Mumbai beach.
That jumble of abandoned boats and scrap wood is actually a squatter's home.
MUMBAI, India – Red lights mean go, stop signs mean very little, and a shake of the head means ‘yes’ – except when it means ‘no.’ Unlearn everything and India will start to make sense.
My first experience in Mumbai was a 4 a.m. ride from the airport in one of the ubiquitous black vintage Pals that ply the streets. Our cabbie actually sped up for the red lights, though I’m not sure where he was in a hurry to get because, as we found out, he had no clue where he was taking us.
After driving around the wrong district of town for a while and asking no less than five people for directions he finally, mostly by accident, ended up at our hotel. He then asked for an extra 100 rupees as a reward for getting lost. Last I heard from him he was still yelling through the doorway at us.
In many ways Mumbai is overwhelming – the streets are gridlocked half-mad scooterrorists, cabbies paid by the honk, and overloaded buses. Despite the traffic, everyone manages to go fast, and directly at you.
The architecture is a riot of styles, from sprawling colonial buildings (you can never have too many gargoyles), to drab socialist-era tenements, and ornate Hindu temples.
Businessmen, laborers, and beggars hurry elbow to elbow down crumbling sidewalks, walking over and around cripples, potholes, and puddles of piss, and the air is thick with humidity and the most wonderful and nauseating smells.
For those without tickets to the big cricket match, you’re guaranteed to find an amateur one around just about every street corner and taking up every garbage-tainted patch of park space. The kids will be happy to let you have a go – prepare to be embarrassed.
Less fun is the shocking poverty, rampant disease, and child labor – yes that 8-year-old child passed out on the train platform sweeps by day and sleeps on the ground and that little girl with the outstretched arms was crippled by her parents to aid her begging.
If you have a question you’ll always get an answer, often wrong but always well-meaning, with that peculiarly Indian head shake.
You’ll have trouble spending more than $3 on a feast and if you’re not eating well, you’re not trying. No one is more fond of and deft with spices than Indians. It’s one of the few places in the world you can go vegetarian and never get bored, but you can find some outstanding meat dishes too (I even tried the brain). You get used to the bad Indian habit of touching with bare hands everything that is to go on your plate and learn to forget the poor hygiene that may lurk behind the touch.
It’s dirty, exhilarating, depressing, and delicious, often at the same time. Once you get swept up in the madness, though, it’s the friendliest, most endearing anarchy you’ll experience.
BOLLYWOOD EXTRA:
Crime-fighting 'stache.
A visit to Mumbai demands taking in a Bollywood flick (and it doesn’t hurt that the theaters are air conditioned) and we picked a doozy. ‘Dum Maaro Dum’ roughly translates to ‘The Avenging Mustache’ and the moral is essentially ‘drugs are bad.’
The director worked hard to ape the style of Guy Ritchie, which is a bit like a baseball slugger patterning himself on Mario Mendoza*. Despite or, most likely, because of this, the movie his hilarious, though not billed as a comedy.
Not for the faint of heart, the movie delves into the dark heart of party town Goa, with plenty of bloody violence, a ‘comical’ interrogation where the mustachioed hero repeatedly sticks the business end of a handgun into the business end of a drug dealer, and, of course, songs, the highlight being a ‘rap’ about law enforcement by the hero, in uniform, reminiscent of the Village People.
It was so inspiring, I kept a fu manchu for the rest of the India trip.
*Baseball's 'Mendoza line,' a .200 average, is named after Mario Mendoza, a career .215 hitter, and denotes serious hitting incompetence.
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