Rolling hills shelter the gaur, the riverbank houses the otter, the broad leaf is the baya’s atelier, and Bombay, as it was then known, was Busybee’s stomping ground.
For decades, Behram Contractor or ‘Busybee’ was the city’s greatest columnist. His writing was about his charming, friendly and quirky conversation with the reader on current topics concerning Bombay or his own social and cultural life, so his subjects varied. But it is as a cultural and political satirist that he is best known. It is an endangered species in India today; but even back then, there were few who did it so well and none for so long. To seek Busybee’s peer is to look outside the Indian newspaper space. One of the few names that comes up, then, is that of TV satirist Jaspal Bhatti. Today, we have many stand-up comedians who riff on culture and politics, but Busybee’s quirks are still missed by many fans of satire.
This is his 25th death anniversary year.
His ‘Round and About’ column began with The Evening News of India in 1966, as per his obituary written by journalist Mark Manuel. The column moved papers with him, and hopped from typewriter to Wordperfect on DOS and possibly more modern word processors. Its last home wasthe Afternoon Despatch & Courier, the paper he founded. He wrote regularly until weeks before his death in 2001.
As a bookish child, I caught on to the fact that his writings were an expression for artsiness, tenderness and whimsy that had adapted to ‘practical’ society. It was something I wanted for myself. Not that I imagined I would meet Busybee, the great columnist and newspaper editor. It was later that I understood: senior journalists like him were accessible for small talk, if not always over a glass of cutting. Alas, he died a year before I joined journalism school in the city.
Growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, I read him in the AD&C. In the pre-Internet era, many people lived with his column as a daily fixture in their lives like, say, brun pav. His five hundred words — daily! — about the city, always topical, amiable and life-affirming, whimsical and humorous, and frequently hilarious, kept thousands hooked to the reading habit.
For me, they did one thing more: they also helped me further understand my father, firmly one of those reticent Indian dads with layers of armour over the more tender, vulnerable parts of his personality. This trait we share can be a strength and a cage. He read Busybee during his long bus journey back from work.
Today I appreciate that he slaked something in himself through Busybee’s warm, friendly, rasik heart. The cool, impersonal black-and-white newsprint between regimented gutterspaces, and the warm, glowing column amid it; now that I think of it, Afternoon seems a metaphor for father’s psyche. He was a man of numbers who could not enhance his nascent interest in literature growing up in a family of corporate professionals, and who, after marriage, shelved it in favour of supporting his own roof; a standard path for the grihasth. He was a man locked into his job. His jaws were hardset to endure the daily grind. On the inside, he was lonely, as work and family naturally sent him and his massive circle of friends in their own directions. To read Busybee was something like being with a kindly, enthusiastic friend on the lonely bus ride back.
On the face of it, our family had nothing in common with Busybee. He was a writer, a maker of culture, an upper-crust SoBoite. He as a writer, though, was ours.
His concerns, values, standards, qualities and joys were ours: his penchant for making fun of the powerful and privileged and holding them to account, his cracking jokes to cope with a civic system that did not adequately empower him, his longing for probity in governance, his passion for cricket, good food, and the company of friends, his jollity, his relatable delight at good weather, comfort with places that were not posh, and simple joys like riding a BEST bus or a nice walk in the crisp, cool air at dawn. These were ours, too.
Many issues that affected Busybee’s Bombay are seen in an exacerbated form in Mumbai: high rents, poor civic infrastructure, pollution, overloaded public transport, lack of public spaces, meaningless jobs. To say nothing of megalomania. The chain of sea-link bridges, a proposal he held to be a mistake, are being constructed for a fraction of the city’s population which drives high-performance cars and can afford costly tolls, and which treats fines for overspeeding as blips on the way to their personal land speed records. This reminds me of his column about his fictional pal buying a fleet of Mercedeses as he ‘couldn’t afford public transport’. Sympathies!
Today, his work is a time capsule for the polarised present. Like the funny piece alluding to Bombay’s name change where he advises his talking dog Bolshoi the boxer to be renamed as Moti. The humour is just a way to come to terms with a significant, non-consensual change. His food columns tend to be about relationships and culture, giving us a lot to chew on. His takes about civic affairs, too. While a lot of his writing has shed its topical charge, much remains culturally relevant and even current, broadly speaking.
Yet, a lot of his work has simply vanished, at least from public view, for lack of archival. This includes a website dedicated to his writings, busybeeforever.com; a working copy of it with a few columns can be found on Internet Archive. Only three to five compilations from all his tremendous writing keep appearing in circulation: a selection featuring Bolshoi the boxer, two volumes of ‘Best of’, another with his columns on the premiership of Rajiv Gandhi, yet another on the subject of food, and one with his takes on the Bombay riots and their aftermath. These give more than a comprehensive flavour of his style, range, and personality, which is important. But equally so are the events he responded to. Hopefully his work exists in clippings filed away in a forgotten cabinet which may yet see a sunray.
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The witty treatment of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency: “By evening, the official censor of the government of Maharashtra had come and sit in the Times (of India) office, looking a little embarrassed. All copy was sent to him and the poor man spent half the evening correcting grammatical errors and making fresh ones”. (The “had come and sit” is Busybee’s colloquial, conversational style.) Here is a lot to read between the lines. He poked gentle fun at decisions and missteps of Rajiv Gandhi, during the latter’s premiership. Unsurprisingly, he also levelled his wit at powerful netas of Maharashtra, such as Sharad Pawar, who may have borne his decorous elbow-jabs with an indulgent smile. As did industrialists such as Dhirubhai Ambani.
Busybee could also be forthright when needed, though he was also invariably polite. A man who evidently believed in gentle, non-violent forms of political expression, he dropped the ‘saheb’ suffix from the Shiv Sena supremo’s name without fearing a thumping from, shall we say, ‘concerned citizens’, which the rest of us cannot. That was only partly because they had worked together as reporter and cartoonist at The Free Press Journal. No surprise that Busybee ribbed Sena leaders, like then-mayor Chhagan Bhujbal whose plans for a ‘green Mumbai’ were fictionalised as ‘painting the whole city in a uniform shade of green’. He wrote of his (imaginary) wife who wants him to do chaaplusi with the Maharashtra governor to get a sarkari job; this was, of course, a subtle dig at that particular state dignitary.
His gentle ‘punching up’ was celebrated by his readership, and treated well by the targets of his jokes. That is partly because his humour was only a good-natured call for uprightness. It was directed towards the person as an office-bearer and respected their boundaries of private life. Thirdly, the humour emerged in a climate that was supportive of free speech. Moreover, his satire was part of a larger oeuvre.
An urban adventurer, he’d share anecdotes about grimy speakeasies during Prohibition in Bombay in the Sixties, wandering in food-rich Amritsar and Delhi in the Eighties, traipsing in Dehradun and Bangalore, marvelling at the sights of Thimpu, and travelling to Washington and, among other things, meeting columnist Art Buchwald in his office. A food columnist and urban chronicler as well, Busybee could write joyfully and lovingly about a great meal with his friends one day, and the next day dash off some of the most literary yet accessible lines about the Mumbai winter as you’d ever read. Well, almost-winter.
He was also the gregarious man around town recalling an evening spent with Raj Kapoor on his terrace over glasses glinting with conversation. The cricketista memorialising the last Ranji Trophy game featuring unflappable Sunil Gavaskar: “Only once in recent years has he allowed himself a little emotion. That was on Monday, when he scored what he knew as his last Ranji century on his home ground. Then, for a passing moment, he threw his hat in the air, his hands to the skies”.
His sheer range makes him hugely readable — and archivable! — today.
As if this wasn’t enough, he was a writer of fantasy in the news space. He created an entire cast of characters for the purpose of humour and satirical commentary: his wife gently pushing him towards upward mobility; boisterous sons Darryl and Derek; his dog Bolshoi the boxer who doesn’t bark but speaks and has a good nose for current topics; his uber-rich friend living on the 21st floor of a building famous for being twenty floors high, and is wealthier than oilfield owners.
His idiosyncratic language is best described as Bambaiya English with its musical run-on sentences, often with turns of phrase like “And while we are at it, let us change your name also” that were not so much chutnification as chaification. It was based on how Bombayites spoke in those decades when bland, non-idiomatic, ‘correct’ English hadn’t yet appeared. That helped his writing to go straight from the eye to the heart.
I had memorised, for instance, the beginning to his weekend column: “And, for a Saturday, a few stray thoughts and a few general observations and a few points of view (all my own work)”. For a while, I adopted the affectation of ending sentences with ‘also’ whether needed or not, including in an essay submission at journalism school. My lecturer caught on to the turn of phrase, because it turned out she’d been (late) Busybee’s friend and colleague also. This was shortly after he had passed away.
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The Afternoon…, which reprinted his columns, folded up around the time I was finding my feet as a journalist in Mumbai. My father entered the last decade or so of his hard-won, successful career. The years passed. I began developing into a writer of fact and fiction. One day the lockdown slammed the city shut. I was living alone, away from my folks. Without consciously thinking of Busybee, and just to let off steam in my humble, small way, I began writing Facebook posts about having an imaginary girlfriend, which struck a deep chord with many of my FB friends and connections. My imaginary GF, I wrote, worshipped a godman called Bobby Ramdisk. She idolised politicians who resembled Santa Claus somewhat, and like him made imaginary promises. She was an avid runner who was so fast, no one saw her. She liked that I had eyes only for her, when the fact was that only I had eyes for her, owing to the whole not existing thing. She had briefly broken up with me to date a flag manufacturer in Kerala; she ended things because the relationship had too many red flags. Oh, and she had knitted me an imaginary sweater which sufficed for the Mumbai winter.
Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.
