Anatomy of the suspended junk yard

In 1922, nearly three decades after paediatrician Dr Luther Emmett Holt wrote The Care and Feeding of Children, Emma Read patented the baby cage in the US. Holt, an advocate of 'baby airing' — ensuring that a baby gets adequate fresh air — himself never recommended such a contraption. But since clean air is to cities what chalk is to cheese, Read platformed the pitfalls of stuffy apartments (no gardens, balconies or terraces) into a controversial innovation: wire cages for babies, to be placed on windows several stories above bustling urban jungles. Anything for fresh air.

This horror may not have caught on in Mumbai, but that says little about our self-incarcerating tendencies (read: our love for caged windows). As flats became smaller, ceilings lower and lofts, endangered, residents ached for a solution to the dilemma of insufficient storage.

Enter the box grille.

You see them in slums, high-rises and everything in between. Protruding anywhere from a few inches to a few feet from window ledges, these large, unwieldy descendants of the simple window grille stick out like tongues in a city starved of aesthete.

Box grilles house the darnedest of things: chairs, broken toys, gas cylinders, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, newspaper bundles, clotheslines, wooden planks and even bath tubs. In their quest for a garden, the conscientious ones decide against heaping eyesores on the collective and keep potted plants instead. Permutation-combinations of treasure and trash are common, say, aloe vera and tulsi plants that have pigeon poop-dotted buckets for neighbours.

"Everything that should be indoors is displayed to the world. Box grilles are major contributors to visual clutter but so entrenched that no one gives them second thought. It all boils down to how you perceive your city," says Shilpa Shah, one half of the duo behind S+PS Architects.

Shah grew up in a family of 13 architects, none of whom had homes with even basic window grilles. Caged windows, she feels, offer little more than a false sense of security – a point that'd make Mumbaikars balk, since these are considered as much a line of defence against intruders as main door locks. "The 'security' aspect is overplayed. Most break-ins are through the front door. In comparison, Spiderman-type intrusions through windows are perceived threats," adds Shah.

Shakuntala Birde, a resident of Appapada in Malad, has no qualms admitting that her box grille is more store room than security measure. Familial issues forced her to move from a bigger home in Vasai to this one-room kitchen. "It's easy for people to taana maro and say our window is a junkyard. We don't like it either, but we don't even have a bedroom, forget room for storage. Where can we keep our stuff?" she underlines. "What's useless to these paisewaale isn't so for us. Empty cans, bottles or boxes always come in handy."

Box grilles are piss ugly, but great storytellers. A glance at one will tell you more about a family than a knock on their door would. A clothesline indicates, among other things, if the household mostly consists of men, women, or kids. A dusty tricycle may point to a once-frequent rider who's now grown up. Cement bags signal a just-concluded or impending renovation, while newspaper mounds reflect potential hoarding tendencies. A grille is a reflection of you or your situation.

But most of all, box grilles are a telling symptom of a city bereft of breathing space — a world where receding balconies and simple attics have become pipe dreams.