Salaam Bombay!

On 11 May I attended my last meetings at the university. Stepping out of the typically arctic air-conditioned room, I accepted the kindly and slightly embarrassed smiles of a small bunch of colleagues who stood around me. One of them offered me a sultana cracker. "They're delicious," he said. I looked at the packaging. "It's made in Malaysia," I said. "Tastes different from the ones I've had as a kid."

On 12 May noisynotes and I boarded a plane for Mumbai. I read somewhere that most Indians still call it by its old name Bombay. There is more than nostalgia in this, at least that's what I think now that I've seen it for myself. There's a gentleness, a sleepyheadedness in the m's of Mumbai that does not do justice to the city's roaring energies. Not as well as the booming b's in the old name. And this is how I would say it: Bom-m-m-Bay!

We didn't have much time in Bombay, just two half-days. It was the stopover en-route to Udaipur and Jaipur, the two cities in Rajasthan that were the destinations of this holiday. But Bombay surprised me. On the road from the airport to the hotel, I saw big colourful billboards with humorous advertisements in English. And the traffic was crazy but it was not as bad as I feared it would be. (I have been to Hanoi before where the traffic seemed crazier. But don't be disappointed: as you shall see in a later post about the car ride to the airport in Jaipur, for the first time I got to experience the life of a stuntswoman in a car chase scene, and "crazy" and "traffic" conjoin at a new formidable pinnacle!)

I wish that Bombay could be a more walkable city. The guidebook said that the best way to get around is by taxi. There's a good reason for this. We walked from the Prince of Wales museum to Fab India (a wonderful wonderful 4-storey shophouse with all kinds of cotton goods - shirts, kurtas, skirts, tablecloths, curtains, and my personal weakness: cushion covers). That was barely 8 minutes. And it was mildly stressful. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I could not stop thinking about the Singaporean director who lost his legs whilst filming a commercial in India. He was run over on the street.

After Fab India we decided to look for another shop called Bombay Paperie, which apparently sells very nice handmade paper and notebooks. This turned out to be the second voyage that Ulysses shouldn't have made. Walking up and down the same street at least 4 times whilst looking for the right lane to turn into, we became gradually aware that it was getting dark and we might not make it to the shop before closing time. In times like this I wish that noisynotes and I had the telepathic abilities of elves (at least the ones in The Lord of The Rings) but no, we must have been sending each other the wrong signals because we plodded on in single file and we turned into an alley that was lined by photocopying and hardware shops. Along the way I tried not to notice the beggars and the piles of rubbish that a worker seemed to be trundling more junk towards.

When we finally made it to Bombay Paperie it seemed closed. I was going to go up the stairs and check when I saw a huge grey rat, worming around the rubbish that had been shored by the curb. noisynotes also saw the rat. He had turned his back on the shop and was looking at the Bombay Stock Exchange building where armed security guards seemed to be supervising some operation. I took some pictures and we hailed a cab to go to dinner. Here's a picture of the building where the shop is located:


And here's one of the street, looking the other way:


The image of that rat haunted me for the rest of that day.

I saw so many beautiful old buildings in Bombay - but I could not take any pictures because I saw them from a moving car. And those three hours we spent walking on the first afternoon did discourage us from venturing out on foot. Which is a huge pity. In fact, I wished several times that I could just blend in, or become invisible, so as to be able to see the city, to take pictures of buildings and people up close. It reminds me of why I keep going back to Tokyo. And Taipei, too, joins that list.

Apart from the two streetscapes above, my photographs of Bombay are the views of the tourist who is half-entranced by this mad, maddening city, looking at it either behind a protective sheet of glass in a car or in an artificially-cooled room. My hope is that I will be able to return another time and see more of it without the glass. One thing for sure: pretty hand-printed cushion covers await my custom at Fab India.

(view of the esplanade at Nariman Point from hotel room)