Train rides in India are good only for insomniacs. We booked 2 Tier Sleeper A/C bunks and both ended up with bookings in the upper bunks. The layout ends up being a ‘compartment’ of six bunks, two along the narrow aisle walkway with curtains to keep you from staring at someone’s passing bum (been there, done that), and two sets of two bunks facing each other. We ended up in the double set on the cramped upper (windowless) bunks on this train with a middle-aged Indian couple on the lower bunks in control of the noisiest fans on the planet. Our fellow bunkers were quite a pair. Finely dressed and good looking, is the one thing we can say about them that is kind. And then our thoughts turn sour. The sound effects from the pair was amazing. We had loud chatting, gut-wrenching burping followed by high-pitched singing and an unending stream of turberculosis sounding coughs that lasted the entire evening and night. Hopefully, they were on their way to the hospital in Mumbai for those coughs or maybe some singing lessons. And if that wasn’t enough to keep us awake, the next compartment down had a family full of young children that kept the youngest baby in fits for a solid eight hours from teasing and that with youthful energy rampaged the train car peering at everyone through the curtains for long durations letting the florescent lights pour down on everyone. “Chai-e-Chai-e!” sounded so quiet out of the tea seller against the din.
Derrell kept saying during the trip, “Wasn’t this supposed to be the Orient-Express? Like we should have a butler and be refreshed when we arrive?”
Nope.
Bleary-eyed and feeling like we were up in the middle of the night, we headed out into the humid morning air of Mumbai and dealt with a new taxi system, (a system saturated with con-men). The system, which eventually with much discussion and a few turns away from the negotiation with complete disgust on our part, finally worked out in our favor as the guidebook said it would: run the meter, multiply it by the official card rate increase the man has in his pocket (13 times the meter), and add a few Rupees for baggage. This was a hard won negotiation by us, as evidenced by the discussion by the taxi driver with his fellow drivers (about a group of 20) that had been “helping” the driver negotiate with us. A lot of shrugging and head nodding and ‘it was worth a try’ laughs punctuated that three minute face saving, see you later exchange. And I must admit, this is a moment that you can only appreciate in hindsight, after you catch up on your beauty sleep and forget the assault of sweat dripping down your neck and pungent urine and oil smell of the street. Hmm.
Our first impression of Mumbai was amazement at how green the place was. We found palm trees and banana trees, humid air, and center dividers on the roads full of flower gardens that were sponsored by large businesses in the area. That is about where the pure beauty ended, though. The buildings were mix of crumbling, dillapitated Raj-era architecture, shanty-town tin-sided creations, the ubiquitous garage-door Indian-style store fronts and a handful of pseudo-shiny high rises. The effect was odd. I had a desire to run a scrub brush over the town and give the place a good sweeping. It might actually shape up to be a city under the gray layers.
Once again the blurb from the guidebook gave some context to what we were seeing. The population in Mumbai is around 12 million, half of that is actually real city and the other half is one of the largest slums in the world. They estimated that 10,000 people a day were pouring into the city looking for work. On the other hand, 50% of the country’s export revenues flow through the city ports. So, there are (possibly literally) ‘boat-loads’ of money flowing through the city. Bollywood movies are also made here. Can you mix up more of a contrast that that?
Our big hope for the city was dashed that afternoon. The movie theater, the Regal Cinema, had a ‘Sorry, We decided to Close.’ sign on the outside of it. The owners were opposing an Entertainment Tax and closed March 13th or thereabouts. This, along with the raiding of the dance clubs, a few nights earlier that arrested over 500 twenty-year olds in the city… and the tone of the city was subdued. Nothing like a bit of corruption in the Tax Boards to really cheer up a city and cause work for the local journalists.
So, with nothing much to do but wander the harbour causeway, we did just that. Thinking along the way, that since we only had three more meals in India and a brutally timed flight out of the country, we would eat safe. Well, it was a hope. Recommended restaurants or not, India has the most appalling hygiene on the planet. The unexpected treat of my afternoon was picking up something from the restaurant that gave me a second roll of the dice with something very akin to a stomach flu. So the remainder of that afternoon and all of the next day in Mumbai was spent sending Derrell out for water and then rolling around in agony cursing the Indian sub-continent cooks with every gut spasming curse I could come up with (which was not very creative given how low I was feeling).
With a good dose of some awful bacteria making havoc inside me, we arose at 1:30 AM for the one hour drive to the airport. The city looked much different at night. The streets were free of cars. A very good thing, since headlights are again optional and all traffic lights are apparently there to be completely ignored. Actually, we considered the rule might be: Speed faster through blinking red lights, and even faster through solid red lights. Beyond the empty streets, a few restaurants were winding down, owners and cooks lingering out in front chatting in white aprons. Stray dogs were awake and wandering energetically everywhere; that was a refreshing sight, since we had not seen a dog move during the heat of the day throughout the entire country. We figured a new ‘Prone’ dog breed existed. And then our vista changed… we turned a corner in the road… and people were sleeping on the sidewalks and on the bridges, everywhere. Hundreds of people lying out on the sidewalks, zonked. There were many men sleeping in their spotless Taxi cabs, which did not look quite as comfortable as the street but did look like a cleaner bed. But the poverty of the area and homelessness… Oh, Mumbai…
The Mumbai airport was much more airport-like than Delhi’s. It actually had a small shopping arcade, seats for waiting (not enough, of course) and a tiny British Airways lounge (one cramped room) that looked out of place but had free sodas and actual copies of the Economist. Not that we got more than a five minute break in the lounge.
It took 55 minutes in the amazingly mosquito-infested airport to get through the immigration line. We wondered how it could take so long to get exit Visa stamps, but we discovered how when it was our turn. Derrell was asked no less than seven times where our port of entry was. Each time his response was ‘Delhi’, a very slow and pronounced response by the seventh time. Well, that was not a correct answer it turned out. I finally interjected ‘New Delhi’ and the vacant faced man bluntly nodded then informed us we had too many stamps for him to find our entrance stamp. We found them for him and then he took another five to ten minutes to inspect them, write in a ledger, type in a computer and finally stamp us out. I wanted to wrap a stomach cramp around his neck by the time he vacantly shooed us on our way. Guess you have a job for life, if you want it, in the Immigration and Customs department. The other flights headed through immigration where headed to Nairobi, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Bahrain, so we had plenty of shady characters that kept ending up in the immigration chief officer’s office looking a bit worried. All of them made it through eventually, but they seemed to have awoken the Indian bureaucracy’s god of slowness and they somehow managed to have a special gift of slowness bestowed upon themselves. We deemed ourselves fortunate.
Our last few minutes (half-hour) of waiting to board the plane was spent in an overlit flourescent lobby at 4 AM stuffed to double capacity with a TV blaring an Islamic prayer while showing folks circling the Ka’ba, the great black square in Mecca. For a mostly Hindu population headed out on a flight to Bangkok and Hong Kong (think Buddhism), it was a bit surreal.
Actually, India itself is surreal. Nowhere else has seemed quite so far away from home. And good to visit. And horrible to visit. And interesting. And appalling. And heart-wrenching. (And needless to say, stomach-wrenching.)
The country has made us discuss politics (and cricket) more than usual. The poverty is brutal. The overpopulation makes it hard to vision a path (let alone an easy path) to creating basic infrastructures to support a mere billion people. The society is kind. The arts are colorful. A sense of optimism exists in everyone. And yet for us, it is the most disheartening place we have encountered. It just comes down to the numbers. How do you add sewage systems, fresh water, health care, steady electricity, paved roads and compulsary education to multiple cities of a million people with a poverty line at over 30% of the inhabitants? China, next door, sounded so outrageous with its harsh family planning law of one child, and the environmental atrocities of building such huge dams. It now seems to us, it might be the most compassionate thing that the China government could do for its people.
Nothing is so black and white in political design when it comes down to a billion heartbeats, eh?
