Towards a Provincial Cosmopolitanism: Amitava Kumar’s Bombay, London, New York

Abstract

In Bombay, London, New York, Amitava Kumar recounts the tragic death of Mohammad Ayaz, a 21 year old Pakistani peasant, whose lifeless body plummets ‘from the sky like a stone’ (230)¹ from a British Airways jet onto a concrete car park near Heathrow airport in July 2011. Ayaz had sought more lucrative opportunities as a labourer in Dubai, but like many indentured migrant workers across the world, he and his family found themselves viciously mired in debt in order to secure his passage to Dubai. Faced with increasingly overwhelming odds, Ayaz attempts to flee to Britain by hiding in the wheel bay of the BA jet taking off from Bahrain airport. Instead, he ends his life of desperate dreams in a pool of his own brains after falling the 3,000 feet between his hideaway and the ground.² A tragic reminder of the vast disparities in material privilege that exist across the globe today and the violent personal histories that dot rural landscapes, Ayaz’s ghost haunts the borders of Kumar’s Bombay, London, New York. His spectral presence reminds us of the promise as well as the violent underpinnings of globalisation and the more privileged plane passengers’ unbeknownst proximity to Ayaz serves as a metaphor for the hidden realities engendered by polarised ends of an increasingly globalised world.

His eyes were brown-grey, as if they held a little of the twilight of another town in them. On the streets of each Indian metropolis flickers that same vanishing light that has its origins elsewhere in humbler houses and huts. […] We can see that the street seller is hawking the fragments of another world, the world of the forgotten village and small town.

— Bombay, London, New York