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Literary Review
Bombay dreams
WRITING about the quotidian, as Ruskin Bond does in Landour Days, without boring the pants off your reader, is not easy. There is a man called Reyner Banham who managed to write three entertaining and informative pages on the potato crisp that ended by asking whether "the world's greatest anthropologist had got his polarities wrong and should have written, say, The Boiled and the Crisp." (The allusion is to Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked.) I thought this essay signified the pinnacle of such writing but have now come across Busybee on Lifebuoy soap, and pau bhaji.
Behram Contractor wrote these columns between 1967 and 2001. He got up at 5.00, his wife says in her short, affectionate introduction, did nothing up to about 7 am (apart from thinking hard, one presumes) and then tapped out 500 words between 7 and 7.30 "in one quick gasp" for the pages of Bombay's Afternoon Despatch and Courier. Every day. The "best" of these columns have been collected here.
Busybee likes his booze, and thinks Gauloise cigarettes taste like nothing more than Charminar, "export variety". He has a dog, Bolshoi the Boxer, that speaks. Nehru and Wodehouse he celebrates; cellular phones and killjoy Morarji Desai he satirises. He mourns the passing of Shastri, JP, and hot chappaties with Polson's butter on them. An entire column is a conversation with Sachin Tendulkar's answering machine.
For all we know, Contractor was one of those cultivated Parsis who could identify a sonata from its first notes. In his columns he cultivated the persona of the ordinary man in a middle-class slum: a strategy, when successful, that appeals to a huge readership and creates a social document often more telling than anything "tenured cretins" (Swapan Dasgupta's phrase) in universities can come up with.
Busybee, the Best of Thirty-six Years, Penguin, Rs. 250.
ANURADHA ROY
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