and that’s entirely their choice), but most of the moms I know, don’t. I would love to live that life, but I don’t.

I do take the time out to exercise and take care of my health, especially now that my child is getting older and goes to school, but I don’t understand why do moms have to apologize for prioritizing themselves, or for having a support system? And just because we have a support system, why do some people assume that we are less involved mothers? I have a full time maid for BabyA, and I live in a joint family with a helpful mother in law, and an eager mom who lives 20 minutes away so the world tells me that I must be having lots of “my time” and yet, here I am, trying to schedule a cup of green tea at any point in the day.

It’s not that I don’t have time because I don’t trust anyone with my kid. When I go out, I never call to ask the 3 Ms: my mother in law, mother or maid the quintessential mommy concern, “Baby ne khaana khaaya, kya?” (Has Baby eaten her food?) In fact, I never call home because I’m too busy taking selfies of myself having a good time- because it is an event in my life!

So even though I have so much support, and I do manage to sneak in a mommy lunch every now and then, in reality, I spend most of my day with BabyA. I pick her up from school, and after her lunch, we play board games. We have “chutney time” where we make “chutney” out of each other, hugging tight and squashing tighter till we’re both paté. We go for coffee dates often to the local bookstore, where after our reading session, I drink cappuccinos while she sips on babycinos (milk) at their cafe (she’ll let me drink a hot beverage in peace as long as “coffee time is our time”). I do realize that this is a luxury in itself, because I don’t have to do housework or work outside to supplement the house income, so I can truly spend quality and quantity time with my child. I thank God every day for blessing me with this luxury, but I resent when people make a caricature of my type, and write that we don’t have time for our kids because we have so many people to help out!

I grew up with a mom who was always home when we got home, and to me, that was the biggest joy, whether I expressed it to her or not. I don’t mean to pass judgement on someone who doesn’t have the opportunity to do that, but I do mean to share what was important to me while growing up, and I want to be the kind of mom I have had. That’s why, when people think I have a decadent life where I wonder what to do with the oodles of time I have to myself, I want to believe in that fantasy too. I shut my eyes, and imagine myself all alone on some beach, holding a tall glass of chilled Sangria and a copy of “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri (of which I have read the first chapter four times, as I have never had the free time to escalate to the second), the cool sea breeze mixed with the hot sun lulling me to sleep… and just then, a squirt of tepid water hits my face. I open my eyes to see her standing there, looking impatient, with the jet spray pointed towards me like a gun:

“Mamma, why are you sleeping on the potty? Come on quick! Wash yourself!”

And I’m back to reality.