In her childhood, Bandarwadi used to be a bunch of small houses and a couple of chawls with a playground in the centre.Houses were all better versions of huts, some of them with a good concrete structure. She could see the Arabian sea from her granparents' home in the chawl. Needless to say there were common toilets for all the people in Bandarwadi. Invariably these used to be very poorly maintained. A lot of kids always preferred to use the space outside these toilets..for theirs and others convenience...
There was a good mix of people in Bandarwadi..Though primarily Dhanagars and Marathas, there were many Muslims too. She remembers visiting Muslim families during Eid and savouring yummy Sheer-kurma. There used to be Taaboots in Moharrum..with many many people beating themselves to blood...such a horrifying sight!! Dhanagars were the heart of this Bandarwadi...(May be initially it was called Dhanagarwadi or Banagarwadi, which later got convertedpolluted to Bandarwadi) Most of these Dhanagars used to have sheep and goats of their own and these animals could be seen wandering freely in Bandarwadi. She would always wonder if all those people earned their livelihood by just rearing those animals...At night after dinner, one could often hear Dhanagar songs being sung by a group of people far away...All these songs used to have a very similar tune, one person singing a line and others singing after him...It used to be a lot of fun for her to listen to that music. Those became some of her earliest memories of music.
A lot of these Dhangars used to wear a very traditional dress...a very flowing kurta and dhoti. They also wore a heavy wrapping of long cloth on their head...it would be quite imprudent to call that thing as pagadi...The Dhanagar ladies always wore their traditioal 9-yards saree with a big Nath, a heavy studded nose ring. Most of them used to prefer to put the vermillion on the forehead in a thick sleeping line shape tapering at both ends. Very rarely one can find them without kunku. Their hair always oiled excessively and tied in a bun. One could rarely find a lady who has pleated her hair or even tied a ponytail. They would always have at least one dozen green glass bangles decking every wrist, the colour of these bangles competing the colour of the dark green mango leaves. They normally had their head covered with their saree padar. It used to be her pasttime to watch how they do their daily chores like cleaning the outside area of the house etc, by holding the padar on the head, sometimes even holding it with teeth.
This description is not of any village..neither it is from a very distant past...This place is actually in Mumbai, the biggest metropolitan city in India. Bandarwadi exists till date in plush western suburb of Bandra and just a walking distance from S.V. Road and the famous Linking Road....
Though there are a lot of changes now, I do feel that Bandarwadi of my childhood was more colourful, beautiful and of course social than it is today...
