Mumbling Mumbai

With the inevitability of a proper full time, big boy job looming in the Autumn I decided to go out on one last trip before starting the dreaded 9-5. Picking India was an easy decision and with my pasty white complexion what better time was there to come than during the hottest part of their year.

Got to start with a picture of the Mahmata!

Touching down at 4am in Mumbai even then I could feel the heat. After a quick change out of jumper and jeans into something a bit cooler I headed for the taxi. As soon as I stepped onto the taxi rank I began to feel like a prize bull on market day with incomprehensible bids flying at me from every which direction. It wasn’t long before one driver had beaten the rest to the punch, had me bundled bags and all into the back of his motor and we were trundling off on our way.

Driving those first few flyovers I got quite a good feel of the city in the early morning light. If I was to sum it up in a word, it would be chaotic. Everything from the sprawl of buildings, the majority that looked like they hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since the Brits left. To the haphazard swerving of the drivers weaving their way through thick lanes of traffic.  To the beautifully blended cacophony of tireless motor horns and the bellowings of hawk nosed vendors hawking their loads of goods. Chaos everywhere.

But somehow it worked. Wherever there wasn’t a market stall on the footpath there was a homeless family living on the streets. Slum housing used the gable walls of run down colonial buildings as a springboard to create a mini settlement, crashing up the side of them and reaching two stories high in places. Graffiti dabbed every free corner and piece of fencing, be it religious, political or environmental it all seemed to be imploring a change that didn’t look to be forthcoming. And everywhere there were the cows, cows to be fed, cows to be patted, cows blocking roads staring with bovine wonder at the exasperated drivers who were honking their horns in a vain attempt to get them to move. Smells drifted in through open windows, the lower tones of filth and car fumes being overpowered by sharp lemon grass and onions in the veg markets, to give way to fish so freshly caught it probably was still dreaming of opening waters.

The humdrum of humanity was deafening and after 24 hours of travelling with little to no sleep my brain was struggling through porridge trying to cope. I decided it was all too much so made for Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, CST, station to get a train out of there. I’ve been to a few megalopolis’ in my time and didn’t have the fortitude of will just then to push myself through another one. Thankfully on arriving at the station I learned that the train I wanted was already gone so it would mean spending at least one night in that huge colorful riot of a city.

Open air laundrette

Being close to a holiday there were iPhone release day cues of people already lined to buy tickets for tomorrow, a full hour before the ticket office opened. Standing in line, in full view of the taxi drivers and bus boys though meant I was subjected to the advances of a hundred salesmen all offering me alternative transport from the city. I explained to them that I wanted to get the train because I had heard it was a very scenic way of travelling and would give me a good intro to the Indian country. This seemed to have earned the approval of Birmingham born woman with a fondness for cursing, who told me about my special Gringo bonus of a cue jump desk for foreign tourists.

 

Jain Temple 

Tickets were easy to get but a couple of Indian men spotting me with my pen and filled in form cornered me. At first I was naturally defensive that four men would come over to me, especially these four who looked like they would maybe not have been the biggest proponents of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent protests. But rather shyly one of them asked me if I could fill out their forms for them. It was an easy ten minutes for me filling in names, addresses and date of births but made me think how much of a daily struggle it must to be the illiterate population in our rapidly modernizing text based world.

Anyone fancy a spot of cricket?

As I had an early morning train I wanted to be close to the train station so I could get there easily the next day. One of the taxi drivers who had been chancing me earlier came back for round two and persuaded to take me to a hotel near by. It was a hotel in the loosest sense of the term. A reception, a room, a hole in the roof I assumed from whence water must come if you wanted to shower. But it was somewhere to leave my bags. The taxi driver had offered then to take me on an impromptu tour of the city, and being too tired to walk it seemed like a great offer. After a bit of haggling we settled on a tenner for a full day of driving and him telling me tid-bits of information. His English was good, even if he was a bit arrogant. He had only taken me to two or three of the destinations however before he asked me for an “English bonbon”, to which I seriously pissed him off by telling him I didn’t have any. After that we fortuitously bumped into his brother, another taxi driver, and he was quick to shift me into his brother’s car to finish off my tour. The brother was more pleasant, even if he spoke less English but I was happy with that still having had little sleep from the night before.

 

City cows and holy pigeon coup

In a morning I pretty much saw everything I had wanted to see. I visited a Jain temple with ornately decorated doors and shoeless worshipers, meeting ahims worshippers with covered mouths doing so to not accidentally kill a bug that might fly in. I watched games of cricket being played on the lawns in front of the ornate houses of justice with a mini Big Ben standing beside them. A religious parade passed with robed grandfather and toddler grandkids being pushed down the main road in flower-garlanded trolley by a prayer chanting, incense burning, banner furling friends and family. I even passed a Parsee temple, followers of an ancient religion based in Persia (think the bad guys in 300) but unfortunately they don’t let outsiders in. Mumbai has one of the largest populations of Parsee outside of Iran and by chance I managed to find myself quite close to their Tower of Silence at one point. Parsee’s don’t believe in burial or cremation for their dead instead they leave them out on platforms for the birds and elements. The air was dotted with every form of carrion bird you could think of like the barflies that gather around empties left over from the weekend before. Tree boughs everywhere hung low under the weight of vast flocks of the crows and vultures sitting idly in them. Chilling stuff.

View from the hanging gardens of the world's most expensive house down the centre, in the trees to the right is the Tower of Silence with birds wheeling overhead

After that ghastly spectacle I visited the colonial buildings down by the waterfront. The Gate of India and the Taj Mahal Palace, which I recognized on the news from the 2008 Mumbai Bombings, were impressive but I was losing interest in the day. I walked home via a quick stop in Leopold’s (for all the Shantaram readers) back in the general direction of my hotel. It was only as I got closer though I realized I had no idea where I was going. The name card that the hotel owner had given me with the address on it was actually just a vague description of the location of two nearby markets. I must have been stumbling about in the stifling midday sun for more than an hour with patience levels draining faster than my fluids before I found it.

Taj Mahal Hotel and the Gate of India

Of course the hotel didn’t have wifi and that evening when I followed the owner’s directions to the nearest internet café I was lost in that backstreets of Mumbai in minutes. At least he was consistent in his vagueness. It definitely felt well off the beaten tourist track as I wound through stalls and side alleys, dodged cows and scooters in equal numbers, ducked under billowing silk awnings and past huge elephant bags of spices, none of which I could recognize but choked the air regardless with their smell.

Backstreets of Mumbai

It was only after finally finding my way home, no mean feat mind you due partly/mainly to my terrible sense of direction, that I realized I hadn’t ate all day.  The heat had wilted my appetite so I settled for a dinner of a 10p samosa which was very tasty and a 45p idli, a rice like bread with dips, not so tasty.

The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn to get my train from CST. I was travelling south to Goa, hoping to catch the end of the travelling season there before it all closed up with the oncoming monsoon. The only option for booking was the air conditioned carriages. This was both a blessing and a curse as twelve hours in a heat blasted metal cabin might have proved to be more than enough. However the windows there were small, translucent, glass rectangles with an extra layer of a decade or so of dirt to reduce visibility further. At first I tried looking out but all that could be seen was the blurry outline of the train of trash and discarded debris that runs parallel to the tracks that had built up over the years. The level of litter in India has been pretty shocking, you see everyone from kids to their mothers finishing a bottle or carton and immediately dropping it on the floor, which is a shame in such an otherwise beautiful country. The rubbish followed the train the whole way out of the city, piling up in places almost like sand forming castles to build heartbreaking homes of cardboard and corrugated iron.

 

Leopold's Cafe in Colga

Abandoning my seat view I went outside the cabin. The doors are those heavy metallic lever doors you’d imagine in an old school submarine and it was easy for me to swing one open. Immediately I was blasted by the heat, but almost as soon the wind had whipped it away leaving me feeling fresh as I stood in the doorway. The thunderous rattle of the rail echoed my heart beat, exhilarated sweat fill palms were blown dry by that grasping wind. Rollercoastering through tunnels the train let out a vacuumous roar as the air rushed past me seeking to get out of the train’s path. It felt like it was threatening to suck me out in its place, to be dashed into the heart of darkness. Holding on the tighter I could feel it in the awkward positioning of my wrists as I clung to the rails, until finally I burst out into the sweet sunlight. Chancing a peak out the dust and wind whipped fiery at my eyes. The train was a creeping centipede of shelled carriages with both the head and tail lost to sight.

CST Station

The wall of trees and rock in front would give way to reveal magnificent vistas as the ground receded away below and the track took a higher path. On the back of a bird’s wing soaring over mud brick homesteads, patches of green crops and kids playing in pebble-strewn riverbeds. Harley-Davidson handlebar horned cows were tended by their herdsmen crouched down in a motionless heron pose. A position that only looks possible to hold all day in the intense heat if you share a birthplace with yoga. Each image was seen only for a few seconds but left a lasting print on my minds eye. All that before hurtling back through the abyss of another tunnel to repeat from the beginning again.

I stood there for about eight hours, until the sunset and the darkness took all of those views back for itself. It was just a peak into what lies ahead but my mind was already racing with the possibility of it all. Finally the train pulled into my station in Goa and jumping down with my bags it was a quick taxi to my next hostel.