Five days in Bombay



Gateway of India

After five balmy days in India, I've spent five wretched days in Seattle, struggling with a debilitating cold (hence the delay in filing this dispatch).   Between the two experiences, India wins -- hands down.

You can see a lot in five days, but you can't see everything.  And Mumbai, at 13 million souls, is not a compact, tidy destination.  We (Kathy, Juliana and I) agreed that, physically, it reminded us of a rather unkempt Paris.  In personality, on the other hand, it bore a definite resemblance to New York.


Cricket pitch in shadow of
Bombay High Court

But after spending five days in midtown New York, no one could assert that he "knew" or "understood" New York.  And we definitely confined ourselves to "South" or "Downtown" Mumbai --  the old, original British town and still one of the city's major commercial areas.  South Mumbai has most of the monuments and sights that one associates with the city.  Without disparaging the huge swaths of the city that I've never seen, I suspect it would be fair to say that they are all Queens and the Bronx, to South Mumbai's Manhattan.

Kathy and Juliana
Sunset on Marine Drive

My only earlier visit to India focused on Delhi, and Delhi is very different.  Delhi has more architectural history -- all those Mogul forts and monuments -- and is immersed more deeply in traditional India.  Mumbai -- the Mumbai we saw, at least -- is all about today.  In Delhi, we got around in three-wheel tuk tuks.  In Mumbai, the streets are full of small taxi cabs.  In Delhi, male and female tourists were warned that even Indian married couples do not hold hands in public.  In Mumbai, amorous couples were wrapped around each other all along the waterfront, and women were stylishly dressed in Western clothes.  In Delhi, merchants sat around chatting and drinking tea with prospective customers.  In Mumbai, office workers poured out of railway stations and down the streets in endless, fast-walking processions -- reminiscent of time-lapse films of New York rush hour.

Delhi was, perhaps, Boston; Mumbai was, unquestionably, New York.

We walked miles along the Arabian Sea waterfront.  We photographed the Gateway of India and had drinks in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.  We took a boat to Elephanta Island to explore the ancient Hindu cave carvings.  We had dinner with an upper class family (servants!) on exclusive Malabar Hill, where we learned that, for many Mumbaikars, the city is, without question, still "Bombay."   We stayed in a small hotel, with funky old-European charm, where ascending the stairway that wound around an elevator shaft was usually much faster than taking the elevator, and where breakfast was served on a roof overlooked by not-so-picturesque apartment houses.  We ate at tiny coffee shops and, the last night, at a trendy, upscale restaurant ("Indigo") under the stars.

We did, in other words, the expected tourist things.

And, of course, we cheered Juliana as she emerged from the Bombay heat and smog, crossing the finish line at just over five hours running time -- exhausted, but all grins, laughs and hugs. 

Marthon finish line with
Victoria Terminus in background

My traveling this very long distance for a very short stay almost didn't happen.  It sounded embarrassingly silly, and probably was.  But it was a great experience, and I loved every minute.  I wouldn't say that a return to Bombay (Mumbai), in itself, is high on my to-do list, but certainly a return to India is.  It's an exciting country, still "exotic" and a bit mysterious to a simple guy from the Northwest Corner, but also a country emerging into the 21st century.

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2-1-13: Since writing the above, I've happened upon the following interesting quote:

"'You must not run down the Mogul Empire,' he [André Malraux] said and then rapidly outlined how Akbar the Great [proved to be] a universalist in the manner of the French Revolution; ... and how this explained why the Muslims made a great civilization in India and the British never did, comparing the Mogul cities like Agra, Delhi and Lahore with the Anglo-Indian Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, which he described as 'transplanted British building suffocated by bidonvilles [i.e., slums].

--Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here [discussing an interview with Malraux in 1974]. Both Malraux and Chatwin were notably opinionated. Whether you prefer the Mogul or the Anglo-Indian cities seems mostly a question of personal taste.