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Published: November 29th 2009
Madam, if you don't trust me, you can turn around, and go find another taxi ok... What was this guy on about? Was he not aware of the reputation that preceded him and that of his country?
He was a taxi driver and I was a simple western tourist with invisible dollar signs stamped on my forehead, and together, we were attempting to do business-in India.Trust was never going to be apart of this equation.
But his indignation wasn't entirely without reason;I guess he was offended that I had just told him,that if I was to find out that the "authorised" badge he was wearing around his neck and the price he was asking for the taxi ride was all apart of a scam, then I'd be more than happy to go around spreading vicious truthes about him and his dodgy dealings.
But my own reasons for such a threat, I thought, were entirely justifiable.
India's reputation aside;this was my first haggling experience in the country and I wanted to set a precedent for myself-for how I'd approach all future Indian hagglings. Now was not the time to be weak-I had to lay the groundwork for becoming one tough,
haggling bitch.
With all this in mind, I was about to reject his appeal to my trusting nature-when the unthinkable occurred..
Madam,raising his palms, as if in surrender...
Madam, I give you good price ok,wriggling his head from side to side,
fair price ok...
Jesus, Joseph and Mary-was that what I think it was?
Did he....Did I just witness the famous Indian head wobble?
{The natural,fluid motion of the Indian head wobble is amazing.This unique Indian gesture, is like a fine art-and that is why I call for it to be Unesco Heritage listed.}
I contemplated asking him to do it again, but then I thought the better of it;my camera wasn't in practical reaching distance and to not have captured such a momentous occasion on film-well that would have been a crime.
So with the popping of my head wobble cherry-I was the one to surrender that night.
Admittedly, it was the fatigue of the long plane flight and the coming of the midnight hour-more then any magical power of a head wobble hypnosis that made me eager to get to my hotel and ultimately led me to get into that taxi.
Intuitively though, I knew I was being
ripped off.
Of course, I did find out that after paying him 1000 rupees (after haggling him down from 1200), the normal rate was 300 rupees.
In the end,the focus of my lingering resentment wasn't directed at the money I lost but at the people who were behind it. It was an airport security guard, who had guided me to that taxi and who I presume was involved in the scam all along.
But it's a scam that I had to experience;all apart of the steep learning curve of travelling through a poorer, foreign country and somewhat necessary for the development of my own traveller psyche and individual character-and it was the bitterness of being scammed, that inspired me to take the first real steps into becoming that tough,haggling bitch.
However,I am not adverse to a little revenge-oh how that security guard and his little head wobbling sidekick,
oh how they will rue the day...bass-terds During that first taxi ride however, I was easily enough distracted from any dubious thoughts of whether this guy was actually taking me to my hotel or some undisclosed seedy destination of his choosing, when I looked out the window onto the vast outskirts
of Bombay dwellings.
In the shadows of the dark hour, I could see shards of tin,plastic and cardboard thrown together to form little huts of shelter while people weaved in and out of the narrow laneways that curved around the settlements- these werent any regular dwellings,they went on for kilometres and thousands of people, over 50% of Bombay's population, call them home-it was my first glimpse of the infamous Bombay slums.
Driving through the city,block upon block, there were sleeping bodies on the streets-the homeless,the disabled,the forgotten-it was like some giant hand had gone along indiscriminately picking bodies from a human waste dump, collectively dropping them on the cold pavements, to live out their perilous existence together.In the morning they would all be gone, the cops had moved them on-so all that was left was the ghost of their suffering.
When I did safely make it to my hotel,my room was small,practical and compact; but I was a princess, about to go to sleep in a large opulent castle.
In the daylight hour,I stepped from the hotel foyer onto the Bombay streets-it felt like I had just made the transition from looking at a national geographic magazine, to
actually jumping into the pages and becoming apart of the stories and images themselves.
All my senses were in overdrive. The smell of spices,street food,urine;the sounds of laughter,crying babies,blaring car horns,spitting men..'
madam,madam..you buy..100 rupees..good price ok'..the touch of a beggar tugging on your shoulder or a little one tugging on your hip-the feel of the wet,sapping humidity; the sights of auto rickshaws, cycling rickshaws,fancy modern cars, ancient rolling carts,rusting rickety pushbikes-all trying to maneuver past one another in the dense city traffic, Indian women dressed in their multi-coloured saris,men and women carrying heavy loads atop of their thin Indian frames,the rubbish on the streets,watching Indian men watching me-their stares ranging from gazing to goggling to gawking.
I stood in momentary wonderment, it was all I could do not to be overwhelmed in the culture shock.But I had a more pressing matter at hand,an urgent human need that was screaming for attention and would include me having to overcome the shock to plough on through the crowd of this new wonderland.
'Shit,amongst all this madness-where the hell am I going to each lunch? Hungry, I wondered where I could find a decent place to eat, without
the added benefits of contracting food poisoning.
That is when I met Barbara.
I don't believe in idols-but if I did, this woman is the closest I have ever come to having one.
I had approached her,wondering if she knew of a good place to eat-turns out she did,and seeing she hadn't eaten yet she decided to join me.
On first appearance Barbara looked just like any other sweet, soft spoken 69 year old lady.
But it was her decision of just where we would eat, that proved otherwise.
Sitting down in the restaurant,I noticed straight away that there was something different about this place...
Ummm, Barbara...have you noticed.. we are the only women in here?
Oh yeah,she said,
that's because it's a muslim eatery,only muslim men eat here..
Oh...really?...ok..are we even allowed in here then? Should we be in here?
Yeah of course,we pay for their food,they won't kick us out..and even if they don't like it,who cares...we have every right to be here as much as all these men do.. And with that I was gone;head over heels in awe and reverence of this woman.
She was brave,strong-willed,unapologetic and fiercely independent;qualities
I could only hope to behold and express, with the same unfaltering conviction, one day.
Hailing from Virginia, U.S.A.- in her 20's Barbara had lived in Libya for 4 years; in the last 10 years she had traversed the lands of south-east asia,on her own;5 years ago she spent 6 months in India,again,on her own and now she was back to do it all again-on her own.
Over the next three days she,the veteran,took me, the newbie, under her wings-and continually reminded me that it doesn't matter who I am dealing with, I must always stand my ground,be confident within myself and not to take anybodies bullshit.
By the end of it all, I didn't care what it was that brought her into my life-buddha,fate,hare krishna or some force of nature-it didn't matter.My hunger, her food recommendation and the fifty pissed off Muslim men because of it-it was all just meant to be.
Our experiences and mine alone in Mumbai had been amusing,perplexing,bewildering and sometimes potentially soul-breaking.
• Our hysterical laughter had filled the air as we nervously navigated our way through the lawless traffic,always trying to fall into step,behind a well trained local.
• Hustling
and bustling in the Crawford Market,Barbara admonished me for being "too nice" in my amateur bargaining techniques,swiftly telling me
you need to get tough,lady.But the tough Renee stance didn't work, when a man trying to sell me a piece of fruit wouldn't take
NO, I do not want your fruit and stop touching me on the butt!! for an answer-continuing to follow us from the market to our hotel..
madam,just one,100 rupees ok...-all the while Barbara was trailing behind us,giggling and teasing me about my new Indian 'boyfriend'.
• I walked past the chanting blind man,swaying where he stood, lids pulled back to reveal the white marbles of his unseeing eyes-palms raised into the shape of a cup-praying that someone would hear his song, maybe a prayer itself;past the ageless girl whose growth had been stunted by malnutrition,her legs were frail beneath her-but her arms still healthy enough to beg with; I walked past that utter hopelessness and shifted my focus, only to have it fall upon the impenetrable gaze of a man without limbs.
There were people all around us-Indians-but his gaze was fixed upon me,the gori-the white girl.In that split second, I saw that his eyes, had seen
too much in mine. Like the coward that I was- I was the first to look away.
• Sitting in the back of a taxi,I noticed every driver would adjust his rear-vision mirror until it was me he could see and not the deadly traffic riding on our arse.He would chew on his beetle bud;turning the colour of his teeth into a murdersome shade of red-and then-in his best effort to turn each and every female tourist into a raging lesbian, he'd precede to hock up, what sounded like, 50 years worth of accumalated saliva- and then spit it out the window.
Hocking and spitting,again-and again.
And if he had of looked into the fine vantage point of that newly adjusted mirror,after each and every one of those beutiful moments we shared,he would have seen me shuddering and gagging,on what felt like, 25 years of accumalated vomit.
Shuddering and gagging,again-and again.
• We roamed a Muslim market;observing the dexterity of the peoples work- from the minor- children making toys from scraps of metal,to the major-men pulling apart the insides of a car until all that was left was its frame. We kept on roaming and we kept on observing..until..
oh my...*goosebumps*.. the crowd had parted like the heavens are supposed to- until all we could see in front of us for countless metres, was muslim men kneeling down in their call to prayer-a small laneway made into a makeshift mosque.
• Telling a man dressed like a muslim cleric that my next destination was Goa,he proved that his uniform was no token gesture,when he opened up his holy heart and asked me to buy his weed...
Arrr-Go-aarr..you want some weed Madam...you smoke..you have vedee vedee good time in Go-aarr...no prob-lum. • My frustrations with being glared at by Indian men, reached boiling point when I glanced past Barbara to see that two men had turned their bodies around in their seats to look at me with such menace and intimidation that I couldn't sit in silence anymore..mustering all the anger inside,I returned their glare and told them to
Stop staring at me!!!...One of them raised his palms, and wriggled his head from side to side, as if to say
ok ok, sodee sodee.
Barbara was giving me the look of unmistakeable motherly pride..as if to say,
That's my girl!! On our last night together I walked Barbara to the
..The Dobi Walla..
This is one of the reasons why India is amazing. This is the sight of the Dobi Walla at work-People contracted to take thousands of pieces of laundry, to be handwashed and delivered back to their owners-without getting them mixed up. I think they have like a 99% efficiency rate at not screwing it up.train station.As we sat, I was ambivalent about taking photos of the people sprawled out before us.Some waiting for trains, some waiting for nothing.She told me again to
toughen up lady...people should see this,and they should be angry about it..someone should answer to this.
There was a commotion.Two men were shaking one of the sprawled figures.She wasnt responsive-Barbara and I wondered aloud if she was dead.I could see her body in the distance-images of the Ethiopian famine I had see on T.V as a child, were running through my mind.But with more force from the men-she stirred,awaking into her life of the living dead- she dragged her gaunt,skeleton of a body out of sight,but by no means,out of mind.
Not long after, something else caught our attention.Next to us, a scrawny little old man was going through the belongings of,what we thought, a female stranger.But what happened next,was more disturbing.As he continued to slowly raid her bag and transfer all her worldy belongings into his,she looked at him with vile hate-yet, acquiesced in silence, as he then wordlessly ordered her to sit down on the concrete,submissively eating food forced upon her, while he took some perverse pleasure in watching the
whole spectacle unfold.Wife,husband;father,daughter;two mentally unstable strangers or pimp and prostitute,whatever it was,it was disgusting and unsettling.
And naturally, Barbara wasn't having any of it.
She motioned the man over to where she was sitting. With her finger raised,doing it's own version of the Indian head wobble, she told him in her beautiful Virginian accent,
You're a bad bad man, don't you treat her like that, you stop that right now..you're a bad bad man...Raising his palms in response,wriggling his head from side to side,he said,
ok ok,madam,sodee sodee...But I don't think her words truly reached him;he sat back down and continued to watch the lady eat as she continued to look at him with undisguised revulsion.But others had heard her; a group of men that had already been staring at us,took pleasure in watching the drama of the elderly white woman versus the elderly indian man. They laughed loudly when she gave him her piece of mind,laughing and looking at each other with the expressions of "who is this crazy white lady?".I laughed too and commended her on her ballsiness,giving her my own look of
that's my girl!.
I left Barbara at her train,momentarily freaking out when I saw
her silver topped head disappear within the mass crowd of Indians who had swallowed her up, as they fought to get into one of the carriage doors.Just as I called out her name to see if she was still alive,I was reminded of what kind of person this crowd was coming up against...
I heard a bellowing cry,
HEEEY!,HEEEY!..yep,it was Barbara,telling the people to back the fuck off,and let her onto the train.
I walked out of the station, hoping that I wouldn't have to come up against a similiar,desperate crowd the next morning,on my early train to Goa.
Out of the station, and onto the hauntingly quite streets, ahead of me I saw the familiar large scattering of homeless and defeated bodies on the pavements.It was like dejavu of my first night in Mumbai,except this time I would be walking through the wretchedness, not peering at it through the windows of a comfortable car. I made the decision to cross the street,to avoid walking through it-when I thought-
fuck it Renee don't be a coward , you didn't come to India, to not see this.So I turned,kept on walking and with all my will, stopped myself from running
at full pace through the narrow trail left to me,by the 50-60 people lined on each side of the footpath.People of all ages;some wearing ripped shirts and pants,most without a blanket,the ones that did;sharing it between 3 or 4 friends and family members;hearing the coughing and weezing of the little toddlers who had no pants on to preserve their health and to protect them from the cool night air,toddlers the ages of my own nieces and nephews-I walked swiftly across the road and into my hotel,where I could breathe again.
Snuggled up in my warm,cozy,god damn beautiful bed,it wasn't the noises of the city, but all the noises within my sleepless thoughts, that kept me awake that night.
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Maxime Dupuis
Nice blog ;-)
Hello Renee, My name is Maxime, very interesting blog, Im going to Mumbai in mid-january and was wandering wich hotel yu went to? Thks in advance for the tip,