Mumbai, India Day 2 March 14, 2016

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Mumbai, India Day 2 March 14, 2016

Come morning we were out early so as to make the most of our last day. The boys were a little late, as they had thought we agreed on a later time so as to avoid the morning traffic crush. No matter, they habitually show up early, so we loaded on up and headed on out into the traffic.

They had an efficiently-plotted agenda. Drives between places would be relatively short distances, the time necessary being dictated by the number of other vehicles headed the same way, or worse, perpendicular to our path. It's not actual gridlock, as few vehicles actually cease forward motion. Even at stop lights, there is a constant jockeying for position, each driver seeking a small advantage over the other, without an ounce of road rage seen. It's just the way it is.

We entered the gates of the Sassoon Dock, built in 1875, the oldest dock in Mumbai and a fish market before that. We were warned to take no pictures, at least not obviously, as security has doubled down since the 2008 attacks.

These are the very docks where the assailants came ashore with their weapons, and security likes to make a big deal about their vigilance. This was in counterpoint to the sole police officer I saw, a short, slim man with an incongruously inflated pot belly clearly meant for the body of another. Partial reincarnation, perhaps.

He was puffing on a smoke, his booted feet up on a wooden box, legs protruding from the roofed sentry shack where he sheltered from the sun. I watched him from the bus as he regarded us sliding past, a bus trying to look inconspicuous. He didn't move, though, and not until we were well past did he suddenly heave upright, stand in the doorway of the sentry shack and fumble in his breast pocket for several seconds. As we began rounding the corner he raised an officious hand, fixed the bus with an authoritative glare, and after taking a visibly deep breath, blew a series of short blasts on the whistle he had had such difficulty in retrieving from his pocket.

I was the only one to have witnessed this, as the driver and guides chatted on, oblivious. "Gonna be trouble getting out," I thought as the bus continued around the jetty and out of sight of our perturbed security dude. I wondered if he'd bother coming after us.

I soon forgot the potential consequences of later leaving the docks as I took in where we were. Long angled jetties protected a large marina, which was packed with local fishing boats of every description, except, "modern." Packed holds stood open as men flung up the day's (or week's, or month's) catch from the boat to the wharf, where legions of women sat ready to dismember and filet, to hand back over their shoulders to the guy who would auction it or deliver it to a buyer.

100-footer wooden trawlers and little fiberglass or ancient wooden dories all waited in the bay for their turn to Tetris their boats into the spill of vessels to get as close to the dock as possible.

Prized catches were given a cleared area to be worked on, and we found ourselves watching a wiry man with a machete dismember a freshly-caught marlin. Potential buyers of the meat clustered about, making offers until another small man took charge and began the auction. All the while the wiry man considered, and chopped, considered, and chopped, his blade glinting in the morning sun with oils and water and swordfish parts.

Nets dried everywhere there was room to spread them, including an underemployed forklift holding strings of nets high in the air. People moved amongst them, patching and splicing and reattaching. The variety of gauge is a little sobering - the seines and drag nets were of a very tight mesh, and do not allow much to escape. Fishery conservation means little when there is a willing market for everything you can catch.

I could have spent the whole day there, watching the interactions and the equipment moving about.

People quickly became adept at stealth photography. As long as you didn't actually bring them up to your face to frame a shot, people generally ignored the cameras, although a few workers cajoled us into taking their pictures. The warning came again from Sushil, keep the cameras down.

As we got back to the bus, we saw we had attracted some security attention as a couple of uniforms were ambling our way, so we got while the getting was good.

But no, although we made it to the front gate without getting busted for our photos, there was still the irate gate whistle guy to deal with, he who had no doubt been steaming the whole time we were inside 'his' cordon. Sure enough, he stood in the middle of the road like Sheriff Buford T. Pusser, his palm out in an officious order to stop right there, his mirrored sunglasses brooking no argument.

Shailesh rolled his eyes and bailed out, waving off my offer of 100 rupees for a bribe. "My problem," he said, and was out the door and into the heat, where he gave the uniform his due and appeared to wilt under the berating barrage of Hindi shouted by the cop. Later translated for us, he had been upbraiding Shailesh for his disrespect. "Now the security had been violated and it is all your fault for bringing the cursed rich tourists who think they are Vishnu's gift to the struggling people of Mumbai who only want to live and work in pea - oh, 200 rupees? Very nice. You can go. Please come again tomorrow."

Back into the northeast hills where we passed a great many grand gardens and parks, upscale apartment buildings and ornate temples, nice cars and well-dressed people moving quickly and with purpose. As we neared our next goal, the streets grew more narrow, the shops smaller and simpler, and everyday people appeared; people pushing carts; men cutting the hair of other men seated on milk cartons with a mirror taped to a nearby fence or wall; a cow relaxing on the sidewalk next to them; schoolchildren getting on or off buses; animated shopkeepers not wanting a sale to walk away. Everywhere people, people, people constantly moving in and out of temples of all stripes, taking a break with a cold or hot drink at the curb, and chatting with neighbors.

We attracted little attention as intruders on their neighborhood, clearly they are used to a busload of foreigners now and then willing to make the climb down and back to see the fabled Baganga Tank. We abandoned the bus in the choked streets and moved in small groups through the neighborhood, past people going about their everyday business. On a landing along a winding staircase leading down the hill, we found an uncle preparing to shave the head of a small boy. A relative had died, and the boy was having his head shaved for the funeral, to express his grief.

At a larger landing, we got an eagle's view of the Tank. It is a stone lake built into the hillside, surrounded by an amphitheater of large stone blocks, too big for stairs and too rough for seats.

This is one of Mumbai's most tranquil and sacred places. Hidden amongst a warren of newer apartment buildings and older traditional multifamily homes a little too upscale to be called a slum, this is where the Hindu Lord Ram, being suddenly athirst, pierced the earth with his arrow (or maybe his elbow, I couldn't quite hear) and started the spring which feeds the lake. A wooden pole in the center of the lake marks the center of the world.

Over 100 temples of various faiths surround the area, and it is a favourite pilgrimage of the faithful to come and have body and soul cleansed in the God's Spring. Indeed, there was a cluster of men in one corner who looked as if they were due for a good cleansing.

People drink and bathe with the relatively clean water from the pipe which is now the outlet of the spring, and directly below, Dhobi wash clothes and people dunk themselves, piously or otherwise. Men hammer and chisel the stone blocks from piles of rubble, presumably smoothing and shaping them for the repair of the more unstable areas of the perimeter.

On the way back, children were leaving schools, ambling along in chattering groups, or waiting for buses or relatives. We had a couple of great photo sessions with kids eager to be photographed by and with the silly-looking tourists. I'm waiting for Betty Jean to send me a photo she took of a group of girls smiling engagingly for the camera, while I play the photobombing fool in the background.

Festivals abound in Mumbai, and although we didn't hit a big one here, we were shown an area of Chowpatty Beach where a gigantic Ganesh festival is held each September. This festival is not only important as a religious observation, it is a huge economic boom each fall for Mumbai as hundreds of thousands of revellers, if not millions, flood the streets for almost two weeks.

On the first, third, seventh and tenth days of the festival, families bring their Ganesh statues of all types and sizes to the low tide mark to be drowned. On the tenth day, the largest Ganeshas are drowned in the rising tide, and there is joyful mayhem as the crowds go quite mad for a bit.

Iskon Temple is where Krishna is worshipped (yes, those orange-robed airport people of the past). He is a blue-skinned flute-playing good guy who combats evil. He is sent by Vishnu and is best buddy to Ganesh. The Krishnas put a great deal into use of the Third Eye, chanting, bead counting, and decorating their richly painted meditation rooms with gold foil. They have joyously raucous services, with much hooting and jangling and dancing.

The improbable highlight of the day was a walk through Dahravi slum. We took few pictures as we were asked to respect that we are not there to document squalor, but to see how these people live productive, dignified lives. Google "Dahravi Slum," there are plenty of photos, if you are curious. These are not the slums of Vancouver's East Side to collect the refuse of life, but a place that collects stories of resiliance and self-worth and progress towards better lives.

This slum takes up a large triangle of prime real estate in a corner of Mumbai over which developers wring their hands and drool. The people that live here do not own the land, and there is an ongoing, decades-long battle to displace them. Noone knows to where, though, as 60% of the population of Mumbai live in the slums; between 600K and a million in Dahravi alone. All inside just one square mile, and at twenty times the density of the surrounding urban residential area.

Resettlement is difficult for many reasons, but the first is that the slum is of actual economic advantage to the region. Ten thousand different businesses thrive there, recycling cardboard and metals and plastics and glass, selling or bartering for services and food, and they produce high-quality leather goods and fabrics. Indeed, Shailesh and his partners have trademarked the word "Dharavi" within a graphic of hands creating a heart shape which they use on their mysticalmumbai.com t- shirts. They have also trademarked the word "DHARAVI" with a heart in the 'D' which is used on the leather goods. Now the same handbags, wallets and pouches they have sold to Gucci and Dior so that they could profit with their incredible markups, are marked with their own trademark at a twentieth of the price.

Jane bought one. Very nice. Very red. From a storefront hidden away in the slum, with glass doors and air conditioning, goods attractively displayed on sparkling shelving. Right next door to the tannery. Incongruous to say the least, and emphasising the contradictions of the region.

So it is not necessarily a badge of shame. People live there for many different reasons, and they are not all cash-related. Some families have been here for generations, and although it is certainly a great deal cheaper to live here rather than in the highly-priced apartment complexes of Mumbai, a strong sense of family and of community is evident as they work towards their next meal or the next payment on their chawl (a building of four or five stories, with ten to twenty rooms (kholi) on each floor).

Families are close and everyone knows their neighbor's business. Living in such close quarters, emotions can amplified, but a strong sense of "that's the way it is," permeates the community and peace usually has the day as people simply cope with the next inevitable obstacle.

The biggest of these obstacles would be the remnants of the caste system, still very much in evidence. The system is stacked against those who think they can move from one class to another. Although these days more doors are open to the optimistic and motivated, and many of the people in the slum will band together in common economic cause, the old social beliefs which keep the poor down and out still hold powerful social sway.

All that said, while experiencing it certainly changed our perspective, it is indeed a slum. There are are few to no official social or health services, though unofficially, some exist - they set up their own clinics and schools. Basic services such as water and power vary widely according to the location of your chawl in the vast maze.

No beggars or litter, although piles of garbage are everywhere. Although some areas have underground sewers, many do not, and open drains and gutters carry away human waste. Or don't. People crowd into too-small rooms, toilets are rare and far between, clean ones almost nonexistent. One guidebook claims one toilet for every 1400 people. Garbage chokes what maight be a waterway underneath all the discarded plastic. Some areas have actual running water. Otherwise, clean water is available at intervals in the communities but must be fetched. Most households have a big blue barrel, a container in which they keep water so it only has to be occasioally refilled.

Inside the chawls and smaller buildings, many homes are neat and clean and adequately equipped, although crowded. In the narrow alleys and passageways between buildings, there are homes with elaborately carved doors which would not be out of place in an upscale suburban home. Others are protected only by curtains.

One doorway jammed into a corner had a clean area, a tiled and raised porch covered by a jumble of sandals, a foot washing bowl, and a towel hanging on a nail stuck in the wall. The threshold of the next was a muddy pathway disappearing into the gloom. Goats curl up strategically in corners of the alleyway to catch the last of the sun before it disappears behind the rooftops, and know to stay out of the way of the constant flow of carts laden with all manner of goods or castoffs, and people carrying impossibly huge bundles on their heads, much of it cardboard or plastic refuse, headed to bargain with the recyclers.

Electricity is available. Very available - most of the transfer boxes are wide open, their steel doors long ago scavenged for other purposes. There is no large-scale theft of energy, though, as it is all metered and the reasons for excessive bills are hunted down and dealt with. The wires are all out here in the open and easily traced.

Through the rabbit warren of interconnected ground floors are the 'illegal' factories, where in a series of small rooms, they pulverize, purify and remold the plastic for resale. Tanners work indoors and out, but not enough to protect them from the caustic solutions they use on the skins. There is work here for people, but not necessarily paid work, it keeps them busy.

The smells vary with the wind - delicious cooking odours, the tang of the tanner's chemicals, the pong of open sewers, and the omnipresent engine exhaust from the neverending belching of vehicles and machinery. The noise is as varied and as neverending. Engines, shouting, hammering and cutting machinery of all sorts, metal clanging and piles of plastic bottles avalanching, plastic being broken up. Children being called home. A man yelling at his neighbor. A singing child balancing along the stone wall of the rancid river. Dogs ignore us, cats stalk us, goats eye us balefully.

This is a very busy place. We came away impressed, confused, enlightened and stymied and conflicted by what we had seen. The standards are dismal, but it functions. And it is not at all like what we had thought it was going to be.

Rendezvous with the bus was to be on a main road that cuts through the slum and we hung around waiting outside a machinery shop with guys changing tire tubes at the curb, another guy with a tire iron, walloping something that wouldn't fit where it was supposed to go until it did, and lots of people, people, people pushing by, squeezing between us and the slow-moving vehicles, either with or against the flow of traffic with a sliding grace born of a lifetime of learning how not to get hit.

From one extreme to the next, we went next to a fabric store, a more elegant place than the crowded marketplaces where vendors seemingly sell an identical array of colourful bolts of worked fabrics, but in reality, quality and price vary with the wind. This place, we were assured, sells quality at reasonable prices. "No bargaining, the price is the price," said Shailesh, which seemed an assurance of fair price.

The women enjoyed the higher-end Indian clothing available, and I worried just a little as one of the salesmen took Jane upstairs, "where the really nice stuff is." It was very nice. If I thought I would ever wear it anywhere else, I may have bought a nice brocade Nehru-style jacket with formal matching headgear. I would have had to grow my mustache out to Sikh-like proportions to really carry it off, though.

Jane got her four lengths of exotic fabric, one of which she successfully wore as a Sari at one of the ship's formal dinners. I passed on the jacket and turban, but some of the ladies bought some nice Indian-style wraps and blouses.

We had taken a lot of time and we were not likely to get back to the office areas to watch afternoon lunch being delivered at 2:30. This is another unique tourist attraction in Mumbai - dabbiwallahs and the tiffin delivery.

Tiffin are metal cylinders like a large thermos, with round trays stacked as the body and secured in a brace or tube. Each tray contains a different dish: rice, a curry, some vegetables, some fruit.

In Mumbai alone, six thousand delivery people first collect the lunches earlier in the day, from private homes, then deliver them to hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the city. The tiffin are carried in huge racks or bundles, often by the hundreds, carried on carts for the big loads, by head for the smaller. The delivery charge is minimal compared to the daily cost of eating out so the business is very popular throughout India.

Most of the deliverymen (and they are all men) are illiterate, and the collection and distribution of the tiffin is governed by a complex but easily readable series of colour-coded dots, dashes and crosses.They have an astonishingly low error rate, perhaps one misdelivered meal in a million. The consequence of an error - giving beef to a Hindu, pork to a Muslim, garlic and onions to a Jain - is dismissal.

The famous Crawford market has enjoyed its central location since the islands were joined. A huge vegetable and fruit market sits near the central railway station, under a blocks-long warehouse roof with alleys and aisles throughout. There were spinoffs, like the enormous area for pet animals and pet supplies. It's a tossup to the casual observer if those bunnies are for petting, or for curry. The purpose of the green- and blue-dyed baby chicks was not explained. A booming business is also done in that section in exotic and endangered species.

Crossing the twelve lanes of traffic on foot was an adventure in itself. I hope Rick makes available the action video he shot while we gaggled across the slow but constant streams of traffic, shepherded and directed by Shailesh and Sushil.

Into the streets and alleyways of the outer markets, tiny shops jammed in every which way, and the occasional warehouse-sized building where hundred of people sold fabrics and plastics and electronics and clothing from tiny stalls and storefronts.

Rolf again proved the worth of his stature as the crowd were thick and it was easy to get distracted for a moment, only to realise you had lost sight of the group in the milling mass of bodies. Even Marianne's bright orange tshirt blended into the cacophony of colours. But we could always spot Rolf in the distant middle of the crowd, standing already at least a head above the tallest local, holding up his arm as a navigational beacon. It was an obstacle course of crowds and spilled displays and the odd vehicle insisting that this was not a pedestrian mall, despite the crush of pedestrians.

The bus had a hard job, to stay away from the traffic crushes and try to find nearby, usually nonexistent parking and still be within easy response distance when Shailesh makes his pickup call. We could see our bus stuck in traffic beyond the market, but the entertainment value of pedestrians crossing the choked streets amongst the vehicles made the wait a painless one.

Time flew, and we only had time for a very slow driveby of the old Victoria Terminus, now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a beautifully maintained multibuilding complex of Victorian Gothic design uniquely combined with Italian and Mughal (a 16th to 18th-century blend of Persian, Indian and Islamic) building styles. This is the train station that was a target of the 2008 attacks, killing 58 and wounding 104 with grenades and AK-47s.

We saw only the outside. The streams of people funneling through the many doorways hinted at the undoubtedly chaotic crowds on the inside, as this terminus connects everywhere to everywhere there are train tracks, and there are a lot of train tracks in India.

Another sobering drive through residential and business areas designated for the lower castes took us eventually back, for the last time, to the Green Gate.

After two days together, we felt that our guides had become friends, and we were sad to say goodbye. But hugs were had and tipping was heavy.

They say you can't help but come away from India somewhat changed. We learned a great deal about life in Mumbai, and of the personal lives of Shailesh and Sushil, details of which we will keep to ourselves, but combined with the minuscule but rich bits and pieces of Mumbai we managed to experience in only two days, the knowledge we gained certainly made us more deeply aware of the incredibly different lives we enjoy, simply through an accident of birth.

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Photos

Mumbai, India
Sassoon Dock built in 1875. Oldest dock in Mumbai.

Mumbai, India
Sidewalk barber under the watchful eye of a sacred cow.

Mumbai, India
Young boy getting a head shave from Uncle in preparation for a relative's funeral.

Mumbai, India
Baganga Tank. A most holy place. The pole is considered to be the center of the world.

Mumbai, India
Marigolds. A popular choice as an offering to many gods.

Mumbai, India
Delightful school children.

Mumbai, India
The Iskon Temple where Krishna worshipped.

Mumbai, India
Bawree Clothing Emporium. High end materials and clothing.

Mumbai, India
Dharavi Slum. Home to a million people in one square mile!

Mumbai, India
Dharavi Slum walkway.

Mumbai, India
The leather goods store in the slum. The proprietor is on the right and is a childhood friend of Shailesh.

Mumbai, India
Crawford Market.

Mumbai, India
More Crawford Market.

Mumbai, India
The Victoria Terminus.

Mumbai, India
With Shailesh and Sushil. What a fabulous 2 days!