“Ellowen deeowen”

“Ellowen deeowen” is a playground chant through which Salahuddin Chamchawala rehearses his imagined arrival in London. Repeated like a spell, the phrase makes the city seem close enough to approach one letter at a time, and gives a child’s longing for England a memorable verbal form.

Origins in a Dream of England

By his thirteenth year, Salahuddin had come to imagine the Vilayet as a place of crisp promises and measured composure, in sharp contrast to the dust, crowds, noise, and abundance he associated with Mumbai. His desire to leave was bound up with disappointment in his father, Changez Chamchawala: after Changez took the wallet’s crock of gold for himself, Salahuddin feared that his father would smother his hopes. England became not simply a destination but the place where those hopes might escape paternal control.

That dream surfaced in children’s play as well as private ambition. Salahuddin favored playground rhymes that yearned for foreign cities, including the singsong sequence “kitchy—con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople kitchyCon-stanti-nople.” The elaborate nonsense sounds make distance playful and speakable: before London can be reached, it can be rehearsed in a rhyme.

The Chant as a Ritual of Approach

Salahuddin’s favorite game was a version of grandmother’s footsteps. When it was his turn to face away from the other children, he would gabble the six letters of his dream city, ellowen deeowen, as if repeating a mantra or casting a spell. The phrase’s childlike sound turns the abstract ambition to go abroad into an action performed over and over; while his playmates creep toward him, he imagines himself creeping toward London, letter by letter.

The fuller sequence, “Ellowen deeowen London,” brings the invented-sounding chant into contact with the actual name of the city. Its movement from syllables to destination captures the way Salahuddin’s English ideal is constructed through imagination and repetition before he can inhabit it in person. London is at once the goal of the game and the imagined answer to his dissatisfaction with home.

From Childhood Phrase to Adult Self-Invention

The phrase belongs to the early formation of a new identity. The narrative says that Salahuddin’s mutation into Saladin Chamcha began in old Mumbai, well before he reached England. As a boy, he even prayed for England to defeat India in cricket, aligning himself with the game’s creators against its local imitators. The chant is part of the same orientation: it gives voice to a desire to cross not only a geographical distance but a cultural divide.

Five years later, after leaving school and while waiting for the English university term to begin, Saladin returned home with his transformation into a Vilayeti well advanced. Nasreen Chamchawala teased him for criticizing the fans, food, balconies, paint, garden, films, and tap water, as though education abroad had taught him to find fault with his own surroundings. In the garden with Changez, Saladin could now name plants he had not known as a child, including jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest, and plane. That new knowledge brought melancholy rather than uncomplicated mastery: he felt the garden had been better before he knew its names, and that something had been lost beyond recovery. Against that later feeling of estrangement, “Ellowen deeowen” preserves the earlier moment when a name for elsewhere could still be spoken as a hopeful spell.