Editor’s Note
As a creature driven entirely by sound, by the way music falls on one’s ears, by beats and tenor and tone, as a reader who is also a listener, I was intrigued by how each time I read Bilal Moin’s poem ‘give me bhaji, bastard’, I was struck by the intense rawness of the speaker’s tone, by their unembellished voice. I kept wondering why it was coming through so directly, without any peripheral static, with such naked force.
I now suspect that this is the work of an often overlooked stylistic device we use in poems, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, the speech register. Starting from the title of the poem to phrases such as ‘quickly now, boss’ to ‘behenchod, just give me bhaji’, the register & the tone of the speaker is informal, insolent, driven by the energy of slang, and not to mention, utterly hungry & impatient. This voice reaches us uncensored & unfiltered. It carries the urgency of a subtle assault and showcases a tendency to bring down our own linguistic pompousness, our ideas of sophisticated speech, our attitudes of politeness. It is what Tony Hoagland calls in The Art of Voice, a low register, which differs from the high & the middle.
But what truly made me a believer of whether or not this register was working for the poem is when I could sense how seamlessly the speech & tone of the speaker expresses & enhances the central demand of the poem: a common Mumbaikar’s desperate attempt to get a plate of the humble & affordable pav bhaji, the same meal which once filled the stomachs of the mill workers of Bombay; how it lessens the gap between the poem’s speaker & the poem’s reader, so that the latter hears—no, listens—truly listens to the charged & unvarnished language of everyday survival, hunger & haste through the carnal & insistent need for ‘this bastard bhaji / of bastard Bombay’.
—Kunjana Parashar
The Bombay Literary Magazine
for Rafiq Azad and Arun Kolatkar
in the belly of the beast,
on a mongrel mid-day,
at the pav-bhaji stand,
the boiled bastard spills forth—
spawn of seafaring fathers
and a Bombay bitch in heat
built from borrowed things:
chillies chartered by Vasco,
potatoes pilfered from Peru,
capsicums carted from colonies,
peas, pop-eyed and parachuted,
tomatoes, red rascals of rebellion,
marauded from Mexican mesas,
and onions, plucked from Persia,
all plundered and pulverized,
beaten and battered,
mashed into Mumbai—
nothing here belongs,
yet everything fits.
give me bhaji, bastard.
and don’t forget the pav,
that Portuguese punk,
pinched from pantries,
soft as sin.
lay him down,
baste his buns in butter,
sear him till he sizzles,
turn him sacred,
a saint of dough,
bread fit for a basilica.
quickly now, boss
you’re a vendor of vice,
prince of the pavement,
supremo of the street.
serve it on anything—
aluminium, clay, leaf,
makes no difference.
the palate craves no luxury.
this bastard bhaji
of bastard Bombay.
behenchod,
just give me bhaji,
serve it scalding,
with a sliver of lemon,
and a fleck of coriander.
hurry, just
give me the city
broken and buttered
let me devour it
bite by bite
before the cotton mills
spin my bones into
thread.
Source: from the Bombay Suite, II
Did you eye them when we rushed in—
my worn-out soles, strewn like beads
from a broken tasbih, scattered wide
across the terrace tiles in Friday’s tide,
as adherents swelled like breath
in Allah’s boundless lungs?
Did you hear the imam—
asymmetrical, bald but bearded,
Quran’s cursive threading through us:
‘You who believe, do not consume each other’s property unjustly.’
Tell me—what foot slipped in first?
Did your toes wriggle, anxious intruders
alien to the prayers stitched in my soles?
Did you fear, as they slid over your heels,
that damnation might follow you home?
Or did it balance the scales of an unseen cycle—
an eye for an eye, a slipper for a slipper?
We’re brothers, you and I –
foreheads to the ground, coalesced into carpet,
folded like origami cranes into divine geometry,
palms pressed flat, parchment to stone.
We’ve traced the same whirling paths:
circumambulated the cube,
circumscribed and circumcised –
yet still, you slipped away with my soul.
Rumi says, ‘What you seek is seeking you.’
But I’ve searched and found nothing—
in the shoe-rack’s gaping maw;
in the bazaars where men scale rooftops
and monkeys tread the streets;
beneath rocket-ship minarets,
where children clutch the dome’s corners,
their marbles scattering like comets.
Still, my grandmother says: forgive.
She swears that somewhere,
beyond wrong and right,
there is heaven, with slippers for us all.
Even the cripple will roll forward,
his wedge of wounded wood cast aside,
and we will all be made whole again.
stations strung like prayer beads
slip through my fingers—
you left me at that bus stop:
book in one hand, bouquet in the other.
the flowers wilted as you swore
to send a postcard, pressed petals,
perhaps a mail-order bride.
now I haunt Lost Property.
after ninety days, they say,
everything belongs to the transit authority,
even fragments of you, filed away
with umbrellas and orphaned gloves:
lovers like phantom parcels—
tagged, shelved, and gathering dust.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Sudhir Patwardhan. Lower Parel (2001). Reproduced here with the kind permission of the artist.
In the 1970s, before he became Maximum CIty’s preeminent painter, Sudhir Patwardhan was a young radiologist at the King Edward Memorial and Mahatma Gandhi Memorial hospitals in Parel, the core of Mumbai’s mill district. The times were then, as now, the bestworst of times with a side of hope. In the couple of decades however, the textile mill industry would dismantle itself, trade unionism would be crushed and the locus of hope shifted to neoliberal dreams: software, globalisation and white-collar work. Patwardan’s painting Lower Parel is a witness to the beating of what was once a city’s working heart.
For an in-depth look at Sudhir Patwardhan’s work, check out Nancy Adajania, Timothy Hyman, R. Siva Kumar and Madhav Imartey’s book: Sudhir Patwardhan: Walking Through Soul City (2022).
Author | Bilal Moin
By day, Bilal Moin is an economist. By night, he is a writer, poet and photographer. Most recently, he edited The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City (2025), an anthology of 375 poems—translated from over 20 languages and set in 37 cities—spanning a 1500 years of Indian urban poetry. His writing has appeared in Rattle, Oxford Isis, Indian Literature, Himal Southasian and elsewhere. His first collection of poetry was published in 2018. He was born and raised in Bombay, or Mumbai, depending on your persuasion.
