Bombay

December 9-10 –Bombay

December 7 & 8 were sea days and I think I’ll write one long lengthy blog about life at sea and the various characters we’ve met along the way. We sailed into the harbor of Bombay in early morning, but we had begun to smell it long before we saw it. There is a pall over the city which has the exact same odor as Delhi had last year – a combination of burning cow dung, car pollution and air inversions which don’t allow the aromas to dissipate. You get used to it, but that first whiff told me we were truly in India.

Unfortunately I was under the weather, so Bob went on the tour of Elephanta Island alone. I had so wanted to go since it was one of the places which had impressed Daddy enough to take a few pictures during their stay in Bombay. What was eerie was that they took the tour on the exact same day - December 9th, 1927.

Before any of us could do anything however we were required to meet in the main lounge, at 7am, to have another ‘face-to-face’ – this time with Indian immigration, and to get our shore passes. I returned to bed and Bob set out for the tour.

So Bob now becomes more than the editor of the blog and becomes an entrant as well.

***I was unhappy that Beatrice had to miss an event that had so much meaning to her, but delighted to find only 13 other people on this tour…and an excellent guide. This also meant that our small band would have an entire ferry boat to ourselves for the one hour+ crossing to Elephanta Island. First, we drove to the Gateway of India…a triumphal arch built for the ceremonial visit of King George V…meant to impress the locals, and make the colonialist more self important. But, it wasn’t built in time for the royal visit, and was part of a project that was never completed…so it points in an odd direction. It reminded me of the arch in Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village. I was underwhelmed, but took pictures.

We waded through hawkers, beggars, and pigeons, around the arch and down wide stone steps to the ferry landing. Our boat was tied outboard to two others, and we had to cross each and jump from boat-to-boat. Quite an adventure with my eyesight, and I would have been very worried about Beatrice’s knee.

We gathered on the open top deck for a very pleasant trip across the busy harbor. We passed an Indian Navy base, with a motley assortment of hand-me-down former US, British, and Russian ships…and a former British Aircraft Carrier. There were many oil and LNG tankers, freighters and container ships in the busy commercial harbor. Our guide regaled us with Indian history and culture, and stories of her family life…her sister lives in Austin, Texas.

We arrived at an old stone pier that extends about a half mile out from shore. Climbing the wet, broken stone steps was another adventure. We boarded a small diesel train, which ran on wooden tracks, for the slow, noisy trip to shore. There was a small ‘village’ of shops reserved for very polite vendors who must live on the island. But we were constantly followed by very aggressive old ladies with large parcels, or pots, on their heads begging us to take their picture. Of course, this will cost you ‘one dolla’…we had been warned. There were many small restaurants and shops around the entrance to the park.

Through an arch, we were faced with a very steep ascent, up about 125 wide stone steps. At first it looks easy…two steps and a wide flat spot, then more of the same…then it gets gradually steeper, and 8-10 steps at a time. You are given the choice to walk, or be carried up in a “maharaja chair” by four men (about us$12 rt). Of course the people who chose the chair weighed at least 250 pounds! One woman must have weighed almost 300 pounds, and refused to tip extra for the half dead lifters…embarrassing.

There were vendor stalls on both sides…some aggressive, some not at all. Beatrice would have loved all this color and excitement, but her knee would have been severely challenged. What great photos I could have gotten of her in the “Maharajah Chair”!

We had been warned that we would be accosted by monkeys looking for food or handouts when we reached the top…but earlier tourists must have satisfied them today, because the docile monkeys just sat and watched us.

There never were elephants here at these caves. The invading Portuguese found two statues of elephants (now in a museum) at the entrance to this Hindu temple site, and gave it that name in the 1600’s. The temple was created, in the large natural caves, in the 5th and sixth centuries AD. Many huge statues of the Hindu Gods were carved into the solid rock inside the caves. Many columns were added to create the temple effect, but they are for decoration and religious meaning, and are not needed to support the cave roof.

We spent about another hour exploring all the cave entrances, carved statuary (sort of like the Catholic “Stations of the Cross”), and learning about Hinduism and its place in Indian history 1500 years ago. Now it was time to head back down the hill. The day had gotten quite a bit warmer and more humid, and we were all feeling the effects. The corpulent (not all from our group) lined up for their ‘chairs’, and I started down slowly. The edges of the individual steps were very hard to distinguish, and it would have been very easy to fall. Concentrating on my path, I was able to ignore all hawkers. We repeated our ‘toonerville trolley’ ride to the end of the pier, and re-uboarded our private ferry. Only three of us braved the intense sun on the upper deck for the return…thank you Mr. Tilley for my fabulous hats! Back to the Gateway of India, and onto our air conditioned bus. A Becks beer was calling me, and I couldn’t wait to tell Beatrice about the whole adventure.*****

The next day, Thursday the 10th we had a ‘City Highlights’ tour of the city and I was damned if I was going to miss it, so off we went with a wonderful Indian guide – a sensible, knowledgeable woman who herself was a Zoroastrian, and had lived in New Jersey, so that she had the American idioms and humor to match. As our bus left the protected terminal area you were hit with the hustle and bustle of big city India: people sleeping, defecating, bathing or shaving on the sidewalks; cars playing a vicious game of bumper car while trying to avoid hitting vendors pulling carts, women carrying goods on their heads or business men ducking between cars to get to the office. Our bus drove us into the heart of what would have been British Bombay where the large Victorian edifices all look a wee bit the sadder with wear and tear, pollution and very little maintenance. You can imagine the wide avenues, the genteel atmosphere… but one needs a very rich imagination. While current day India has tried to erase the time of the British Raj by changing its name to Mumbai, renaming all British edifices with an appropriate Indian moniker, and removing all signs of Queen Victoria, you know that without the British the city would have had a very different look.

A city of over 60 million simply is beyond comprehension. How any government could manage this city is beyond me. How does one begin to explain, understand, or reconcile the dichotomy between the world of trendy high fashion malls, Bollywood, thriving businessmen and blue jean clad young people …and that other world of cardboard and tar paper slums, naked beggars, tiffin wallahs and the dhobi ghats . It just plain astounds me. It would appear to be working and our guide assured us that crime is fairly low while everything was improving – but it is such a fragile ecosystem that I’m not sure how long it can work. How long will the poor live with these discrepancies? It is one thing to be dirt-poor farmer in a remote village where one can sustain oneself and quite another to try and live amidst the harsh chaos that is Bombay. Somewhere there is a new Gandhi lurking who is waiting to overthrow not the British Raj, but the corrupt Indian government and the nouveau riche living in their protected gated communities. We kept hearing platitudes that the Hindu religion made everyone more understanding, that education would provide a new path - maybe. Time will tell.

Our city tour was meant to give us an over-view of this amazing city and it did a fine job. We had photo stops at the old Victoria Terminus (renamed), the Post Office and the many old British government buildings that have been turned to many different purposes. We passed wonderful old buildings with ornate jalousies and balconies which we could imagine as once elegant hotels or apartments, but now rundown pathetic structures. It seems that rent control and the inability to move people encourages the landlords to simply allow them to crumble. We drove along the Queens Road(renamed Marine Drive) looking out to the Arabian Sea, over the heads of homeless people sleeping on the beach, and pigeon squares where the ‘flying rats’ are fed in gated enclosures measuring twelve feet by six feet. (Imagine trying to cage New York’s pigeons into lovely little areas…right )

As we drove along the water front we passed a series of large parking lots, which had been transformed into gaudy gold-bedecked sugar-candy coated structures in glistening white, which serve as wedding venues for those with enough money to afford them. In a culture where one may have to entertain hundreds of people at a wedding, these temporary Disney-world spaces stood in sharp contrast to the grimy world around them.

Our first real stop was the famous dhobi ghat, where thousands of pieces of clothing are sent everyday from hotels, restaurants and private homes to be washed, dried and ironed by laundry wallahs. These wallahs - each in a square, cement space - stand in knee high filthy water, washing, pummeling and whacking laundry, hanging it on lines to air dry, and ultimately returning them to the appropriate owner. Astounding!! If you had clothes you cared about, they probably wouldn’t be sent here since they would simply disintegrate from the thoroughness of the cleaning process. This appears to be a prized profession that has existed for years and yes, laundry come out crystal clean.(But what do you do if you’re missing a sock?) This is a true tourist highlight, and we gawked at it in wonder. This one ghat runs along a primary train station and appears to go on for blocks. It was most colorful with all the many colored laundry drying on the tin roofs above the washing ‘tubs’. I could have watched for a lot longer but the persistent hawkers pushing jewelry, peacock fans , laminated maps of the world and postcards drove us back to our air-conditioned bus.

I kept snapping pictures out the window – be it the advertisement for opticians who will remove squint, McDonalds which sells not Big Mac’s but Maharajah burgers, the two-toned red and black fiat taxi’s which are held together by bailing wire and gum, trucks (“goods carriers”)with elaborate gaudy designs above the cab windows, street markets with wonderful piles of fruit and shoppers getting food for lunch or dinner. This city is so alive that despite its chaos, dirt and poverty, it charms me to no end. I would love to come back for awhile to really explore.

Our next stop was Mani Bhavan, the house where Gandhi lived, which is now a memorial to his life. It is a true shrine where the ground floor serves as a library showing books he owned or was influenced by, the first floor with a wonderful array of documents and photographs telling his story, and the top floor with doll-like figures showing critical events in his life. The top floor also had his perfectly preserved living & working space and terrace. He was an astounding man, and I have to do a lot more reading about him. There was a quote from Einstein which read:

“A leader of his people unsupported by any outside authority; a politician whose success rests not upon craft nor mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality; a victorious fighter who has always scorned the use of force; a man of wisdom and humility, armed with resolve and inflexible consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the uplifting of his people and the betterment of their lot; a man who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being,and thus at all times risen superior. Generations to come…will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon the earth.”

Somewhat subdued we returned to the bus and climbed to the top of Malabar Hill, the very wealthy part of Bombay, where the owners in their high rises and estates can look down on the city. There was a visit to the Jain Temple and then we went to the Hanging Gardens. This is a large open garden built on top of a water reservoir, where neat, orderly garden beds are laid out, topiary of all manner of animal is carefully tended and incongruous penguin sculptures dot the landscape. It is here that the famous Towers of Silence exists. The Zoroastrian religion traditionally believes that people should not be buried or cremated. Instead their bodies were laid out in one of the four towers where vultures plucked the bodies bare and then the bones were allowed to disintegrate. Unfortunately the vulture population has been hit by disease, people’s delicate senses have been offended, and now only two towers continue to exist. The corpses are now treated with chemicals, and sun-focusing optical devices. At Daddy’s time he spoke of seeing the vultures overhead, but then as now no tourists were allowed to enter these protected religious areas. The gardens had been designed by a prominent Zoroastrian (whose statue we had seen opposite Victoria Terminus) because the neighbors had been upset by the ‘leavings’ of the vultures, and these beautiful gardens soothed them and provided a place to stroll.

As we started back to the main part of Bombay it was lunch time and we passed a few Tiffin wallahs on their bicycles, wearing their signature white Nehru caps, as they delivered hot lunch meals. This is an amazing process. It appears that many workers in the city either can’t or don’t want to ‘eat out’ at lunch. (Religious issues, financial issues etc) They want a true home cooked meal. To accommodate this, the tiffin wallahs exist. Hundreds of these illiterate, but energetic men go to the various homes where the devoted wife or mother has created a multi-course hot meal. The meals are picked up and the wallah puts them on trains which then return to the heart of the city, to Churchgate Railway Station ,where the thousands of meal boxes are re-sorted and handed off like a relay to other tiffin wallahs who iare responsible for a particular building or neighborhood where they will deliver the meals to the appropriate individual, in the appropriate high rise establishment. There are over 250,000 such wallahs in the Bombay area, each responsible for between 10-20 individuals. Through a defined set of symbols, characters and colors, which defines source and destination, each tiffin hot meal container is sorted by the wallahs who with unerring perfection deliver the meal to the appropriate person with 100% accuracy. The only time this system doesn’t work is if the trains are not running – sort of like the postman. This elaborate process has been tried in other cities but has not been successful since the train infrastructure is critical to its success. After lunch, the entire process is repeated…in reverse!!

These wallahs are part of a union and have been studied by business schools to understand how they can be so successful.

Our last stop was the Prince of Wales Museum, opened in 1923 and built to commemorate King George V’s royal visit to India. Its name has been changed to a very long multi-syllabic Indian name, but the building is distinctly British. Inside we took an audio tour to learn more about the many artifacts of India’s history, including statuary of many of the gods, and beautiful miniature paintings. At this point it was in the 90’s and the museum while shady was not air conditioned so we truly gave it a cursory look before heading back to the bus. Then we drove for a photo-op to the Taj Hotel …still closed and under restoration after last year’s bombings, the Gate of India, and back to the boat for a well-deserved beer…and showers.

This is a magical city and I will come back. I want to wander its streets, poke into its markets, eat in its restaurants and spend more time getting to understand it.