Gateway to India, Mumbai
When people think of India, I imagine they think as I did before my brief time there this contract. All silks and bright colours, saffron and incense, Elephants decorated with tassels and beautiful girls with gems on the center of their foreheads.
In truth, that’s only half of India, the half they show the tourist board. India is a very hard place to describe, because it’s both nothing like and everything like, what you expect. I will say this though: even at its lowest points, India is fascinating.
I’m sort of at a loss as to what to say about India. It’s…a very strange place. I will say this, it’s not pretty. At least the part of India that I saw wasn’t pretty. When you get off the ship you are immediately mobbed by Tuk-Tuk drivers (remember Octopussy, yeah those things he zips around in down the streets of India, really exist, and I spent most of the day riding in one), and taxi drivers, all trying to convince you that they’re tour is the best. Around here, taxis don’t take you from one place to the other, they are almost strictly tour cars, trying to convince one of them to just take you somewhere and drop you off is like trying to convince Molasses to run uphill. In winter.
Starting then, with Cochi.
There were 6 in our party to start with, but ultimately we split into two groups of three, because tuk-tuks can only carry three people at once. The fellow driving us was hilarious and friendly, as most of them are as long as they get paid at the end of the trip. However, the traffic is beyond insane! It’s as if you’re playing chicken (or Chinese firedrill) with the whole city! Horns everywhere, goats in the middle of the street (sometimes sleeping), the various trucks, cars, people and took-tooks zoom in and out of each other in a constantly changing and interweaving pattern, as if no space is too small and speed is simply not a consideration. Of interest here is the fact that tuk-tuks have no seatbelts, so every time you go over a speed bump (for which they don’t slow down), you jump off the seat about a half a foot. The ride is a great deal of fun, but not for the faint of heart.
For $6 (a price reached after a lot of hard and confusing bargaining) our driver took us all over the old part of the city of Cochi, including through the village area. It made my skin crawl a bit, the villages are so poor…these people live in, I don’t want to say squalor really, but…I can’t think of a better word. There is nothing charming about an India urban-village. At one point we stopped at our driver’s home, which qualified as little more than a few boards slapped together with a blanket over the door.
My companions were most distressed that I refused to haggle more than a token amount, and it’s true, I am a soft touch and I know that haggling is expected (I also know that I’m no good at it, which is why I always make sure in ports like this one, that I travel with someone who is far more aggressive than myself). I also know when haggling is obviously insulting a person’s pride. If, after four or five times of asking, a merchant is still saying that they can’t or won’t go any lower, I will usually give it up as a bad job. The girls I was with though, haggled till the cows came home. Ultimately I’m sure I was taken for more than I should have been, but when one started to use my purchase to haggle down hers, I put my foot down and said “I’m buying this one way or another, so whatever you do is up to you”, and my companion (the art director I was with), looked at me and rolled her eyes and said “you just totally ruined the bargaining process.”
In truth, bargaining is an art, one that I have never mastered. If you don’t bargain, a merchant will assume you’re an even softer touch than I, and inflate your price, if you bargain too hard, they’ll dig their heels in and raise the price anyway. It takes a very delicate touch, and if you ever go to India, I suggest you study up on the protocols beforehand.
And lo, after all that, then there was Bombay.
My apologies Mumbai, its’ called Mumbai now, but somehow it will still always be Bombay.
Bombay is – everything intensified, the colours, the noise, the scents, and yes, the heat (if you think anywhere you have ever been in the world is hot, I suggest you spend a few hours in India, it will make everything else feel cool), it’s everything times ten. Sadly, that also includes the negative shades – where you have double the wealth you will find it surrounded by double the poverty, double the beauty, clashed up against double the squalor. But truly, it is an incredible place, you never know what you’re going to find next. For example, on the way out of the restaurant from lunch we almost walked headlong into a live cow standing in the middle of the market street.
Seriously.
A cow. A brown cow. Lazily eating hay in the middle of the street.
Security in Mumbai is taken very much heart, especially since the attack on the Taj Hotel (which is one of the most stunning hotels I’ve seen yet), in the early 2000’s. To approach the famous Gateway to India, you have to have your bags searched and to even enter the Taj Hotel you have to be scanned by security. When you set this alongside the fact that there are vendors clogging the streets and who knows how many pickpockets, when little girls in clothes that are obviously on their last legs are sent up to with outstretched hands hoping, hoping, that this tourist will be the one who’s soft enough to give the m something… its enough to make your head spin.
And yet beyond all that, there’s a breathtaking beauty to it and that beauty is in the people themselves. The buildings may be falling down, the water may be filthy, and the animals wander the streets unchecked, yet the people themselves are lovely. I don’t mean their particularly friendly, some of them aren’t, but they’re beautiful, there’s a way in which they carry themselves that’s almost impossible to describe. And everywhere you look you see colour, because all the women wear Saris, and some of these are the most beautiful pieces of material I have ever seen. Embroidery and gilding catch the sun even as the hems are carefully lifted out of the ever-present dirt and dust.
Silk, sweat and saffron…
Surreal…
Bright Blessings,
Shaughnessy.