Walking the old quarters with Bandra girl, visiting from France

I thought I might walk Bandra during Christmas time and relish the lights and the smells of baking… but I thought that would only be to add to the clichés that cling to the Queen of the Suburbs. But then an old friend materialised from France and it seemed like it might be a fine time to walk down a Bandra street with France-24’s foreign correspondent, Leela Jacinto.

The day is pleasant, so pleasant that we can bask in the sunshine at the bandstand. It’s early so the fans haven’t showed up for Bhaijaan’s birday and the laathi charge will happen later, but if it had broken out while we were drinking nariyal paani, I should not have been surprised. For Leela Jacinto tends to be a stormy petrel, who has been trolled on three continents by right-wingers of various stripes.

We think we will walk the road from Leela’s home to the station, the first steps away from Bandra that would take her first to St Xavier’s College and then to a post-graduation course in media at the Social Communications Department of the Sophia Polytechnic. She worked with several Mumbai-based newspapers and magazines before heading out to New York where she did her masters in journalism at New York University (NYU). There was a short stint at a newspaper but it was while she was reporting for ABC News, that she found a way to break into the Big Boys League.

“I struck up a friendship with Ziad Doueiri, a Lebanese filmmaker I met at the Toronto Film Festival; he invited me to Lebanon and so I took leave and I went to Beirut and worked on a story. When I came back, I handed it in to the editors.”

She would make this her beat, a contentious destination, a vacation, a story idea. “It was great because I had not promised anyone a story but I knew the story I wanted. In the course of investigating that story, if another one turned up, something more promising if a little less defined, I could follow that one too.”

And it made the travel experience more intense. “If you arrive as a tourist, you explore as a tourist, you experience as a tourist. If you arrive as a journalist, you don’t just chat to people, you hear their life stories, you make friends, you experience these new places much more fully.”

With a touch of regret she says, “No more of that. Now there’s insurance and my current employer doesn’t want to find me in dangerous areas these days.”

Thankfully, no one has told France-24 about Bandra’s sidewalks. We have been rubbing knees with fenders and curving our spines out of the way of bumpers. Like so many other parts of the city, Bandra seems to have sidewalks at will. Some streets have a stretch on one side, some on the other. Some will have a stretch and suddenly throw up their hands and say, “Ah what the heck!” and give up the idea.

Meanwhile, Jacinto tells me about her stint in Kabul, a city battered, bruised and Talibaned.

“I had always had a sneaking fascination with Afghanistan and the Gulf countries in general. It may have been that they were just exotic but when there was a chance to go and train young Afghan journalists at the Pajhwok news wire service after the 2001 ouster of the Taliban, I volunteered,” she says.

Ours is a friendship that spans decades so I remember stories of the freezing cold and of shortages of everything except good spirits and Leela’s intense drive to do epic shit. She was getting the programme running and she was freelancing on the side. “A side-business? I guess you can take Leela out of Bombay but you can’t take Bombay out of Leela.”

Eventually, she would leave the US and settle in France, getting a job with France-24, a state-run channel. “They had a lot more time for Africa which meant I got to cover another continent with another set of problems,” she says.

This is a peculiar skill that Jacinto has: to be able to arrive in a new country, to pretend complete ignorance despite having read deeply in its history and economics, and then to focus on the question that needs to be asked, a skill that means she has been a columnist with the respected ‘Foreign Policy’. “Often it is an issue so large that it has been taken for granted, it has just merged with the mise en scene,” she says. “But it pays to be an outsider in those situations.”

(Thanks for all your mail. Please keep those letters coming. Meanwhile, it is still fun to walk in Bandra and many of the cribs and lighting will be around for a while yet but it has been dug up so hadh-e nigaah tak, gubaar hi gubaar hai…)