Unconfirmed Reports

I arrived at Mumbai airport at about 3 in the morning. I got a taxi from the airport to downtown, and stared out the window at the great, grimy city closing in on me. Airport to downtown Mumbai is a long journey past a series of slums and industrial areas. At 3am, the images passing before me were apolocalyptic: huge rundown buildings, dogs and humans picking though piles of rubbish, more humans sprawled motionless by the sides of the road.

The taxi driver didn’t know where my hotel was, or even the road, so I got him to leave me at the central railway station, then I walked. It took me a few minutes to orient myself to the crude map in my travelguide. I wandered one way then another, walking around the sleeping people, a snarling dog. I watched a cat toy with an injured mouse underneath a streetlight, while two crows looked on greedily. The only people awake were taxi drivers, chatting in a group near the station.

With some difficulty I found the doorway to Hotel Oasis; it was blocked by another sleeping person, a sort of doorman who slept with his body angled across the doorway, so that anyone coming or going would have to wake him. He let me in, and there in reception three more men were sleeping on the floor. They all woke up and stood to attention; I apologised for arriving so late, and was shown to the small, semi-clean cell that I had booked.

The room was hot and stuffy. It had air-conditioning, but the unit hung right over the bed and had green lights and a loud noise, so it was best left off. I felt wired and couldn’t sleep, so I read for a while, then lay for a long time staring up through the window, between buildings, at the heavy sky above. I willed this purple-black fog to get lighter, but it refused, and time seemed to have been switched off altogether. I stared, and willed, and by the time I had reached a sleepless hypnotic state, the first shade of pale blue began to move up the window. The first few beeps and voices sounded below.

Daylight Mumbai grew slowly into a state of mania. For the first couple of hours it was okay: vendors laying out wares, men pensively drinking small cups of tea, cows wandering the streets. But as the day ripened, the humans multiplied unstoppably. The first few beeps of the dawn climbed an exponential curve, and by mid-morning the din was terrible. Eyes-wide and sleep-deprived, I walked through random downtown streets, wanting to stop at every shop, shrine, restaurant, doorway, and find out what was going on. Almost everything was incomprehensible. A woman with a shrine balanced on top of her head came up to me asking for money: I looked at the mad, red-faced god sitting on top of her, at my eye-level, and felt I needed to pay her something because I may never again see a person with a shrine on their head. I saw a pigeon restaurant - a special section of the pavement reserved for pigeons: you can buy seeds and thrown them into the dining area, and they have water-bowls too.

By midday, my own manic energy was waning, while Mumbai’s was still on the rise. Forlorn signs in the middle of the road proposed “Say No to Honking”, and “Silent City, Peaceful City.” But all the vehicles in Mumbai beep continuously, orchestrally. There are no lanes for the traffic, and no obvious road-rules either, so beeping is used as a system of communication between vehicles. Asking them drive without beeping is like asking an Italian to talk with his hands tied together.

I was walking now in the main market area of downtown Mumbai. By this point, I was too detached from my body to know if I was hungry or not; but I really needed to get away from the cars and scooters, just for a few minutes, so I dived into a humble street-corner eatery, dark and aromatic inside. A man pointed me at a table in the corner, then stood in front of me and said something I didn’t understand. The restaurant was quite full: khaki-clad policemen with their paunches and moustaches; other men in white tunics, their heads wrapped also in white cloth. No women, of course. They all seemed to be looking at me, and then finally I understood the man to be saying “veg dhansak”, so I assented to that, and chapati.

The food was amazingly good: a spicy rich vegetable curry, and a subtler, warm aromatic dhal, which I must have ordered without realising. Serendipitous. Near me, in the corner, was a kid wiping down the tin plates as customers finished with them. Something about the way the main waiter kept yelling at him made me think this kid was his son. And the kid kept staring at me, openly, unashamedly, leaving off from wiping his plates, and instead just standing about a metre in front of where I was eating, and watching me. The he’d get yelled at again, and go back to his plates for a while, before forgetting about the plates and going back to staring at me. I tried to smile at him, raise my eyebrows enquiringly, etc, but he didn’t react, just stared.

I didn’t mind the kid staring. I was glad to have provided some fascinating change to his dull round of dish-wiping.

After lunch, more wandering through the crowds and noise. I smoked beedis (small Indian cigarettes) to stay awake, but there wasn’t much keeping me upright. I now regretted having checked out of the Hotel Oasis: there were still five or six hours to survive before I could get on a night-bus and get out of Mumbai. So I kept trudging across town, dogmatic and half-dead. Whenever I interacted with anybody, they seemed to tell me I had to do something, or buy something, or just give them money, or go with them somewhere.

I found a cinema, and tried going to see a movie, but I couldn’t understand how anything worked, and some people shouted at me, so I left. I headed west hoping to hit the beach.

When eventually I found my new oasis, it turned out to be a dirty strip of sand with about 3 bits of shade. Each of them was already full of Indians. But still, this strip of sand enabled me to get about 20 metres away from the traffic noise, and that was my essential goal.

I sat down cross-legged on the sand, and arranged a t-shirt on my head for shade. I looked out at the unappealing bay, and was relieved to be somewhat still, and quiet. But then the children started.

First just a couple of them, cheeky little middle-class Mumbai kids, came over to me and said hello, asked a few questions, wanted to talk about cricket. They were rude and excitable, but I didn’t see any problem here. But soon the two of them became four, then ten, and they all got more and more excited, and louder and then at some point there were twenty of them, shouting at me and laughing. I tried to just ignore them all, respond to nothing, and stare straight ahead; but there was no getting rid of them, they found this too entertaining, and they multiplied still, maybe thirty of them now, and they were shouting more all the time and even beginning to jostle me.

I briefly considered a strategic act of violence, then realised there was nothing for it but to leave. I got up, and shook off the ones who were grabbing on to me; I started walking, and they followed along like a comet tail, laughing and shouting… So I had to leave the beach altogether, and as I walked off the sand and back on to the pavements, the comet tail trailed off, till there were just four, then two, then none, then I was back on my own, back in the streets of Mumbai.

And so I just kept walking, in a bad mood now. There were still people sleeping everywhere, and from the look of their skin and clothes, many of them seemed in a pretty bad way. I wondered how many of them were actually dead. I climbed up a footbridge over a filthy brown railway line, and a man there was sleeping down the steps: his head on one step, and his feet four steps below.

Nothing interested me now - I just wanted the day to end. When I saw some public benches, I lingered hopefully nearby, opportunistic, but they seemed permanently occupied.

There are probably much better things I could have done to pass a long day in Mumbai, but I was too tired to think straight, and instead I reverted to some destructive dogmatic mode. So I stomped exhaustedly around more streets, until finally I got my luggage from the Hotel Oasis, and thankfully by then it was time to catch my bus.

The bus was a much smaller vehicle then I had expected, and it didn’t really seem to be going anywhere. It just sat, driverless, by the side of a narrow street out the back of the stinky poultry market. Me and one other guy were slumped in the darkness of the cabin. But I didn’t care: it was dark, and quiet, and in the dark cabin of a stationary mini-bus, surely no-one could hassle me.