The Big Mango

First, a discussion of the latest news. As I mentioned there is some sort of crisis involving both Pakistan and cricket. Bear with me. Here's what happened: after a great deal of rigamarole over security clearances and other such nonsense, the Indian Premier League finally ended up listing 11 of the top Pakistani (world-champion)cricketers for auction to Indian club teams. We know what happened next, but not why. When auction day finally came, a great number of players' rights were bought, but not a single offer was made for any of the 11 Pakistani players, leaving every cricketer present from that country to face a sudden and humiliating silence before departing empty-handed. As far as petty sports bickering between neighbors goes, it was already a pretty good snub, but cricket is some serious shit in Asia, and by the end of the day people in the streets of Pakistan were - I kid you not - burning the chairman of the Indian cricket league in effigy. Were cricket not one of the centerpieces of diplomacy between two countries whose relations otherwise tend to involve exchanges of mortar fire on 6000-meter glaciers, this would be some of the funniest shit I've ever heard.

Another story. It seems that the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (a major international Kashmiri mujaheddin outfit) has shocked Indian security agencies by...wait for it...purchasing some 50 paragliders from Europe and allegedly training its members in airborne suicide bombing. While I certainly don't want them to succeed in killing anybody in this manner, I just can't wait to see them try. I can just imagine a determined jihadi gracefully soaring his way downwards towards a packed festival at a Hindu temple along the Ganges, being blown off course by an unexpected gust of wind, and being sent spiraling to a splash in the river, followed by a loud boom, an upsurge of water, and a rain of fish giblets flopping onto awnings in the vegetable market and rebounding with a *pffwapp* off the faces of unsuspecting cows. Even the mullahs would have to ponder a bit whether this qualifies as a glorious martyrdom.

Back to my own life in Mumbai though, which thankfully has yet to involve suicide bombs or outbursts of gunfire, but has involved the usual dangerous darting across traffic - in front of a fully-loaded armored personnel carrier.

I'm staying in Colaba, which is the southernmost tip of Mumbai and ground zero for all things absurdly British. Not far away is Oval Maidan, "India's Central Park", essentially a big long field swarming with amateur cricketers, some of whom take themselves incredibly seriously and amble about the finer parts of the field in their all-whites with a paid referee in a silly white sunhat. What horrors the Empire wrought. The first building I stumbled across was the unmistakable Gateway of India, a ridiculous triumphal arch leading down into the sea with mock-Gujarati ornamentation and a massive inscription commemorating the arrival in India of the King and Queen of England in 18-whatever. Hardly able to remove this imperialist pomp without turning away thousands of tourists a year, the local authorities have, in the name of Indian (and more importantly, Marathan) nationalism, responded by erecting a touchingly bellicose statue of the Maratha prince Shivaji waving his sword in the general direction of the arch through which the last British troops left India in 1949. Never mind that Shivaji died like 250 years before; obviously it was this same indomitable Maratha pride that freed Bombay Mumbai, and indeed the world, from the yoke of British tyranny.

Many more edifices in the same vein followed. Most impressive, bewildering, and outright laugh-worthy of all was the train station formerly known as Victoria Terminus and now known by some impenetrable Marathi gobbledygook honoring Shivaji or possibly another guy with the same name. You just look at the station and have to ask yourself "what the fuck were they thinking?". Is that a cathedral? With a pagan Roman goddess on top? Did someone repair a medieval French cloister with leftover windows from a Mughal brothel? Why is it that color? Did they vandalize a Gujarati brothel too? Is that gargoyle a tiger? The British in this period, you see, held the comical belief that centuries of exquisite Indian architecture were trifling, but held a handful of great ornamental ideas that would be vastly improved by using them as flourishes on gigantic ill-formed piles of brown and gray Victorian brickwork. The endearing result is that much of southern Mumbai looks like it was overrun by a bunch of pompous and puritanical but chronically intoxicated fops with a child's understanding of Indian culture. Oh wait, it was.

Somehow from the old Victoria Terminus I ended up on an interminable (shit, is that a pun? whatever. blow me.) ...an interminable walk across central Mumbai through various long, tedious, and dirty bazaars in the Muslim quarter, where I was dismayed to discover that Mumbai actually does allow cows. I suppose I should give the residents their due for in the most part the citizens realize that cows have no place in the damn streets, at least until they can learn to behave. Moving on. I ended up, somewhat to my surprise, a good 3 kilometers from where I intended at a place called Chowpatty Beach, where Mumbai people come to enjoy the sand but wisely stay the hell out of the water. The exception seems to be young men in tight shirts who rent jet-skis to zip across Back Bay, though I feel that if they are so desperately in need of churning up wakes in that kind of fluid they may as well just tie a Happy Meal windup car to a balloon and set it going across a slick of laundry detergent in an unflushed toilet in the privacy of their own home.

Chowpatty Beach is, however, at the foot of Malabar Hill, a hilly little peninsula that has pretty much always been the swankest part of downtown Mumbai, and is now practically covered in high-rise luxury residences demonstrating the astronomical amounts of money made, hoarded, and conspicuously spent within the confines of the city limits and its navel-gazing, outrageously wealthy elite. I tromped through finding nothing too remarkable at ground level. Eventually I came almost to the end of the peninsula in my attempt to find a path leading to the neighborhoods above the cliffs and suddenly I was surrounded again by what looked like a rather traditional Hindu area sitting on what has got to be some of the priciest real estate in South Asia. I descended a curving step-alley with little neglected Hindu shrines and found myself upon the edge of what was clearly a sacred tank. I walked around to examine it and found to my very, very great surprise that here in the shadow of cutting-edge apartment buildings and construction cranes was a site of no less venerability than a holy tank mentioned as a resting-place of Rama in exile in the Ramayana. India, man. You just never know.

After returning to the beach and taking a very lengthy stroll down Marine Drive, the brilliantly illuminated curl of skyscrapers and art-deco mansions around Back Bay which they still colloquially call "the Queen's Necklace" for how it shines at night, I concluded a most tiring day.

I rose the next morning with a certain amount of resignation. My plan for the day was a trip across the huge Mumbai harbor to Elephanta Island, which is only reachable by boat. I fucking hate boats. I'm not hydrophobic or anything, I just hold an extremely firm opinion that boats suck because once you're on a boat you really have no choice what to do with your life except continue to be on said boat, which is itself tragic because as I've said, boats suck. This most harmonious circle of reasoning only reaffirms the perfection of the natural laws which have been defiled in such violating fashion by Man's embarkation in dreary vessels across the seas.

Nevertheless I endured the nigh-Odyssean hour-long crossing with tact and was amply rewarded when I made landfall upon Elephanta. Elephanta is known as a very old and remarkable site of Shiva worship dating back to the 5th century (yo, that's old) , a time when the reinvigorated Hindu faith was in full artistic swing at the climax of its thereafter-unstoppable comeback against Indian Buddhism. The name 'Elephanta' was given by the Portuguese (who briefly held Bombay - or Bom Bahia as they christened it), referring to a massive stone statue of an elephant they found on the isle. The statue is no longer there. What happened to it? If you made the obvious guess and went with "lifted wholesale in the 19th century and relocated to either a museum, garden, hall, or court named after Queen Victoria", congratulations, you can probably earn a degree in British History. (For what it's worth, it's in the Victoria Garden in Mumbai). Aside from the elephant, the Portuguese found a series of impressively large man-made cave temples cut straight out of the hillside, which they promptly delighted in vandalizing, no doubt spilling merry quantities of red wine, musket balls, and pork gristle about as they did so.

The caves are all dedicated to Shiva in his various metaphysical forms (whose names I have almost entirely forgotten). One wall featured a particularly violent-looking Shiva as Demon-Slayer, while a shrine nearby housed an unusually large lingam - that's Shiva-phallus to you - which people continued to pay their respects to. A favorite panel of mine was that of Nataraja, Shiva as the "Cosmic Dancer", seen here in an exquisite dancing pose with an unlikely number of arms and fine craftsmanship. Nataraja is one of my favorite Hindu deities as I find Shiva's cosmic dance to be one of the most eloquent metaphors yet devised to explain the intricate interplay of energies and forces that essentially defines our universe. Most impressive of all, however, was the gigantic 6-meter tall Trimurti bust in the center of the temple. And what a bust it was. Trimurti, you see, is Shiva with three faces representing his three most fundamental aspects. So this is a 6-meter statue of three giant faces, like a smaller, Hindu Mt. Rushmore, and is known around India as well as that fabulous heap of presidential faces is in the US. "3 faces?" you say, "bahh! Mt. Rushmore has four!". Oh, but you overlook: There is of course a fourth face that we just can't see because it's facing away from us, and furthermore, there is a fifth face but it transcends human understanding and isn't depicted in sculpture. So there. Also, it could be said that Mt. Rushmore could be greatly improved if Thomas Jefferson were holding a lotus flower and Teddy Roosevelt had a fucking snake draped around his neck (I'm sure he'd approve).

Once again I tediously set off by boat across Mumbai Harbor, and having failed to attract the ire of any cyclops well-connected with maritime deities, I managed to get back in only about 12 goddamn years.

This morning I rose at an unseemly hour for a great adventure: the night before I had been recruited as a Bollywood extra. About which much, much more anon.

In the late afternoon, recuperating from a demanding day of Bollywood, I set out to see the sunset at the tomb of Haji Ali, a Sufi mystic who for whatever reason was buried in marble tomb on a rock in the Arabian Sea just off the West coast of what is now central Mumbai. You get to the tomb by a long, narrow stone causeway over the ocean which is completely swamped with water when the tide is high, and completely swamped with hideously injured, trance-miming beggars when the tide is low. Though it was Sunday and by no means a particularly busy time to visit, the causeway was utterly choked with visitors both Muslim and Hindu who were making the trip out to the rock because it's a beautiful place to watch the sunset, and generally a wholesomely good time. The tomb is yet another of these incredibly unlikely and captivating places in India that force one to consult an old Arabic astrolabe or some shit to prove you're still on planet Earth. The falling turned the lime-green walls glowing gold while thousands milled about eating hot snacks cooked on carts right on the rock, listened to the trance-inducing qawwal music, prayed in the tomb, frolicked in the waves crashing on the rocks, and just stared off into the sun. It was a lovely place to visit and I may return tomorrow.

Knowing what I'm likely to see in the next day, I might just find that I need to.

edit: corrected historical dates relating to Shivaji which I had misplaced by some 120 years.