But Seriously, Mumbai

Good

Fucking

God...









...I actually like Mumbai.

The beginning of my stay in Mumbai was far from promising. As usual, my tale begins with an Indian train. An Indian train that was nine hours late. Now, I am accustomed to long journeys across this country and assume that every transit connection I make will be absurdly tardy...I gave myself a four hour cushion for this one. I'm a little at a loss for words though for how to describe being on a train from Delhi to Mumbai for 29 hours. Befitting its destination, the train was severely overcrowded to the point that the 8-berth section of the carriage I was in held no less than 15 people piled on top of each other and their luggage in the conspicuously narrow beds, while others spread out newspapers and slept on the floor and in the aisle. Just around the corner, some 10 people were sleeping in the entrance of the carriage while men and children stepped over them and even - I swear - were standing astride the sleeping figures while urinating onto the floor of the passage beyond as the lavatories were themselves being used to shelter groups of huddling figures. And this was the situation in the reserved carriages. I caught a glimpse of the unreserved carriages as the train pulled into New Delhi station, and can only describe what I saw as some sort of human tessellation, with people contorted in all sorts of inhuman positions, filling in every gap in the volume of the carriage. I at least had an upper berth in the reserved carriages, which by unspoken rule can not be invaded by strangers. However, my luggage, which certainly could not go in the designated luggage areas under the lower benches because there was at least one person sleeping under there already. I thus spent the following 29 hours completely immobile, perched in a comparatively generous 10 cubic feet of space like a jar of strawberry preserve on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.

Let me reiterate that the train was nine hours late. This is barely comprehensible. In the United States, nine hours was sufficient time for me to drive from say, Washington DC, to any major urban area in New England. Bored to the point of twitching madness (as I had by then finished both of the books I brought for the journey), I began to do some calculations. Now, consider that this train was nine hours late, and that furthermore, there are services in India that cover three times the distance. It is thus completely plausible that a train be 24 hours or more late to its destination. I reflected on this, and noted that a number of practical and metaphysical dilemmas arise from this possibility. Consider for instance, a train called the Fuckthis Express that is 24 hours late, while a train departing the following day on the same route (also, therefore, the Fuckthis Express) is precisely on time. Imagine the confusion were the already pathetic platform announcements to inform passengers

"Your attention please, train 0666 Fuckthis Express from Bullshitabad to Fuckfacepur via Fort Suicide is delayed by 24 hours, 15 minutes. The inconvenience caused is deeply regretted."

"Your attention please, train 0666 Fuckthis Express from Bullshitabad to Fuckfacepur via Fort Suicide is now arriving at its scheduled time."

Now, there is a prickly question...what if the latter train overtakes the former? How does one know which train is which? Presumably you would have to wait longer to get on the earlier train, but how many people would step onto the first one that arrives and be shocked to discover another person with a valid ticket for his seat? But this, admittedly is a trivial question in comparison to others that arise. Consider further - and here it will become clear I have been reading too much Isaac Asimov - the problem of having two instances (time-beings?) of the same train arriving at a single-platform station at the same time, destined as it were, to occupy the same sliver of spacetime, like a time-traveler who commits the egregious error of traveling to a time and place he has already been. What I'm saying is that Indian Railways poses a grave threat to our conception - or even the existence of - our reality, and should be banished to a temporal prison in another universe.

Aside from making me think about these things, the train's lateness was primarily offensive to me for practical reasons, namely that it deposited me at a "suburban" station some 20km north of the city center on the edge of a slum at 2 o'clock in the morning. It was a rather unenviable situation, to say the least. You may be thinking that I was concerned about robbery. Not so. I was concerned, and rightly so, that I was about to be subject to extortion. The late-night cabbies somehow roused from their slumber at the approach of a well-heeled foreigner who was no doubt anxious to get the hell out of there. I managed to negotiate a less extortionate price that allowed me to keep my shoes, and began the long slog down Mumbai. The smell was horrendous, a vile, acrid smog that shocked me despite having recently arrived from the cesspool of Delhi, where I now hardly notice the flavor of the atmosphere. Heading south, the smell got even worse, and I realized that at least it was because we were crossing the small river that divides the principal island of Mumbai from the mainland, a stream that I read described as "one of the foulest watercourses known to science". Indeed, even high on the bridge across it, the mere act of breathing became a horrid, fecal inhalation. The cab continued on its way and I began to grasp the scope of Mumbai's sprawl. I was traversing merely the core of the city, forget the endless "suburbs" (as they call them), and it was mile after mile of dense bazaars, post-industrial hells, towering luxury apartments, until finally I somehow managed to direct the driver into the correct backstreet of the Muslim quarter, in a neighborhood so dubious my driver took considerable goading to go further, as he was convinced that I had directed us to a surprisingly bad area in a generally good part of the city in a devious scheme to rob him. We pulled up, and the hotel manager informed us that the place was full, my reservation surely discarded in light of the fact I was now TEN HOURS LATE. The driver then took me around the massive Muslim district to a number of hotels that were all full, until finally we found one that allowed me to spend a typical half-week's budget on a six-hour flop, because accommodation here is expensive, and especially when they know you are exhausted and don't have a goddamn clue where you are. Six hours later, I was kicked out to begin my search again, and eventually actually found something reasonable and desirable.

Having run the arrival gauntlet, I took a nap, and then set out on exploration, and found that I liked Mumbai immediately.

Mumbai is everything Delhi isn't. After weeks huddled in unheated hotel rooms and drinking cup after cup of chai to face the North Indian winter, I found myself ordering a lassi. The streets downtown were clean, and though the traffic was certainly of great volume, it moved with relative order. Palm trees swayed in the breeze beneath shell-white skyscrapers and in front of the comically awful Victorian institutions that dot the city center. There are sidewalks, and pedestrians are only in the middle of the street when they need to cross from one side to the other (oh, the things I marvel at now). There were even -*gasp*- street signs, and I could for once navigate with relative certainty instead of having to use the position of the sun in the sky like a wandering Bedouin. I could even find my way around town at midday, when the sun offers no clues and I am usually forced to examine the Westerly orientation of the local mosques.

This one deserves its own paragraph. There is not a single rickshaw. The next one needs a paragraph too.

There is not a single cow.

I took advantage of the warmth immediately. I will confess that in recent weeks my personal hygiene has been rather...cursory, owing to the fact that hotel rooms in the north were miserably cold and I had no desire to get beyond the minimum amount of water on my person, as there was no refuge from the wet ensuing chill. I took a luxuriant shower in my Mumbai hotel, fully lathered myself in soap and almost burst into song at how happy I was to be somewhere with decent weather. I began cleansing myself, as one does, and my skin instantly began to assume a lighter hue, as great sheets of dark, filthy dead skin slid off my body in such quantities that rubbing my hands along the sides of my torso produced worm-like concentrations of filth, which I wiped off in an operation that reminded me quite oddly of rolling a pie crust.

Let it not be said that I conceal anything from you, dear reader.

Downtown Mumbai is exciting, expensive, and fun. There are great restaurants and useful shops. Street peddlers are restricted to designated "hawking zones" (which would be even more awesome if my lodging wasn't in the middle of one). Mumbai is like a tropical version of lower Manhattan, filled with venerable buildings of various heights, from fading repurposed tenements to soaring 21st century towers. Thousands of black and yellow taxis ply the streets, and the residents of the city possess that same lack of interest in anything and everything beyond the confines of their city that so characterizes New Yorkers. The parallels continue: the first affordable restaurant I could find after almost 24 hours without eating was a shwarma joint. If you picked up the city (shorn of its slums) and dropped it in, say, the south of France, it would undoubtedly be one of the world's great tourist destinations. Even the tourists are different. Agra and Rajasthan are full of fat, waddling European geezers with air-conditioned buses, money to burn, and brainpower to expend in its entirety on figuring out where to find elusive bronze statues of Ganesh (*cough* everywhere). Delhi and the north are full of the world's supply of (usually American or Israeli) pseudo-hippies on their way to study yoga at some white-people-ashram in Rishikesh or Varanasi. The overwhelmingly British tourists of Mumbai are, on the other hand, delightfully unashamed imperialists, who come to seek their pleasure sipping on expensive cocktails and marveling at how wonderfully the British Raj managed to civilize the subcontinent single-handedly by constructing edifying Neo-Gothic buildings and playing cricket.

I have much more to say about Mumbai, but I also have much more to do. My visit here is far from over, and I am sure I will have many things to report, including my thoughts on the current "Pakistan cricket snub" crisis (ohhhhh boy!), and the fact that Bollywood is a massive national coverup. You heard it here first.