Chapter 34 - Mumbai, India

The first thing I noticed about Mumbai are the taxicabs. They look like miniature versions of American style cars from the 50s or 60s. I wish I could buy one back home. The drivers make sure to keep the cabs polished and looking sharp. One driver said that there are 42,000 in the city. So you'll notice that these cabs are in many of my pictures.

Mumbai is the most interesting city I've seen on this trip. It's somehow incredibly crowded but still laid back. It gets very hot during the day so most people try not to over exert themselves. In an amazing feat of balance, this guy is sleeping on top of his motorcycle.

The tourist area, called Colaba, is on the southern tip of the peninsula. It somehow reminds me of the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, but busier, dirtier, and more exciting.

This is the classic tourist hangout called Leopold's.

Since I can't do a proper job of explaining this place, I'm going to quote from a very good book I'm reading called Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. The narrator describes what he saw when he first walked around Bombay with his guide. (Its a bit long, so only read it if you're curious)

Hundreds of people walked there, or stood in talking groups. Shops, restaurants, and hotels filled the street side by side along its entire length. Every shop or restaurant featured a smaller sub-shop attached to the front of it. Two or three attendants, seated on folding stools, manned each of those small encroachments on the footpath. There were Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians. Languages and music changed with every step, and every restaurant spilled a different scent into the boiling air.Men with bullock wagons and handcarts wound their way through heavy traffic to deliver watermelons and sacks of rice, soft drinks and racks of clothes, cigarettes and blocks of ice. Money was everywhere: it was a centre for the black-market trade in currencies, Prabaker told me, and thick blocks of bank notes were being counted and changing hands openly. There were beggars, jugglers and acrobats, snake charmers and astrologers, palmists and pimps and pushers. [I didn't see any of the jugglers, acrobats, or snake charmers -B] And the street was filthy. Trash tumbled from the windows above without warning, and garbage was heaped in piles on the pavement or the roadway, where fat, fearless rats slithered to feast.Most prominent on the streets, to my eyes, were the many crippled and diseased beggars. Every kind of illness, disability, and hardship paraded there, stood at the doorways of restaurants and shops, or approached people on the street with professionally plaintive cries. Like the first sight of the slums from the windows of the bus, that glimpse of the suffering street brought a hot shame to my healthy face. But as Prabaker led me on through the roistering crowd, he drew my attention to other images of those beggars that softened the awful caricature presented by the performance of their piteousness. One group of beggars sat in a doorway, playing cards, some blind men and their friends enjoyed a meal of fish and rice, and laughing children too turns to ride with a legless man on his little trolley.

Prabaker was stealing sideways glances at my face as we walked.

"How are you liking our Bombay?"

"I love it," I answered, and it was true. To my eyes, the city was beautiful. It was wild and exciting. Buildings that were British Raj-romantic stood side to side with modern mirrored business towers. The haphazard slouch of neglected tenements crumbled into lavish displays of market vegetables and silks. I heard music from every shop and passing taxi. The colours were vibrant. The fragrances were dizzyingly delicious. And there were more smiles in the eyes on those crowded streets than in any other place I'd ever known.

Above all else, Bombay was free--exhilaratingly free. I saw that liberated, unconstrained spirit wherever I looked, and I found myself responding to it with the whole of my heart. Even the flare of shame I'd felt when I first saw the slums and the street beggars dissolved in the understanding that they were free, those men and women. No-one drove the beggars from the streets. No-one banished the slum-dwellers. Painful as their lives were, they were free to live them in the same gardens and avenues as the rich and powerful. There were free. The city was free. I loved it.

Those paragraphs are the best description I can offer. If want want to read the whole book, you can click this link to Amazon.com: Click Me I'll never get tired of seeing cows across a crowded city sidewalk, and the people walk around the beast as if everything is normal.

That's one facy looking train station.

This is the famous Taj Palace Hotel. One of the nicest and most expensive places in India.

This is a big British-era monument called the Bombay Gate.

I came up on these kids who were playing cricket in the streets. They were excited to get me to take pictures of them and take a few swings with the paddle. I even smacked one over the fence, but I think it was because the kid threw me a slowball.

To the north of Colaba, on the west side, the bay hooks around and becomes Chowpatty Beach. You wouldn't want to go in the water, but it made for some nice views.

This guy with the red shirt was on crack or something.

Next stop Kolkata.

-Thanks for reading-