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Humour by Rehana Munir: We can walk it out
Guided walks are an energising antidote to the ennui of recurring lockdowns. What are some of the routes you took?
It was a dark and noisy night. I stood on the pavement outside the erstwhile Minerva cinema with a group of friends with whom I usually engage via food, drink and WhatsApp. On this particular evening, however, we had signed up for a guided walk around Mumbai’s Grant Road and Mumbai Central neighbourhoods, whose history includes iconic single-screen cinemas, key locations from the freedom struggle, and a much-documented red-light district that still survives. From the shuttered office of the horror-peddling Ramsay Films to a urinal under Kennedy Bridge, immortalised by Manto, the walk was a reminder that our ragged cities still have racing hearts—and eulogised bladders—beneath their soulless exteriors.
Billions of blue blistering barnacles!
The French word flâneur, used for a man walking about town, paying attention to what’s going on around him, has gained currency the last decade or so. A flâneuse myself, it’s been the daily walks around the neighbourhood that have helped me keep myself together during the pandemic. Every little sign of life in a locked-down street—from the clatter of a garbage truck to the barking of pup—was a boost in those eerie days of total lockdown. Now, as we emerge from yet another wave of the indefatigable virus, I’m hungry for guided walks around the city as if afraid that everything will disappear once more if we let it out of our sight.
There’s a special kind of thrill when a walk combines human and natural history. A shorewalk I attended (conducted around Haji Ali right before the six-hundred-year-old monument was obscured from view by hectic construction work for the coastal road) was a real eye-opener and toe-slasher. As our group marvelled at the abundance of life in inter-tidal pools, from hermit crabs to corals, I cut my foot on a barnacle—sharp, tenacious crustaceans that secrete one of the most powerful natural glues. Blistering barnacles, indeed.
The chamber of secrets
A friend and I recently visited the Thane wetlands, where flocks of flamboyant flamingos fly in every winter. Annoying alliteration aside, it was a treat to swap the usual walk for a boat ride, with the winged migrants flying overhead like a fluttering blanket of pink and black. “Do you know Merlin?” asked an enthusiastic lady seated behind me as I struggled to tell the pipers from the shrikes. “Hello,” said I, to the lady sitting next to her, thinking an introduction was being made. She was, instead, referring to a bird-identifying app. More fool me. The guide, meanwhile, was busy with passengers imploring him to ride closer to the flamingos. Unfortunately, any dreams of a quiet boat ride were shattered by a cacophony of insistent demands and emphatic refusals.
Walking through the dazzling hallways and chambers of the BMC headquarters, opposite CST, open to the public for the first time in 128 years, was an enthralling experience. A mix of Gothic and Indo-Saracenic styles, it mostly made me feel like Hermione at Hogwarts. Who needs those stuffy mystery rooms when you can have magical mystery tours?
Make it new
You think you know Goa, and then you’re taken by surprise by a secret pond, a stunning fish thali, or that college mate you’ve been avoiding since 2006, unavoidably there at the flea market. Last December, I had the chance to see the churches of Old Goa through the eyes of a local student. As is often the case, a relatively modest structure often charms you more than the most magnificent architecture. The Chapel of St. Catherine, built by the Portuguese conqueror Alfonso de Albuquerque in 1510, is a Baroque relic with simple interiors and an unfussy altar, from whose high ceiling colonies of bats hang like gravity-defying priests.
A good guide shines a light on something you may have seen a thousand times before, without giving it any thought. The Imagist poet Ezra Pound’s slogan, Make It New, which became a sort of manifesto for the modernists, captures this feeling well. From time to time, we need to burst our air-conditioned bubbles of comfort and rediscover our surroundings, not just as content-seeking Instagrammers, but as participants. Emboldened by my experiences, I’m tempted to conduct my own local tour, filled with peculiar observations, absurd digressions and a pub pit stop. So exciting.
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From HT Brunch, March 13, 2022
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