Namaste Mumbai

January 2011

The West End End Hotel in Mumbai is pretty schmick by Indian standards: air conditioning,   spotlessly clean, very comfortable, cable TV (only ESPN in English the rest Indian in Hindi), large rooms with a desk and lounge, and perhaps best of all a digital safe that removes the worry of leaving computers and money in the room or at the desk. Outside, a lot of people sleep on the street. I suspect this has something to do with the hospital across the road. 

I love India, always have, ever since I was a kid. The experience of being here, even now on my third trip, is so rich. Nothing is as it seems when you first see it. In fact it’s very difficult to nail down a thought or opinion about anything. Ironies like Russian dolls, reveal further ironies. In streets and railways stations worlds exist within worlds. Every sense is amplified - lurid colours, the riotous honking din and shouting of the street , the stink of shit and overpowering perfume of incense. In the space of a few steps smooth marble becomes crunching road or a suspicious looking puddle and the huge catalogue of tastes always surprises - sometimes gorgeous, sometimes overpowering, and sometimes kind of grotesque. 

I’ve always thought that the best way to experience being somewhere is to walk it. And walk it I have. I think that I’ve covered most of the inner suburbs. Yesterday I made a point of choosing a central location and to stroll without purpose in each direction for 40 minutes to an hour in a return trip to where I started. After I did this I went down to Colaba - the Gate of India area where the Taj Mahal Hotel imperiously dominates the shoreline. It was the scene of the terrible terrorist events a couple of years back. The whole area is now cordoned off in a two hundred perimeter of the hotel in which anybody wearing a backpack is searched. The usual stark juxtapositions of poverty and wealth are still as apparent as ever. Touts, trinket sellers and beggars still carry on business as usual in the fifty story shadow of the great TMH.  

Just up the road is the Cafe Leopold, renown from Shantaram. These days about half of the customers are like me - Western tourists in search of a kind of literary Benetton experience. I didn’t realise it but the terrorists attacked Leopold’s first and killed eight people. There are still bullet holes in the wall. It was in Leopold’s that I met Christopher, a Vodaphone engineer who grew up in Colaba. Christopher, as his name suggests, is not a Hindu but a Catholic and a man of considerable appetites. We got talking and drinking and then more talking and more drinking and he took me to a bar with a much better ambience up the road,  Cafe Mondegar, where we were joined for more talking and drinking with Eddy, one of Chrisopher’s Vodaphone cronies. Chris and Eddy play in a band with other members of their section. From what I can gather the band does mainly Dire Straits and Jackson Browne covers. Chris plays the drums and Eddy is the vocalist. Chris kept ordering jugs of beer and meals - whole meals. I ended up having about one and a half lunches and about seven schooner size beers while Chris and Eddy by my reckoning each had three lunches and nine beers. 

We talked a lot about the music on the juke box that Chris hogged for the entire time jumping up every couple of minutes in fits of enthusiasm. “Here...here is something different - ‘Men at Work’ - ‘I Come From A Land Down Under’!” High five. Then more jugs of beer and more fits of enthusiasm then singing and standing air guitar tributes to Mark Knopfler and more high fives. I was getting a little wary by this stage because I was well out of my drinking comfort zone. Chris suggested we repair to another bar down the road for the hard stuff - whisky and bourbon. We could grab some hash on the way. Boys selling hash approach you every ten metres or so in Colaba. I declined without considering it. I didn’t need to get that trashed, get ripped off with the cab fare back to the hotel and wake up feeling like death on toast. I’ve done more than my share of that sort of thing in my life. Besides, the truth was, that for me, Chris was wearing a little thin. Maybe I’m getting old but he felt like too much of a good thing - great energy and amusing but kind of tiring. With some hash in his bloodstream he was likely to eat even more. I’d end up feeling like an extra in that old (but wonderfully bizarre) French film La Grande Bouffe in which a group of guys make a pact to eat themselves to death. I begged off promising to call Chris before I leave. I doubt that I will. 

Today I resolved to have a quieter day. I walked down to Colaba again and went to the Indian Museum of Modern Art which was, except for three or four works, a bit of a disappointment - a lot of fairly dated looking Modigliani and Matisse modernist rip offs mostly done about thirty years ago. Strolling in the vicinity of the nearby Gate of India /Taj Mahal Hotel area I was approached by a couple of barefoot young girls dressed in rags giving out wrist garlands. I knew that they were going to ask me for money but I was in the mood to go along with their pitch to see where it went. The main talking girl had a cheeky face and told me that me that she was twenty one. I kept walking and the girls, in typical style walked in lock step with me, until we got to the perimeter of the TMH security area. We’d been chatting about India in general and them moving to Mumbai from Goa and wanting to go back. The main girl who by this time I knew as Neelima, stopped and said that she wanted to ask me something. Fair enough I thought and I reached for my wallet. She told me that she didn’t want any money. The police who were watching us, would make her give it back anyway.  She wanted something to eat. They both did. They wanted food that was going to last. I agreed, that sounded good. I followed her to a stall run by a young guy just outside the perimeter. She obviously had some kind of relationship with him. She told him that I was going to buy her some rice and ghee. He produced a packet of rice and a tin. The rice, two kilos worth, was nine dollars and the ghee about seven dollars. I said that I wasn’t going to pay that much for those things which anybody could get for half the price in Australia where everything is more expensive. I figured he had some kind of hold over her and that he’d get the cut of the action. He said “Fuck you man” and I walked away. Neelima ran after me begging, really upset. I told her that she lied to me. She replied that she really was hungry. I’m sure she was. I told her that if she really wanted food, I’d buy it from the supermarket across the road. I bought a ten kilo bag of rice for about fourteen dollars and two tins of ghee for about six dollars. We got outside and she couldn’t stop smiling. Weighed down with the (for her) huge bag, she was nonetheless beaming. I told her to look after herself. She burst into tears and said this food would last her for about two months. I left. Maybe she went straight back and gave the bag to the boyfriend or whoever he was or maybe she didn’t. Either way I figured that she’d get something out of it. I didn’t give anybody anything for the rest of the day.  

Every tourist in India who doesn’t confine their traveling to an air conditioned bus experiences this kind of thing. India has a way of imposing itself on you. You feel like a Maharaja. Your clothes, your money, your whole life, an implied insult to people in rags. You even wonder if you should be here at all.  I’ve seen some things this time, particularly involving sick children that have been particularly distressing.  What’s the right thing to do, given you can’t give money to everybody who asks? Ration how much you’re going to give on a daily basis - say five or ten dollars? Give to the people whose plight affects you the most? (I saw a man today sitting on the footpath with a pair of bathroom scales and a cardboard box - nobody was even looking at him. He looked wretched, totally defeated by life staring vacantly into the middle distance.) Not give anybody anything and give to a charity once a year?  I have no idea of the answer to any of this and the older I get the more certain I am that I have no idea. This kind of conundrum, so full of emotion and so full of self contradiction is for me, totally compelling - drunk with life. Poverty is only one facet of India. The country has so many other equally compelling puzzles and fascinations:  

the positives and negatives of religion, the acceptance of personal difference, the capacity to throw caution to the winds and celebrate every day. Probably most overwhelming is the way it holds up a warts and all mirror to who you are, or who you think you are.