India, March 16 -- Hoshang Merchant, one of the most prominent Indian English poets living today, visited Mumbai recently from Hyderabad. I met him at his friend's 20th floor flat in Malad. We talked late into the evening till the housing towers lit up behind us. Merchant, a midnight's child, told me about his Mumbai, the city of his birth, the city of his early education, the city where his bildungsroman took off, where he first stepped into his words, his queerness, and his sense of self. Merchant spent the first 21 years of his life, 1947 to 1968, in Mumbai. I was curious about how a city that he left six decades ago had reconfigured itself in his memory. How moments from those years of his life consolidated to give some coherent picture of urbanness of a 1950s-60s Mumbai in a manner that only he could see and experience. Hoshang was generous with detail and anecdotes, and as he spoke, a particular storied vision of Mumbai was constructed in front of me, brick by brick, memory by memory. In his telling, Mumbai emerged as a giant field for star-spotting. The city itself became a metonym for cinema in the way it was tenderly held in his memory, and many of the movie stars populated the urban landscape as much as they punctuated his biographical sense of his early years. In other words, an autograph book could pose as an autobiography. Our conversation wafted from Meena Kumari (much more on her later) to Achala Sachdev (Merchant's downstairs neighbour in Pali Hill), from Raj Kapoor (parts of whose 1959 film 'Anari' were shot in the street outside his home during his school vacations) to Sadhana (his neighbour, fresh from the success of 'Mere Mehboob', who would let loose her six "vicious" pomeranians on him "when I wanted to see the star who was my neighbour"), from Shashi Kapoor (whom he once saw zooming through Nepean Sea Road in his red sports MG) to Farooq Sheikh (his college senior at Xaviers). Each of them were not simply external figures of awe (which indeed they were, some already in those years, others in retrospect) but more so, it was evident that they had become, over a rich life of poems and reflection, now fully appassioned and interiorized nodal points around which the poet's image of his early life became possible. A movie star is a sticky figure. Memory can't help but cling to it. Time can't help but wrinkle in its vicinity. As Hoshang spoke, and as his memoried Mumbai materialized in front of me, it was clear, that movie stars, as they move, warp the way we live through time and inhabit any space. Time dilates around them, space compresses around them. So much so that spotting them, or being in their proximity, become the guiding leitmotifs often crucial to the way we order and tell our life. "Arrey she'd go past our windows like that, and we'd go from window to window, saying 'Meena Kumari aaya, Meena Kumari aaya'". This was the early sixties. Hoshang was in his mid-teenage, running Charulata-like from one first-floor window of his Pali Hill apartment to the next, tracking Meena Kumari as she moved below, having come to meet the actor Achala Sachdev who lived in the house under Merchant's. Meena Kumari, in or around the year of 'Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam', was, for the young Merchant, nothing short of a lodestar. In those young eyes, she was charisma, not personhood. She was glowing surface, magic exteriority, not some inner life weighed with detail, except when it was consumable as scandal. My question to him was equally complicit in sieving out the person from the star-what did she look like, when you see her, what is she wearing? "She's coming straight from the studio, she's wearing a white saree always, she's wearing makeup [at which point Hoshang's hands splat his face, suggesting the teeming volume of that makeup], she's wearing those 'Yahudi ki Ladki' curls [a cinematic reference he has to explain to me, the 1958 Bimal Roy film with Meena Kumari, Dilip Kumar and Sohrab Modi was called 'Yahudi', based on the Parsi-Urdu play of the name that Merchant remembered]...and she has full monkey makeup, we used to call it, theatrical makeup, and she would have up to here, the sleeves.[he points at his hands] this part of the hand was also painted to match, because it had to look similar, no, on your screen. She would come straight from the studios, wearing those high dutch heels, to elevate herself, she was very small.'. Moving below Merchant's apartment, Meena Kumari was both allowed and not allowed to become a mystifying image. Hoshang is both unforgiving to her but he is also smitten by her, where she is a searing electric glow, already a nodal point of his life, a way to style the story of his city. When I asked my friend Vikram to parse this contradiction for me, they said this is "proximity without intimacy" and that is indeed how stars often function. It may also be that the figure of the Bombay heroine was not being allowed to fully exorcise the caste typology of the female performer when she is glued back to the signs of her professional labour; what else is makeup and heels? Meena Kumari would remain a magnetic preoccupation in Merchant's writing for decades, always proximate, never intimate. Merchant said many more things that evening, but his particular capacity to narrativize the city as a city of stars-those awkward half-human, half-spectres that can bend memory itself, those people who can be ordinary neighbours and extraordinary cosmic objects-was one that I carried back home with me....