Bombay

Praise be: this city has sidewalks!

No, really, Bombay/Mumbai is the best city I’ve been to in India so far. This feels like a world city: huge, vibrant, chaotic, multicultural, historic, beautiful, ugly, fascinating. Riding the trains at night with people hanging off the side, and then jumping from the moving train to the station, is something from a movie. They call this the dream city for a reason.

My mom has now joined me, as of yesterday morning. For the next two weeks we’ll be traveling together, first to Kerala and then to Pondicherry. It’s great to have her here. But I have been less lonely lately in general. A couple days ago I had lunch with Rajit, a friend of a friend of my mom’s, which was really interesting. He’s a software guy who has spent significant time in the states and in Italy. He still comes to NYC a few times a year. His son goes to UCLA. So it was nice to talk to an Indian who was so well-read on the states; he had interesting questions about US politics (Who will the dems run in 2027? How could the republicans block the election of Merrick Garland, and why couldn’t the dems do it in reverse?). I couldn’t answer all his questions.

He was also, as most Indians I met are, optimistic about the future of his own country. From the Westin where we were eating, he gestured to the dozens of towers visible from the window. Almost all of them were built in the last 20 years. The slums, also visible, now house people who are there by choice: they’re waiting for a building to be erected atop their slum, at which point the developer will need to provide them with free apartments to get them to move. In short, things in India are looking up even for the poor. Rajit still can’t bring himself to vote for Modi because of the BJP’s inflammatory rhetoric, but he thinks they’re doing a decent job of developing the country.

The night before I met Rajit, I took the subway up to Bandra West, the hip area north of the historic district where I was staying. Bandra was the most cosmopolitan place I’ve been in India: I saw multiple restaurants serving food from far-flung locales like Malaysia and Thailand (otherwise I’d mostly seen Indian or Western food so far), chic, expensive clothes from indie Indian designers, and even a Magnolia Bakery imported straight from NYC!

I was waiting in a super long line for a dosa at Benne (thanks Pratik for the rec), reading Maximum City to pass the time. A woman asked me what I was reading. We began to talk; Anusha told me that she’s lived in Bandra for three years and Bombay for 20, working as an event planner. Anusha introduced me to a couple of her friends; they all looked very young. They mentioned they’d been staying at a hostel; it wasn’t clear to me whether this meant Anusha had been in a hostel for multiple years. Where did she live in Bandra?

Still, despite my confusion, it was nice to have a tour guide. Anusha took me to a sweets shop, where I had fantastic Indian sweets.

I then caught a rickshaw to the train station, where I took a second-class car all the way back to Fort. I had trouble navigating and was ultimately helped by another friendly local who told me where to transfer.

Prior to Bandra, I went to the famed Elephanta Caves, an hour-long boat ride from Bombay. The highlight was the monumental statue of Shiva’s head. Well, really three heads:

And the day I got to Bombay, Thursday, I mostly puttered around. I did go to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Museum (CSMVM) though, where a free tour guide explained the exhibits to me in detail. I wanted to tip, but he wouldn’t hear of it! He mentioned he was a master’s student in archeology and this was a way of using his degree. The temporary exhibit itself was just fine: it showcased lots of artifacts from the ancient world, from the Indus River civilization, to the Greeks and Romans, to the Chinese and Egyptians. It was unclear what the common thread was until the end of the exhibit, where a display showed these civilizations were linked by various trade routes. Still, the connection felt tenuous: more focus on the overlap would have been nice. On the other hand, a permanent exhibit showcasing sculpture from the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions was very compelling.

A note on naming: I’ve been preferring the name Bombay to Mumbai. I guess it’s contentious, but I read that lots of things have been renamed by the right-wing government of Bombay and India, Bombay being one of those things. Proponents of the renamings claim they are about decolonizing India, choosing native instead of British and Portuguese names. But others say that the new names are often exclusionary, privileging one ethnic group (in the case of Mumbai, the Marathis who are native to the state of Maharashtra) over the cosmopolitan whole. Given the renamings were initiated by the Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist party that has been credibly accused of stoking violence against minorities, it’s hard not to think those opposed to the renamings are onto something.

It’s not really my place to judge, as a foreigner. So this is certainly a weak opinion, weakly held. And perhaps I should refrain from commenting on Indian politics while I’m staying at the Fairmount, a new five-star hotel near the Bombay airport.

The Fairmount is, by the way, extremely nice. This is one perk of having my mom with me: we can go a bit more upscale from time to time. I used the sauna and pool yesterday, and also had a tailor repair a shirt which had lost a button. As always, for those with money, India is a pretty easy place to be.

I’m now off to enjoy a luxury breakfast with a “gorgeous” airport view.