2 days in Mumbai

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My first impression of Mumbai, and India, was sudden and vivid, despite a slight disinterest I felt upon arrival. The disinterest may sound odd. I chose to visit India on impulse when another programmer in Melbourne (I'll call him Yob) mentioned he was attending a conference in Bangalore. I'm not interested in conferences, but I had been meaning to travel to another country. It made sense to book the ticket. But as the date approached I wondered if I had the enthusiasm necessary to throw myself into another trip. Perhaps I also felt a germ of unease about the Indian culture, for typical reasons of narrow-mindedness but also for personal ones.

The flight took 14.5 hours. I barely slept. Local time on arrival was 1:55 am. Trudging through Mumbai airport I found myself in 70s décor, beige or cream hall, which might have been anywhere. Our hotel wasn't booked until the following night. Yob convinced me to take a hotel room near the airport and went to organize it. Through the streaked glass, outside, in the humid morning, sat all types of Indians, many with their shoes off and legs folded upon the seat. I watched the faces pass down the corridor, and felt tired and wondered if I wanted to be here. Yob returned, then our taxi driver showed up, led us to a battered mini van, then drove joltingly through pot-holed streets of small houses, sometimes shanty-towns, littered with garbage, mostly empty except for the stray, hungry dogs which riddle the streets of Mumbai.

The hotel was clean but very suburban. We ordered beer. The porter began an obvious scheme of increasing prices for everything, which Yob noticed more than I did, him having been to India before. I slept with a sense of cynicism and fatigue. In the morning, though, things changed.

The street of the hotel had come alive. Before showering or eating I walked sleepily out of the courtyard of the hotel to take a look at things. In the lobby, I was first struck by the sounds of the street, the buzz of light motors (rickshaws), the beep-beep of horns, then, when I stood on the side of the road, by the morning light, its colour diffused into a weak yellow through the layer of smog. I don't know the type of trees which commonly grow along the streets of Mumbai (see the first photgraph) but their leaves took the light in the smog and became greener. Dozens of figures wandered across the street. A father passed on a motorcycle with three small children wrapped about his legs, all without helmets.

Yob and I ordered a cab and escaped the porter and hotel quickly. We drove down a hillside; little shacks of business lined the road, next to alleyways which ran to slums. The roads were jammed with traffic, every inch of being contended for by vehicles all aiming at different lines of approach, cows stood alongside cars, or cow driven carts. There was a smell in the air … The taxi made it to the ramp of a freeway. The smog covered everything. “You can't see further than 100 metres anywhere” Yob remarked. Taller, high rising buildings, with old and dirty apperaance began appearing next to billboards advertising cricket teams or skin whitening creams. Next to each of them was a lower construction, a shanty town, a canal filled with sewerage, another series of business shacks. The smell became stronger, like dioxide with something more. Traffic surrounded us. A rickshaw driver on our left hand side noticed our cameras squeezing off pictures and waved and grinned at us. One of us shouted when a passing car forced our driver to abruptly swerve. The rickshaw driver began laughing, took his hands off the wheel and mimicked a dance while his car slowly veered toward other traffic. We laughed and he fell back, only to appear again on the right hand side and repeat his silly, grinning dance, while the neglected steering wheel turned and his car moved within inches of our own, again gaining our shouts. Our cab driver, who had til now been disdainful of us, laughed while the dancer straightened his car again, did the trick once more time, then vanished into the traffic.

Our car went on. On the sidewalks, sometimes themselves being ripped up for the bricks, were shanty towns, one stand businesses of workmen, food vendors, fruit stands, people selling chains of orange and yellow flowers. The scents which came with the smog through the car window could be dreadful - a canal or an alleyway of garbage and excrement might be next to a business. People, the well to do and the poor, drifted through the chaotic traffic without a sense of danger. Trees overgrew at the edges of streets and were marked with red and white paint (to catch headlights at night, I later learnt). Dogs slept at the side of the street. Cow pulled carts of farmer produce slowed traffic. Workers stared out from the back of trucks in the traffic ahead. Medium strips were sometimes under construction or reconstruction, each with a different set of workers and with different working methods.

Each inch of each block had been utilized differently by various generations; the detail was fascinating. It would be wrong to liken it to a fractal pattern, for although there was detail upon detail, there was very little visual repetition in what had been created. The only principle common across their appearance was the sense of Indian life, persisting on the most basic of surroundings, and using what was available to meet basic needs. It struck me quite powerfully, and I have spent some time describing it for that reason.

Yob and I found our hotel, The Welcome Hotel, near CST (a train station at the centre of Mumbai).

We ate at Leopolds, the bullet holes from the Mumbai terrorist attack are still visible in the windows and walls. Then we visited the Gateway of India, and walked most of the length of Back Bay. Later we returned to The Dome Bar at The Hotel Intercontinental to watch the sunset and drink some wine.

Walking back from the Dome we passed a woman, sitting on the street quietly, with three children lying around her. One had a bandage wrapped about her temple, and it was covered with blood and flies. Yob and I kept walking on, but I hesitated, then went back and gave the woman 500 rupees. She was crying and not begging, at the time, so I thought that perhaps it was a genuine case. Leaving, I noticed that the child with the bandaged head had its head covered over with by a cloth, but that instead of three children there were two about her. I walked back to Yob and felt a gentle tapping on my leg. The child with the bandaged head, a little girl, was skipping along beside me with the sweetest grin and repeating something to me - she wanted more money! Somewhat irritated I ignored her and went on, but she kept tapping, and it seemed just a game to her (she musn't have been older than 7 or 8), and I was amused despite feeling duped. I gave her another 100.

When I returned to Yob I described the scene, and we both weren't sure whether I had been scammed or not. Either way, it gave me a sense of how complex it was to deal with beggars in India.

As we walked home, we met a middle aged gentleman in the street who stopped and chatted with us pleasantly about the importance of improving relations between India and Australia.

That was Wednesday. Yob left the next morning, choosing to take a 24 hour train to Bangalore. I stayed, instead, to explore more of Mumbai, and had booked a flight the next morning to make it to the Bangalore conference in time.

I went to Elephanta Island to see the 3 Headed Shiva - supposed to symbolize destruction, creation, and preservation. I love boat and sea travel, so it was an interesting exercise, though I didn't increase my knowledge of Hindu mythology very much. A local guide, Natik, showed me around, for an expensive fee of 350 rupees (though, I didn't bargain and didn't mind, I understood that he lived on the island and it was his livelihood). The caves themselves were interesting, as were the sculptures within them, though that sort of thing generally doesn't interest me greatly. I travel for other reasons.

Walking back to the hotel I noticed a hard looking man in the crowd talking in an aggressive way to a group on the street. When I passed he noticed me, made a showy gesture to his company, and put on a face and swaggered after me. 'Sir, sir!' he kept repeating, as he followed me like I was a target. It made me feel quite uncomfortable, and I ignored him and walked ahead, but it angered me a little bit too. He was very small, and my walk may have showed that I didn't particularly like him following me and I was going to ignore him. Eventually he vanished.

In the hotel I went through a moment of doubt. I'd been carrying a lot of cash with me. I removed most of it from my wallet and put it in a secure place, told myself to buck up, and went outside for another walking session.

I passed through the Bazaars, north of CST, and was immediately glad I'd made the effort. The sights and sounds of Indian people mixing in such places is fascinating, colourful, and original. Then I went for a long walk through the heat, up and down Back Bay, back to the hotel. This took around 3 hours, and was tiring, but also exhilerating. The sunset above Back Bay was superb, swimmers splashed in a reflection of the sun, and I walked along Chowpatty Beach and watched people washing themselves in the tide, or simply enjoying the beach.

Finally, having hoofed it back to the hotel, I ate at Universal Cafe. It was very pleasant, quite Western, and served a professional class. I'd chosen it because I was dying for some white wine (which is hard to find in India - beer and spirits being more common). The food was okay. I should have ordered the hamburgers, which looked quite good, but had the fish fry, which was a bizarre dish nothing like what it sounds. I did have two glasses of white, very average (we're so blessed in Australia to have a great wine culture), then crashed out early. The next day I woke at 5 am and took a cab to the airport.

Along the way we encountered a motorcycle accident. A fellow, without a helmet, had been thrown about 20 feet into the opposing lane. The taxi driver cursed him and said that Indians do not speed, and it was his fault for going too fast.

This blog has been typed somewhat hastily from an internet cafe in Kolkata. Perhaps I'll edit and improve it tomorrow. I'll blog about the Bangalore conference, and the rest of my time in Kolkata, and then will be able to write fresh details, as they occur each day, without having to recall them from a days back.

India, on the whole, has been wonderful. Sometimes intimidating, but often fascinating. I haven't quite found the voice for this blog which I'd like, but we'll see what happens as I go.

Cheers!

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