In 1985, with much local fanfare, a musical fountain was inaugurated in a neighborhood park in Mulund East in Bombay.
Mulund in those days was the last outpost suburb in Bombay in the Central line. It was a sleepy little place that was busy yet not hip. Mulund East was cut-off from the West by the train track except for one precarious level crossing and one pipe lia narrow subterranean connector. Neither of these were reliable or convenient, so the eastern part of town evolved differently from the western part. I can't remember if there was a connector to the Eastern Expressway or not. There might have been, but it was not much used.
I have been to Mulund a few times in those days. My friend Sree lived there in the East and occasionally, on Saturdays, I would trudge up all the way from the city to Mulund to visit him. The musical fountain, it so happens, opened in his precise neighborhood.
He was quite excited about it. For some reason, this was a remarkable achievement for a neighborhood that was quite sleepy and solidly middle-class. They managed to cut through a million yards of bureaucratic red tape to actually construct a usable public park and plant a cheesy but large water fountain in the middle of it. In the evenings, as all the retirees and young children descended on the park, the fountain would come alive with music and primary color lighting. It elevated the neighborhood from solidly middle-class to solidly-middle-class with water fountain.
But I still remember the visit to the water fountain park. One Saturday, I visited Sree and he excitedly took me to the park and showed me around. At 5:00 the lights and funny music came on. People relaxed around it and older men took their constitutional walks around it. It was quite lively.
This memory has stuck with through all these years. If you ask me about the most important fountain in Bombay, I will still tell you about Flora Fountain. But for the neighborhood pride, this little local fountain still retains its top place in my heart. I have walked past many wonderful water fountains around the world. Some of them were very impressive with wonderful histories and remarkable architecture. But may be it is the fact that I connected with the locality and the story, this is the one fountain I like to remember.
Perhaps there is a lesson in this. It is not the most talented or the beautiful or the most impressive things or people that you care about the most, it is those who we connect with in a more natural level. I admire the magic of the former, but I love the latter more even though I know how the rabit got into the hat in the first place.
I don't know if this fountain and the park still exist in Mulund East. I have been to Mulund West a few times in the last few years, but the place is scarcely recognizable. The industrial compounds of yesteryear have been razed and replaced with a series of malls. The well-paying jobs in those factories were replaced with fickle mall employment. But people seem to be happy and the town looks more upmarket. I don't know anyone in Mulund anymore and there have been no reasons to go back to Mulund East.
Too many lessons. Too little time.
