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Published: March 31st 2011
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So Mumbai was the final dot on the map for our 6 weeks in India. And we finally got to hang out with an Indian! His name isAshish.
Ashish is a boy we met on our not-so-fun train journey from Varanasi to Mumbai – you know – the 30 hour one after the leg... fun for all the family! As it turned out there was some family fun, in the form of Ashish, his sister, his multiple cousins, his aunt and his very jolly uncle who we all instantly loved. We first ran into Ashish when Dodds was helping me hobble into the toilet to pee (not an easy act I might add when it’s a squat hole over a train track and you only have one leg). When I finally re-surfaced he was very sweet and told me to be careful of my leg when it got cold in the night. I was like an old lady with a bad hip, seriously! Well, I am half way there with my incontinent bladder...
He then came and found us in our little bunks a bit later and insisted we come and meet his family. They were playing some weird
singing game where you have to start singing a song that’s first word starts with the first letter of the last word of the previous song...may sound easy enough but it’s not – every song I have ever heard ever had suddenly dropped out of my brain and I sat there like a guppy fish until they cheered me on ‘come on jasmeeeen, we know you can do it!’. I know I can do it – I bloody love a sing song – I just apparently can’t remember how any songs start! Still, somehow we managed and me and Dodds cracked out a lovely rendition of Abba’s Dancing Queen and a bit of Lionel Ritchie....they had NO clue what we were singing but were very polite and clapped along anyway, and the uncle got up and had a bit of a bop, much to our entertainment. The game basically carried on in this way, with us singing songs that they had no clue what they were (due in part to our ever-so-slightly tone deaf pitch control) and them singing Indian classics, that we too had no clue what they were – their’s did appear to follow some sort of melodic
structure though which was more than our attempt at Lionel had going for it :p
So yeah, lovely family. So when we got to Mumbai, we promised Ashish we would facebook him and go out for some dinner. He rocked up with a mate with a lot of facial hair and a t-shirt saying ‘if war is the answer then you are asking the wrong question’. I enjoyed this immensely. It was way better than the ‘I eat more pussy than cervical cancer’ t-shirt which we saw some halfwit walking around in up north – and he was Indian. My only hope is his English was bad enough not to fully understand what he was wearing. Otherwise I think he deserved one of those old fashioned stonings.
Anyways, hippy student mate in tow, we wandered off for some beer bongs in a local café and enjoyed a good chin wag. We then realised it was fast-approaching our curfew, which when you’re staying at the Salvation Army to save precious pennies is apparently midnight. Ashish and friend had other ideas though – they wanted to smoke sheesha and take us back to theirs for a night of drunken debauchery
no doubt. I wasn’t so keen on the drunken debauchery, but a few more hours smoking sheesha with Ashish coulda been cool..But every Cinders has their curfew, and ours was either midnight or sleep on the street where we had just seen some very fast rats running about, so we chose early night over top and tailing with either Ashish or the street rats.
That’s pretty much all we did in Mumbai – there’s not realllly that much to see. We tried a half arsed attempt at the slums but then realised we were a) scared and b) felt a bit like twatty westerns coming to inspect how the lower half of society live so we stayed and chatted to the kids for a bit then swiftly made an exit. We did nearly get mobbed though – apparently street kids love a westerner, and they love a camera even more. We took a few pics of them and showed them what they looked like which they seemed to enjoy but then they all pushed this kid forward that was clearly a bit special and told us to take his picture. At the time we thought they were doing it
because they thought it was funny to take his picture because he was different but after we thought maybe they just wanted him to be included and we might have offended him more by refusing to....hard to know really – it’s not that often I become paparatzi to a group of 30 street kids. Anyway, so that was Mumbai, basically.
6 weeks, a lot of traveling, a million forts, a million curries, a gillion street stalls, 2 sleeper trains, 1 flight, 1 leg gash, lots of rats, a lot more cows, a LOT of pairs of Ali Barbaars, several bottles of vodka, several more bottles of Kingfisher, several new friends, a fairly decent tan and one 1 whisky drinking sex pest of a driver later and it’s time to say farewell to ‘Incredible India’, and as it turned out they didn’t lie to us, it really was 😊
Think I will most definitely be back – it’s such a vast and contrasting place there’s at least another million and one things I’d like to do. But for now its time to re-introduce myself to the concept of the ‘bucket’ and the fun and frolics that come with that
in the sticky heat of Bangkok....oh KhoSan road, I have missed you......toodle pip Indi-ana and hello Mai Thai....bring on the buckets!
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