The question of residencies is what this essay is all about, since the city, itself, in which this resident seeks to forge his retirement has, in essence, become problematic. But to begin at the beginning, I have gone through three different residencies that I must relate first before invoking the fourth which is still a year or two away. I was born and spent the first sixteen years of my life (1949 – 1965) in the interesting city of Poona. Not only did Poona lie geographically in the rain-shadow of Bombay, but culturally it was a historic city divided between the Pune Maratha and Peshwa culture of the Chitpavan Hindus and the Poona British Cantonment town, home and center of the military Southern Command culture of all the non-Hindu minorities.

Born into a Parsee family of railwaymen and women, I was brought up in one of my maternal uncle's tiny 2394 Sholapur Road residence. It was a chawl run by a hierarchy of kindly Iranian landladies or banoobais, where a hard-working minority of poor communities lived and mingled freely. Since they wanted their children to succeed where they had failed, we were sent, on weekdays, to British schools that existed only in the Cantonment. And on weekends, we were encouraged to read comics and books that were only published from England and to watch movies that came from the big dream factories of Hollywood and the Pinewood studios in England. Since All India Radio did not permit any western musical culture on its nationalistic, swadeshi airwaves, we listened and mimicked all the rock ‘n’ roll that came from America and Britain via Radio Ceylon. And since my British school was funded and financed by the American Methodist Church missionaries in India, we were thoroughly Americanized and Anglicized to begin with. But where did Bombay fit into all of this?

All the newspapers and film magazines that we read on a daily basis were written, produced and edited from Bombay. In fact they all came by truck and train from Bombay and we avidly read them in Poona coming home from school in the afternoon. There were one or two local Poona newspapers, but nobody read them. And even if we did, we found the news from Poona very dull, routine and boring. But the news that came from Bombay was always original and exciting. Imagine, for instance, a Parsee naval officer actually going to the flat of his English wife's lover, confronting him as he was toweling himself outside his shower, shooting him at point-blank range, closing the door of his apartment firmly behind him, and driving straight to the nearest police station and giving himself up! Such things happened only in Bombay. The Parsees in Poona only walked up and down Main Street saying "Sahib-jee" and "How are we doing today?" So when we got an opportunity to visit Bombay, we eagerly went across the Sahyadri mountains (or the Western Ghats as they were referred to in the Oxford Atlas) by car or the famous Bombay-Poona-Bombay train: The Deccan Queen.

Being a railwayman's son offered me the grand opportunity of becoming an occasional resident of Bombay in those early years when I was still schooling in Poona. In the interests of maintaining a stable education, I met my nomadic father, a Permanent Ways Inspector in the Central Railway, only twice a year: two months in summer and one month in winter. (My father's railway career actually started in Bombay in the suburb of Byculla. He was trained as an apprentice there and stayed in Dhobi Talao's Dukkar gulli or Pig's Alley. His most memorable moment was when he was about to dip his nankhatai biscuit in his creamy Iranian tea: there was one of the loudest bangs that the city of Bombay had ever heard, and a huge ship's propeller came screaming over the air and literally fell outside the café, mercifully at his feet.) I was overjoyed when we learnt that as a junior P.W.I. officer he had been promoted to senior status and his first official posting was to be in the dockside of Byculla at Mazgaon.

I still remember that lovely, sprawling first floor of the P.W.I. Railway Quarters on Lower Nesbit Road. It had five spacious rooms, wooden floorings, a netted corridor and a tiny, lovely balcony that opened up towards St Mary's Boys High School (again British) to the left, and across the railway tracks, thundering with local trains every five minutes, to the right, there were the majestic grey buildings called Berkeley Palace where the junior central railway staff of engine drivers, locoforemen, guards, dining-car managers, station-masters, interlocking signal operators resided.

I remember, especially the Anglo-Indians. Whenever I needed to go to the Bombay 'fort' area, I would ride the local train from Byculla to Victoria Terminus 'free,' either with the Anglo-Indian driver in the front or the Anglo-Indian guard at the rear. If it was a 'fast' local not stopping at any station, I was even given the honor of increasing the local trains speed slightly and toot its horn as I went way past my dad's lodgings or wave the green flag as we swept past the crowded platforms waiting for the slow local that had been diverted to the adjacent railway track to make way for our super fast passage.

In those days Bombay was a city whose primary interests were either British or American for this Parsee schoolboy with the ironic English surname. …more of this later… St Thomas's Church was a British Center site I visited quite regularly. It was strangely more relevant to me than the Parsee Attas-Behram, the city's largest and most sacred Parsee place of worship or fire temple. More tears were shed over the gravestones at St Thomas bearing the names of young Englishmen, their wives and children, all victims of the deadly plague than the city's Parsees being delivered to the vultures after they had died. I had absolutely no desire to even once enquire where the Parsee Dungarvadi or Tower of Silence was located. The only vultures that inhabited my thoughts then were the ones seen in the famous American western movies where they helped the cowboys locate the wounded or dying individuals who had strayed or had been abducted from their residencies!

The American centers regularly visited like a sacred pilgrimage, almost every other day during my three month vacations (since there were so many) were the great movie palaces built by all the major Hollywood moguls in their magnificent and resplendent Art-Deco designs. What was a puny nativist Dhobi Talao or The Washerman's Pool without the majestic presence of The Metro with its roaring MGM lion drowning out all of the Parsee dasturjees or priests finely recited Parsee ghes or hymns emanating from Princess Street's agyarees or fire temples. And who cared about famous Indian cricketers like the Parsee Polly Umrigar or the Gujrati Bapu Nadkarni who actually worked for another maternal uncle at the head office of the A.C.C. (The Assorted Cement Company) just opposite Churchgate Station, when Daffy Duck and his gang from Looney Tunes could be met daily in their spectacular Warner Bros. residency at The Eros.

Going to a film was a carefully choreographed and staged rite of passage. You were entering a hyper-real space enclosed within its own mise-en-scène. If it was a cinemascope film, the theatre's interiors metaphorically widened as you wandered its splendid carpeted corridors adorned with posters and photographs of all our favorite gods and goddesses. If it was a film-noir drama, you would walk out, often shaken, and abandoning the customary bus, train, or tram ride take the cab home quickly to escape the evening's creeping shadows being swallowed up by the neon night of the streets.

The main film always started after the interval and you always lined up for the ice cream soda served by a man who had literally stepped out of a Norman Rockwell cover you had just seen from Look magazine. You preferred this ice cream float over the flavored Parsee Dairy Farm milk that the elders were always raving about on Princes Street. And it was Hollywood's famous "sweater gals" like Lana Turner and Susan Hayward who first ignited your imagination to more than the engineering bravadoes of those famous pointed Maiden-Form bras, it was rumored, that only "the fast" Anglo-Indian girls of our school wore. My personal favorite was a two-bit actress called Tina Louise who was really God's little Acre—(the "little," of course, being a euphemism) for her pair of God-given Bheega Zameens (wet lands) that literally loomed out of their golden photo frames onto your eagerly offered wet palms, and then when you saw her in glorious Technicolor or Vita Vision, you blessed Bombay and where you would be for the next two hours in that delicious darkness where nobody and nothing else mattered except you and Tina and Tina and you.

The colonial imagination which I imbibed from our school's ever popular Radiant Reading texts that were always published from the Thames and Hudson enclaves of good old England was always very carefully nurtured during my holiday visits in Bombay itself, a city whose architecture actually duplicated that other great city, the city of London, we vowed we would visit when we were fit to travel. So when my mother took me to Crawford Market to buy mangoes in the summer, I showed more interest in the shoppers that appeared in Kipling Senior's remarkable friezes than the nativist crowd screaming and shouting all around me. Similarly, I found the gargoyles and the busts of English viceroys more fascinating as they jutted their stony heads from the magnificent walls of Victoria Terminus station than Phirosha Mehta's towering statue that stood just opposite it. What conceit, what arrogance, we, the so-called "day scholars" of British Schools had, especially when we watched cricket, that gentleman game in white being played either on the brown Azaad (Freedom) Maidaan (ground) or the green lawns of the Bombay gymkhana pavilion patterned after the famous Lord's Cricket Ground in England. And how delightful we were to roam all over the C.C.I.'s (Cricket Club of India's) pavilion when some member took us for lunch there. At the end of the day we would return home with different kinds of "ashes" in our mouth and eagerly devour all those wonderful cricket stories written by our two favorite scribes Neville Cardus and Jack Fingelton.

These were the kind of "innings" I never wanted to end then. The Mumbai part of Bombay had still not revealed itself to me because my nose and eyes and ears were always tilted towards the West. And the West that entered me, as Bombay's occasional resident, was primarily British and secondarily American. There would be a third entrant—the European, but that happened when I became Bombay's temporary resident from 1966-1980. I shall deal with this later. But in the first phase of my residency, I knew all about Robin Hood and his adventures in Sherwood Forest and knew nothing about Shivaji Maharaj and his guerrilla-style adventures in the Western Ghats even when my train bore through its twenty odd tunnels. Billy the Kid, I knew was left-handed, and Jesse James was shot in the back by a coward. But the ambidextrousness of Gandhi never fascinated me and why a Hindu shot him in such a cowardly manner was never a mystery I was keen to comprehend. And yet, something strange started to happen every time I returned to Poona from Bombay's temporarily stimulating Anglo-American hiatus. I seemed to enjoy the local and purely native Indian collectivity that would suddenly invade and in a way challenge my so-called westernized infrastructure, and it was the long 2394 Sholapur Road agassi or long corridor balcony that contributed to the birth of these first nativist pangs inside me.

The agassi was one of my favorite places. I would stand there for hours absorbing the Indian tamasha or drama being regularly played out on 2394 Sholapur Road that stretched below me and beyond me. That was the road where my Indian paalkhi or procession first started and yet how ignorant I was when that actually happened. It started, as I now recall, with our favorite alcoholic moochi or cobbler who bore the name of the Hindu God Hari. I spent hours teaching him to say 'good morning' at sakaal (morning), 'good afternoon' at dupari (noon), 'good evening' at sandhyakaal (dusk) and 'good night' at ratri (night). The Dupari—'good aftaarneen' sloka was the only one that gave him trouble, but this was my first unofficial teaching act that revealed to me, not only my future profession, but also gave me the first inkling of living and being, thinking and feeling in both cultures. It made me question exclusivity for the first time and it opened my western eyes and western ears to native and Indian visions and sounds. The sound of the ancient girni or flour mill, for example, where the poor people collected the flour that was ground from the wheat was so pleasant to hear in the late evenings just as the kazee's baang (the Islamic call of the muezzin) at five a.m. in the morning then became the alarm I now woke up to.

Similarly, I started paying close attention to two of our chawl's daily rituals that I had always taken for granted. The first concerned N. Shirsat, our Maharashtrian tailor. He had opened his shop directly under our staircase. We had to pay his monthly electricity bill since his territory was right underneath our rooms. He, of course, never had the paltry sum ready, so we would pay his share on the due date, get all our clothes alteration done on credit, and then there began this spectacular debate that he would have with every family member that went up and down that staircase, in the course of a single day, casually or vehemently reminding him of his neglected dharma or duty with light. We would all harass the man till he honored the two 100 watt electric bulbs that dangled precariously from his spider-infested chords. In retrospect, I suspect he enjoyed all the extra attention we gave him, and I am convinced that he deliberately delayed payment in order to actually enjoy the daily staircase banter that ensued between him and us. And I'm sure this Hindi film enacted melodrama entertained all his regular hangers-on at his shop greatly.

The other event involved Raosahib, a burly paan-chewing Maharashtrian (a regular visitor at the tailor's every evening) who would climb the stairs with Falstaffian wit to bathe, clothe, and feed Dinsajee, our lunatic Parsee neighbor, his daily dinner. He lived with Mehramai, his spinster sister, who was the Old Mrs. Hubbard of the chawl, befriending and feeding all the servants who worked for us and because they came from so far away, slept in her tiny rooms and were fed by her for free. Dinsajee was a brilliant lawyer who lost his sanity, when the woman he was about to marry, never showed up on the appointed day. One of Mehramais's regulars was our andeewalla (or eggman) who came all the way from Hadapsar to sell his eggs in the town, and who we called "havaijaaz" because he loved watching all the "jet planes" performing air force sorties in the sky from the nearby Lohegaon air force base. If Sherlock Holmes's Baker Street had its 'irregulars' so did my 2394 street denizens as well!

My mother was a heroine too. Like Marlene Dietrich controlling the drunken revelers in her saloon in Destree Rides Again (and that was only a movie), my mother would often stride with me to Bhimpura Lane, climb up the rickety staircase where Paroo, our servant, lived with her abusive drunken brother Peeraji, lift that bastard by the scruff of his neck, slap him a couple of times, and once she even kicked him down those wobbly stairs, every time he raised his brutal hands on his sister. The whole lane would come out to applaud my mother's heroic actions and Peeraji was so scared of her that often he would run and take shelter, literally in the lock-up or prison cell of the corner Police Chowki (or station). If Hollywood showed me a drama on the weekend involving its cast of thousands, so did my mother, and she was the living and breathing embodiment of a Frank Capra heroine. It was at this part of my upbringing, I remember, that I first became conscious of the peculiarity of my Persian first name Darius and my English last name Cooper.

This epiphany coincided also with the end of my Poona residency in 1965 after I passed out from my British school with a London obtained Senior Cambridge degree. Western and Empire, the two great Poona cinema halls where we had cut our first cinematic teeth on Hollywood and British films were going to be broken down. Our 2394 chawl, itself, had been suddenly sold and was soon going to be torn down as well. Hari moochi, one day, disappeared. It was rumored, he had either succumbed to bootlegged hooch or had returned to his mulak or native village in Satara to take up farming. One day, our tailor also vanished taking with him all his sewing machines and spindles. As usual, we had to still foot his last electric bill. All the Parsee homes on Main Street and East Street had 'For Sale' signs and we were told that they were all going to be demolished and transformed to mini shopping plazas. Poona was in the grip of changes and the time had come for me to pack up and leave and I did and became Bombay's temporary resident from 1966 – 1980. And it was on my name's subdivided status that I resumed this new Bombay residency.

My very first Darius endured Parsee tenure, so to speak, was not a happy one. I could find only paying guest accommodations in the poorest Parsee Bombay area of Grant Road. For two very unhappy years, I lived in another chawl called Dubash Building. The entrance was through a filthy lane which opened up at the end to two distinguished odors: the glorious potato smell of Golden Wafers and the deadly miasmic fumes of bootlegged liquor being made in large corrugated vats by the lane's predominant Goan family. My Parsee tenants were straight out of Dickens, Balzac and Dostoyevsky, strictly lower depths! One was a drill instructor by morning and a pederast by afternoon. Another brought home the chasni which was the meal that was cooked by the fire temple priests, in honor of the dead paid for by the bereaved family members. He lived on that and was always found combing the obituaries of the Jame-e-Jamshed, the popular Parsee newspaper, very enthusiastically every morning.

While these Parsees fascinated me in their tiny rooms at my make shift home, the upper class Parsee students I encountered at St Xavier's College pushed the Darius name more vehemently into the British and American Cooper camp. These were mostly rich kids whose parents were life-time members of all the prestigious British clubs and gymkhanas. They went regularly to the horse races, at Mahalakshmi, on Sundays, and if they were not discussing Indian horses that mostly had English names in the classroom, they were heard arguing animatedly about movements in western classical music and operas. Most of them even lived in those grand English mansions and apartments bearing thrilling English names like 'Ivanhoe' and 'Belvedere Park'. The only Parsees I ever got along with were those who loved the Hollywood films and the American and British music that came, not so much from the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall settings, but from Liverpool and Harlem and Motown. This pleased the Cooper side of me especially when I had started my first ever book collection, in Bombay's temporary residency, with the two volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes' stories and novels by Arthur Conan Doyle and my first ever musical collection with Dean Martin's 33 RPM album "What a Difference A Day Makes" and the Beatles' 33 RPM one of "A Hard Days Night." It was even a pleasant surprise when the Darius side discovered much later that the only client that Arthur Conan Doyle ever defended was a Parsee in London, by the name of Eduljee. What was even more astonishing was that my father's sister was actually married to an Indian born and bred Eduljee!

But while I was constantly being tossed between the Darius and the Cooper sides of my being and self, I noticed that both England and America were on the decline and their place, on the Bombay temporary residency horizon, was now being taken over by fascinating new influences coming, this time, from Europe. The standard Hollywood films suddenly stopped arriving in Bombay in the mid 1960's because the contracts with the major studios had neither been renewed nor negotiated by the Indian authorities. At the same time, the Indian musical recording companies wanted to float their own labels in many of India's big cities. So big American and British musical labels were suddenly outlawed. While we hunted for these in clandestine shops with tailored fronts, where because of their smuggled status we had to pay for them at exaggerated costs, the new waves of films that were exploding all over Europe entered Bombay legitimately either through the city's European cultural centers like the Alliance Francaise and the Max Mueller Bhavans who were keen to show them as progressive icons of their country's new artistic consciousness and through the film societies that suddenly mushroomed all over the city because they could show these films without any kind of governmental censor interference. For the first time we could see films without any 'cuts'. When regular bookstores found this out, they suddenly started ordering all kinds of esoteric film books and critical journals where these European films and the old American and British ones were discussed and evaluated at great length on aesthetic and cultural grounds. Even the popular Oscars took a back seat as we discussed the fates of these films at the great film festivals held at Cannes and Berlin and Oberhaussen and it was inevitable for India to come up with its own very first great international film festival with Bombay, of course, being chosen as the first Indian city to host it.

In this temporary residency, my friends and I went completely European, especially in our reading and viewing habits. In fact, one of the greatest miracles of this residency was the magical formation of great friendships that still exist today because of this Europeanisation. It was these strange new books and strange new films that literally brought all of us together and this bond still continues today. I even met my future wife at a Dr Mabuse film festival hosted by the German Max Mueller Bhavan in 1978. But hadn't I seen her before, especially at the Alliance Francaise where my other friends and I regularly saw French films, every Wednesday and Saturday? Then when I invited her to a special film-society showing of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, the friendship had turned to romance. It was a glorious roller coaster ride, but like all things bright and beautiful, this residency ended around 1980. Parental opposition to our inter-caste marriage ambitions, meager salaries as teachers of 'dead' subjects in the city's local colleges (mine 'English' and hers 'history'), the inability to afford, even a tiny room with a bath, within the city's limits, and the inevitable trickle and drying off of European films and books after the passion for them had started to fade brought on resignedly the customary dreams and the fulfilling of them as immigrants, but not to the proverbial spires of Oxford and Cambridge, but rather to the sunny land of southern California where one hoped to continue this legacy of the British, the American, and the European cultures that had colonized a young Indian Bombay bred couples' sub and unconscious. So we left, she as tourist, and I as student, for Los Angeles in 1980….

....And it is from my current alien-residency in America (1980-2007) that I am writing this, for it has now created for me a new kind of visitor's residency to Bombay, a city I continue to visit for five weeks in every year, from mid December to the end of January. But here, I must interrupt this narrative, and come to terms with what I discovered about myself when I first made the transition, from Poona in 1966 to Bombay, which I was compelled to leave in 1980, because right now, after the break up of my marriage in 2003, I am in yet another transition residency in America, hoping to become a permanent resident of this new Yankeefied Bombay in one or two years time, either in 2009 or 2010.

The Bombay person that I became in my temporary residency there was witty, serious, intellectually inclined and internationally curious. I was different from the Poona-born resident who was na"ive, backward, and who had experienced life only in the cantonment's predominant two roads: Main Street, where all the latest hustle and bustle was, and East Street which was so quiet that I could actually hear the koyal bird sing to its mate as the monsoon approached. Bombay was ruled majestically by the Arabian Sea, and the different winds that thrust me into Bombay's arms carried startling scenic messages and epiphanies. Poona, on the other hand, was ruled by two rivers, the Mula and the Mutha, and their impact, instead of flooding my imagination, often depleted it like their own pathetic dried up presences in the hot summer months. Bombay's sweat, in its humid summers was distinctively rewarding, and so was its romantic monsoon rains. One received daily baptisms of many kinds and expanded and grew in Bombay without once getting exhausted. One could still teach a 7 a.m. class in Bombay after a hectic day of attending cultural events and after crawling into bed at 1 a.m. In Poona, you never sweated and were always in bed by 9 p.m. The sun always made you sick. And the fifteen inches of rain that streaked Poona's Main and East streets were like an irritating itch. They made you, not wet, but dirty. In Poona when you walked, you had a destination you arrived at. Nothing distracted you because life hardly changed. You walked through its familiar spaces almost unconsciously. In Bombay, however, you became, whether you liked it or not, a committed or a spontaneous flaneur, because the city was so full of diversions and surprises that you always ended up losing yourself in them. You were forced to participate in them. Life in Bombay always came unexpectedly at you, sometimes in a Bollywood's Eena Meena Dika rhythm and sometimes wrapped up in a Tukaram abhanga like Vithaal Geet Gava. You could grasp Elvis Presley's I'm Nothing but a Hound Dog's rebellious spirit and enunciate it or sway intoxicated to the sufi strains of a Humein to Loot Leya Dil Ke Haisan wallo nein. You could go instantly from the Biryani culture of Mohamed Ali Road to the puran poli one in Shivaji Park at Dadar. You could choose to have your afternoon stimulated by a lecture on Kant's "Categorical Imperatives" in Elphinstone College and then have your evening serious tutored by a deaf speaker highlighting Abhinavgupta's "rasa theory" at the NCPA library. Only Bombay could offer you Shostakovich conducted by a Parsee and Miles Davis played by a Goan, both within the same week. So as you can see, it was a reluctant departure that my wife and I made from Bombay in 1980. Now, I am single, and after spending eleven months of the year in San Diego, dreaming about what I am going to do in Bombay in the twelfth month of every year, a whole new approach to a whole new residency has opened up. But most of it now revolves in going on a determined search, in that one month I am there, for those old residencies that I have been talking about, in order to see how much of them are still there; to make the effort, with my old and trusted friends to find them and revive them in order to make my future residence, rapidly coming up, not just an empty dream, but a tale told by an old-fashioned idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying something; yes, always signifying something!

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Darius Cooper earned his PhD in Literature and Film from the University of Southern California, and has been Prof. of Critical Thinking, Humanities and Film in the English Department at San Diego Mesa College since 1989. Recently, his essays have been appearing regularly in Biblio, the review journal published from Delhi. He has also written two books: Between Tradition and Modernity: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, published by Cambridge University Press in 2000; and In Black And White: Hollywood Melodrama and the films of Guru Dutt, published by Seagull Books, Kolkata, in 2004. Another essay of his appeared in our last issue.