Mumbai

Four Taxis to Dinner In Mumbai

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In Mumbai one night it was so ludicrous we just had to laugh…afterward.

Taxi number one only got us to the end of our street before Bob, realizing the driver didn’t know where the hell to go, jumped out of the car.

Taxi number two was an old old man that had to stop three times to get directions to Tamarind St. (Less than two kilometers away.) Each time he would say oh yes-like finally he knew just where to go-just enough reaction to be encouraging. He really had no idea where he was going but knew we wanted to eat so he took us right to a good restaurant across from Victoria Station…McDonalds! Oh my god, look where he brought us, I groaned. We paid him and got out.

Then Bob went from taxi to taxi on the street asking if any of the drivers knew where Tamarind St. or Meadows House or if they knew of the restaurant named Ankur. Taxi driver number three insisted he knew where he was going and drove around until we realized we were right back where we started-exactly one-half block from our hotel! In frustration we got out and left the taxi driver sitting there. “I don’t know what he was thinking,” Bob said in exasperation…”what did he think was going to eventually happen?” Maybe a miracle,” I suggested?

Then another driver said he could get us there…ok…one more time. The fourth time worked. I counted 11 people attending 8-10 tables. Tells you something about wages in India.

Our Mumbai Neighborhood

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We watch India swirling with life on the street below our hotel window on the Colaba Causeway-the stretch of land that the English filled the Bay with that turned Bombay, now called Mumbai, from an Island into a peninsula. I love to watch the pretty (little children always are) school children in their clean ironed uniforms pour out of the building across the streeet at 3pm into loving care of parents who come to meet them helping carry away their florescent pink water bottles and blue backpacks like young school children everywhere.

The trim, graceful garbage lady in a dirty grey sari collects garbage out of the street at 7am in the morning with two pieces of cardboard and a green plastic tub…by evening the street gutter is full of garbage again. We are staying at an intersection of two streets and the woman cleans one street but not the other…one street must be her street…maybe she is paid by the private school so the parents don’t have to walk through the litter.

After four days the beggars know we won’t give them anything so they leave us alone…we have become part of the community of taxi drivers, fruit vendors, shop sellers, security guards and street cleaners. One pretty little beggar-woman carrying a baby looked up at me and asked where I was from…America I said…oh, she said with a sad face, I saw the plane that went into the big building on TV…are you afraid in America…

Migrants & Beggars In India

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Continuing our taxi tour with Asane, he takes us to a part of Mumbai where we will see many migrants and beggars…and the red light district.

As is happening all over the third world, migrants from rural areas make their way to urban areas hoping to better their lives. It almost never happens. Instead they squat on any little piece of ground they can find, even the road medians, and throw up tiny little huts made of found pieces of burlap and plastic. Soon, in desperation, the red light district sadly appears and now the city doesn�t know what to do with the people. Many become beggars.-many prostitutes.

Beggars
There is no developed government-sponsored social service system in India, however, the various religions all have societies (at least in large urban areas) that regularly give out money (additional rupees for each child) food and clothing, according to Asane the driver who is giving us a tour of the city. Women can make even more money by having 8-10-15 children who can all work the tourists so they are not interested in birth control. They do not want food-they want money.

There is a shortage of coins circulating in India because of the beggars so banks will buy the coins from the women and give them 10 rupees extra. But when Bob went to the Bank of India to get coins because businesses usually want as near to exact change as possible, he was told they could not make change for him. It�s mostly pretty little tribal women-usually very small, fine-boned migrants from the country with very bright colored saris who have learned to give those pitiful looks that become �professional� beggars. A trained girl of about four will follow you for about a block and a half (her neighborhood giving you �that look� and if she doesn�t score then will give up and turn back to her mother.

The local “CityInfo” tourist guide says not to give money but food instead so I try to keep food in my backpack. Mike, my son Greg�s friend who spent 5 months in India says just to give them the old �flick-of-the-wrist (get away) routine.

But the excellent novel about four people in India I am reading called “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry depicts a Beggarmaster who protects (owns) any pavement dweller who will pay him 100 rupees per week. For this the “beggar” gets protection from the police, freedom from the sweeps that will send them to the gravel pits and ditches, clothes, begging space, food and special things like bandages or crutches…” Lonely Planet says stories like this are common but many have no basis in fact. So who knows…probably every beggar has a different story.

When Bob asked Asane if he gives to beggars, he says he gives to real beggars like the old man with no legs or no arms who cannot work and has no other way to support himself. When asked what we should do about beggars, Asane said that when it comes down to it, it is a matter of each particular situation and what your heart says to do at that moment…probably wise counsel.

Asane’s Taxi Tour

Posted on by Laughingnomad

In Mumbai, we took a three-hour government sponsored tour in an Indian-made Ambassador car with “Indian A/C” which is a fan that sits on the dashboard. While we were waiting for Bob to run back to the hotel for the camera, Asane explained a bit about the Hindu ceremony (puja) that was taking place at a covered altar at the edge of the parking lot of the tour company a few feet away.

Asane is Catholic and he pays a fee for his children to go to school. His wife is a teacher but he says he forbids her to work because “who will stay home with the children?” Later he explained that his extended family (3 families) all live in housing joined together. I thought to myself that there was possibility here of shared child care but I did not ask.

I told Asane that I have practiced traditional meditation many years and then he wanted to know if I knew Rajneesh! Oh no, I said! But he was in my state, I said, and then asked him if the papers here made a big deal about the Rajneesh in India. Yes, he said, he was very rich and not a very good man and India ran him out of the country! Yes, I said, Oregon did too. Even though Rajneesh is dead, his ashes are kept at the Osho Commune International that is still doing a big business of running expensive meditation courses and New Age techniques about 4 hours away by train in Pone (Poona). Lonely Planet says that order to meditate at the commune you must fill out an application form, “prove HIV-negative by an on-the spot test and buy 3 swanky tunics…”

Open Air Laundry
Asane says we won’t see this anywhere else in the world! Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat is an open air laundry where some 5000 dhobi-wallahs use rows of troughs and giant concrete tubs of water that stretch as far as the eye can see to soak, scrub and beat the heck out of thousands of pieces of soiled clothes. The dhobi-wallahs pick up the clothes in the morning and at the end of the day deliver them on their handcarts to their owners. The laundry is over 100 years old and each dhobi-wallah owns his own business-renting his four foot by eight foot tub from the government that provides clean water every morning and that by evening is fllthy dirty.

Terrorism
We asked Asane whether he thought there would be war between Pakistan and Kashmir. He said “no, otherwise we are finish. After war we don’t have business!” Pakistan wants Kashmir, he says, because it is the most beautiful place in India and lots of tourists bring in a lot of money.

Then Bob asked him what he thought of America being in Afghanistan. He said that it was a good thing for America to be stopping terrorism everywhere-that small countries cannot defend themselves in the face of this kind of threat, although there was a scathing editorial against the “New Imperialism” and “Bellicose Bush” in the next day’s India Times newspaper. Asane asked Bob if people in America were afraid of more terrorism. Not surprisingly Bob and I gave opposite answers-he saying that everyone was very afraid and I said that people were going about their business as usual even though they knew there would be a good chance of another attack.

Jain Festival
Asane took us to a local festival at a Jain Temple. The Jains believe that only by achieving complete purity of the soul can one attain liberation and that fundamental to the right behavior is ahimsa (nonviolence) in thought and in deed. They are strict vegetarians; everyone in the temple wore a cloth mask when performing their pujas to avoid the risk of breathing in a bug or mosquito. I was particularly touched by a young boy of about 14 and his younger brother who was reverently bowing before the puja table wearing a Billabong T-shirt.

Bhuleshwar Bazaars

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Kalbadevi
You would love this area if you don’t mind being scared out of your wits by long lines of honking taxis and motorcycles behind you and worker after worker coming at you from the front with loads of goods on their narrow long handcarts. Then make way for the cows that seem to know where they are going without anyone leading the way but with an absentee owner and maybe a woman with a bucket of food or water nearby. And don’t forget to look down so you don’t step in a hole or into greywater or even urine and spital caused by the use of paan (betelnut, tobacco and other ingredients).

Workers stared at Bob and his camcorder-many didn’t know what to think-others were delighted to see themselves on the digital screen-thanking Bob and shaking his hand. But not the Muslim women.

Bombay Renamed Mumbai

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July 13-18, 2002
India forces you to look beneath the surface of things…there is more here than your eyes see…a midnight ride into the city from the airport in the non-A/C taxi with hot humid squalid air blowing the aroma of grey water and human waste across my face was not my idea of a good time. But we knew it. Expected it. Actually it was not as bad as I thought it would be and as I am writing this on the second day already I don’t notice it. Everyone remarks how cool it is for this time of year in India but after coming from a wintery South Africa it may as well be a tandoori oven.

Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1996. Those that favored the change believe the name, derived from the goddess Mumba who was worshipped by the original Koli inhabitants, reclaims the city’s heritage and signifies it’s emergence from a colonial past. When I asked the taxi driver driving us from the airport which name he uses for the city he said that Mumbai was a new name and “people keep calling it Bombay so I guess we use both names,” he said shrugging-seeming not to care which name his city is called.

Eating In India
A thali dinner (there is no “th” sound in Hindi so it is pronounced t-holly) is a traditional meal on a large round platter that is served with small tin bowls (katoris) around a larger bowl of rice and costs 10-50 rupees ($l.00) or more if it contains meat. It usually consists of a variety of curry vegetable dishes,relishes, papadam, puris or chapatis and rice. Often there is a yogurt raita and rice pudding for dessert. We had thali twice at “The Majestic Hotel,” a plain large dining hall on the Colaba Causeway where we were staying. The restaurant was full of working locals, mostly men, some barefoot, some in pants and shirts and some Hindus and Muslims all in white, some in blue, yellow and white turbans-all who couldn’t keep their eyes off us Westerners. The non English-speaking waiter found the pictures in our Lonely Planet India a wondrous curiosity.

During lunch one day I struck up a conversation with two black African men at the next table. They were from Nigeria but one had gone to school in Madison Wisconsin. I asked if he thought he would ever go back to the States. No, he said, it is so much easier for us to be here…people are so nice…no hassling he said with a knowing look…I get that it is easier to be black in India than in the US.

A Sidewalk Miracle
A few steps down the street at a right angle from the hotel we are tempted by a large group of people eating at night from a pavement stall on the street. Huge thin handmade chapatis called rotis were twirled around in the air by the young chapati-maker and then cooked on a red-hot half-globe shaped grill. The chicken and lamb kabobs, dahl, (pureed split peas), bharta (pureed eggplant), curried lentils sweet and sour tamarind sauce and fresh hot chapatis exploding with flavor on your tongue.

But halfway through our meal a big truck drove up and several men got out and walked over and motioned to our table…table…have table…they said roughly and then stood and watched us intently waiting for their table. At first we refused to give up the table…they were not asking for the table of the Indian family behind us although they did take two of their chairs leaving the mother standing…how silly we Americans are-expecting fairness! What? I can’t believe they want our table…what are we supposed to do with our food…put it on a chair…the sidewalk…what? But the men just kept standing there staring at us…feeling very uncomfortable…so not wanting to be the ugly Americans we give up the table…finally figuring it must not be legal for the restaurant to have the 4 or 5 metal tables on the sidewalk. We gathered up all the little dishes, the chapatis and our water while they threw the table in the truck and took off!

Bob and I just sat there looking at each other for a few seconds…should we take the food to the hotel…no Bob says…so we set the food on a third chair and were proceeding with our meal as best we could when the truck came back with our table and the chairs belonging to the other family. A bureaucratic sidetrack? Now they can say they did their job? I don’t understand I said to the 7 year old boy with his family at the table behind us…what has happened? “A miracle!” he shouted with bright eyes as if he knew exactly what he was talking about!