Mumbai: India’s Greatest Boil

I was thoroughly prepared to despise Mumbai.

 

Seriously, I was all up for it. The night before I made the decision to go. I packed my sunscreen and my cynicism and gathered a bunch of facts (55% of the residents of Mumbai live in slums, 4.7 average to a room, sex with a prostitute can be purchased easily for three dollars and the High Court ruled that extortion fees were now tax deductible) and was all prepared to dislike the city in a very educated way.

 

But then I got and the bus, and, how do I say this… didn’t.

 

Walking over the highrises that criss-cross the city and elevate residents over many dense, overlapping, commercial and residential worlds, I instantly fell in love. The city is absolute density, the architectural and cultural manifestation of a car crash, energy and lives and worlds all pressed together, all oozing, exploding and erupting with life. Beneath the highrises from which I passed over the city like an omniscient narrator I saw just layers of worlds and dramas, and every time I focused in and looked closer and closer I saw more and more and knew less and less. 

 

 

 

Beneath me were the packed urban villages, and children playing cricket on the train tracks. We passed over one spontaneous dance party in which I saw many young boys first energetic gyrations. One young man spotted me watching and smiling and pointed me out to his friend, who caught my eye and gestured to his friend by way of a proposition.  The first guy kicked him and chased him away in obvious embarrassment, as I laughed. Everyone was watching, and watching back.

 

 I think everyone in our group fell in love with Mumbai from the highrises, looking out into the sprawling, smog-clouded skyline, and into the green marshes covered with rainbow litter and the slums made of rainbow litter. Here the trash didn’t look just like trash. It looked like confetti.

In line, waiting to get our train ticket (something we’d soon learn is unecessary: train tickets are absurdly cheap and never checked), a man was beating another man with a belt in front of a silent crowd. After some time the beaten man, who’d been held by the front of his shirt, was released, and without any emotion bent down to silently pick up the broken pieces of his button, and then melted back into the crowd. The other man put his belt back on, and seeing our accusatory expressions, gestured that the man had tried to steal his phone. Here the crowds decide what’s done to criminals, the punishment alloted was accepted as easily as the thief had been accepted back into the crowd. 

 

We’re traveling in a group of six: Kelsey, defiant and green-eyed, wearing a peacock skirt; Sean, who sees Mumbai through his camera lense and is filled with many odds and ends of seemingly random but well-understood facts; Mayaan, who’s fearlessly friendly but whose voice shakes; Dake the global wanderer, who sees everything as interesting but far away. And my roomate Grace, who’s an angel.

 

See?

The trains in Mumbai are by far the best way to travel. The door remained open and flashes of Mumbai passed us in a whirl too immense to digest as we clung to the handles on the ceiling with our hair flying outside until we’re squashed back by hundreds of bodies.

 

 

 

Outside of Churchgate Station we’re greeted by wary imperial buildings, in the process of being consumed by India as they wait for their empire to return. Our hotel is filled to the brim with bed bugs, but we don’t know it until we feel them crawling on our bodies later that night. We just dropped our stuff off and headed to the Gate of India, which has been overtaken by nightfall by the time we reach it. It’s a friendly building, despite the fact that it’s visage announces that it was ‘Erected for His Imperial Majesty King George V’, people gather around it, young friends and families eating fruit and ice cream, while venders sell jewelry and toys. We sit on the ground right in front of the gate and buy the tiny chai cups. Mayaan suggests we put on our snobbiest British accents and we cheer to his Royal Imperial Majesty with our plastic cups. Mid cheer I see Rob, a guy from our UChicago group who we wanted to meet up with, appear out of the dusk. He brings with him his all-accepting smile that I always find impossible not to reflect, his perenial stubble and of course a story of spending the day wandering around the city with some mad stranger he’d met on the street. We sit there for a while, just talking and watching the boats on the docks and the pre-Diwali fireworks (and sometimes having photos taken of us by East Asian tourists).  

 

 

 

 

One of the reasons why I was predisposed to dislike Mumbai was the wealth gap: 55% of people living in slums, but this is also the world of Bollywood actors and the international elite. The Taj, the hotel across from the Gate of India, is where anyone who’s anyone goes and goes to be seen etc etc nauseating elitism etc. It was bombed a couple years back by Islamic extremists in a story that was publicized due to the fact that the attack was on rich people and that journalists spun it as an attack against Westerners and the West. After tea at the gate we go to check it out, myself mostly out of a curiosity to see where rich people like to urinate (answer: like most people, but with facewash). 

 

Me and Dake had a wonderful encounter with the concierge in which Dake asked him where to find a good restaurant and the concierge asked us our room number. Making sure to give each other a prolonged, shifty look, I answer “102” in a very unconvincing voice. The concierge looked at us for one moment and said “No”. But he gave us recommendations anyway. So it was a win for the non-classy people of the world. 

 

The rest of the night was spent wandering, dining and cocktailing, all of which was extremely satisfying. My favorite moment of the night I think was when a vender saw me and put on a Mickey mouse mask and then blew a tube on the side so that it whistled and ears shot up out of nowhere. I would say this was my scariest moment in India, but then again, I was somewhat recently struck by lightning (although Mickey Mouse is a close contender to near death).

 

I ended my luxurious night by collapsing on the bed after an ominous “Don’t let the bedbugs bite” from Dake (my appropriate response: “Fuck you”) before deciding to say goodbye to my little friends and spending the night on the floor tiles with a towel and a pillow-blanket. The bedbugs were, however, courteous enough not to bite.

 

In the morning me and six others departed for our tour of the Dharavi, which is said to be the largest slum in Asia, and is said by the guides of reality tours to be “a five star slum”. However, I’ve found like so many words incorporated into Indian culture, the term ‘slum’ here does not mean what it connotes in America. The slum is no ghetto: as I said before, it’s an urban village, and it generates something between 500-600 million USD because of the huge levels of industrial production. The amount of money is difficult to estimate, actually, because so many people live in the slums not because of poverty but because Dharavi is where you go to conduct illegal businesses and organized crime. Housing is so ridiculous in Mumbai (there’s a huge housing shortage and prices that are sky-high even compared to the most expensive cities in the world) that many rich people live in Dharavi, as well as people who choose to live there because of their illegal businesses. In fact, it seems like the crime is the best-organized thing in Bombay; muggings and other petty crime is virtually unknown in Dharavi. 

 

Instead, what you find in Dharavi is the garbage of the industrial world. Literally, broken pens, plastic spoons, tin cans, plastic, bottles and rags: it is a world of broken things. The houses are built from used thrice-used tin cans, while the wealth is built on recycling and exporting the worlds garbage to international companies like LG and Samsung. People work eight to twelve hours a day in order to give us back the things we’ve thrown away in a useful form. Walking around, it was hard not to wonder how many of my own possessions had ended up there. The Dharaviwalle were used to seeing tourists, and most of the reactions we got were just ‘Hi!”‘s from kids. For me it was fascinating to see the far-away consequences to Western middle class lifestyle (not in a negative way, mind) on the world. Yes, the hygenic and nutritional conditions were terrible, but for the first time I understood why people were leaving the beautiful villages for places like these.

 

 For the last few years, having staid both in New Delhi and in a village in Gujarat, I was completely convinced by the Gandhian outlook on cities; he equated them with cancer, with boils on the fair nation of India. And he is right: cities are filthy, and dangerous and the social moors that keep many people on a less harmful path dissolve in the fast-paced rush of urban movement. And admittedly I am a huge romantic realist, but above even morality I believe in life, which is what always attracted me towards Hindu philosophy, which in the form of the Bagavad Gita (I’m a cliche, I know) most famously is in many ways a discourse on unapologetic and ugly life. Cancer is just pure, ruthless life, and even acne is the erruptions of the physical libidous impulse.

 

 Maybe it isn’t wrong chasing a capitalist illusion if it drives your life, maybe that isn’t false. Even the simple purity of village life is a romanticization with a flimsy grounding in reality. I now hear about how the streets that paved the way to the peculiar Western illusion of progress were once coated in filth and feces, and now many are as sanitized and untrodden as the floors of museums. In confronting cities you have to grapple with the difficult questions of how something can be wrong if it led to your existence and to the existence of your world. Do you reject your existence? Do you apologize for it? Do you embrace it for all it is? Obviously, in framing the question I create and decide my choice. 

So now, the streets of America are mostly clean, at least when compared to those of India. But they’re clean because we send our garbage to Dharavi, and they send it back in the form of consumer goods. Pre-garbage is all around us; they make a short stay with us before taking the passage to India, then Korea, then anywhere in the world. Lives are spent transforming goods into garbage and garbage into goods. Humans are consuming the world, or trying to, consuming it again and again.

 

 

 

We spent some of our last few ours on the coast of Mumbai, where the cities youthful population come to sit and socialize. We saw much of the sunset before beginning our journey back.  Nature’s light went and left nothing but a rainbow of artificial lights to illuminate the city, the man-made sunrise of Diwali lighting the streets. My last glimpse of the city was through the bus window: windows, lit pink and green were suspended and hanging in mid-air, free of the buildings that only daylight revealed and smog concealed. A beautiful and terrible city, it seems to be. One I’d love to meet again.