Mumbai and South

Mumbai and South

The heat would be of no surprise to anyone except me. The earlier journey across northern India was done in about the last half of January and the full month of February, 1967. Sweater weather makes a coat fell good at times. October is short sleeve weather in Texas and as I walked across the paved parking lot, looking for my taxi, I certainly knew that I must now be much closer to the equator.

It seems that India society is a stack of managers. Somebody gets to tell an underling what to do and to do it now. Then underling passes the word down. Whether this parallels the cast system, I’ll learn in time but if you want to get a manager grumpy, give him a task and allow him to discover that there is no one beneath him. The buck has rolled down hill and landed in his lap. His people were not to be found. Everyone was on break.

I set my pack in the backseat and gave directions for him to take me to Victoria Terminal, which is the main railway station. Of course, they’ve changed the name since I last arrived there forty years ago but that made no difference as the driver was as old as I and we both remember the earlier name. I lowered the back windows looking for cooler air and the grump, reminding me of Charon, took his seat, glared back at the heat, and we drove along the highway to Mumbai.

I can’t remember when it began but I soon saw that the road wasn’t only a place to travel; it was a place to live. The children played at the edge of the road, the adults took up the space between the curb to about half way across the sidewalk and the remainder was a stall for selling or a shelter for living. Mile after mile there was a solid crowd. The road filled with vehicular traffic just missing each other. The taxis here use LP gas and it has an odor all their own, which mixes with the smells of two walls of people living within speaking distance of each other. They say that if you drink a glass of water in New Orleans that you are the sixth person to drink that water, since the rain fell in the river’s northern catchment near the Canadian border. Each breath I drew I’m sure had been exhaled by a half dozen people. Either that or that LP gas cooked the air before exhausting it. What a difference forty years and a half billion more people make.

In time we drew up at the station. Since it was formally named for Queen Victoria, you see architecture from a time long before this. They built big, rambling, and used the building materials’ color to make the building distinctive. I tipped the driver but I could see that his heart really rested with what intended to say to his charges, if he could find them when he got back to the airport.

No more than I walked into the dark of the building to get directions than a young man approached me to sell his services as interpreter, guide, and baggage handler. I waved him off. The station looked bigger on the inside and was naturally lighted by sunlight. It was also naturally cooled should a breeze blow through the window. Neither system worked worth a damn.

In order to be employed in either the steel industry or for the railway, you must be fluent in English. Cultural diversity is just fine for those peddling on the street but there will be no Tower of Babel when you’ve got an express train or a hot piece of steel coming at you. Now keeping in mind of my imperfect hearing plus my not having heard Indian English spoken to any extent, I could barely make out what anybody said to me. I walked from room to room and not drawing much in the way or assistance or even curiosity. Part of the problem was that it was Sunday afternoon and those (the ticket sellers) who could go home, did. “Tomorrow morning!” And furthermore I was in the wrong of the building. The young man was there again. “No thank you.” I luggage myself up a grand stairway and found some ladies who might rent me a “retiring room.” No deal. You have to have a ticket before “retiring.” I took a look at a retiring room but only from the outside. The door was closed. The window shutter was open. Bars on the window. I’m sure that that is a good idea but the way I saw it would take about a twenty knot wind to stir a breeze inside there. It was hot now and I didn’t expect any cold front moving in before January. That option did not look good. And a hotel room for one hundred ninety-three dollars a night wasn’t all that attractive either. “Sir, may I be of any help.”

The young man, a promoter but the only person in this manmade cavern who seemed interested in being of assistance, explained in clear English what the English speaking railway workers couldn’t get across. No trains until tomorrow morning. I would need a reservation. But that there was a night bus to Goa with sleeping accommodations and he knew the agent. Mumbai had lost its charm. I listened.

To shorten a story of heat and confusion, within an hour, I had a receipt which would act as a ticket which I purchased at a stall across from the Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji. I knew there was a reason I couldn’t remember the name of the railway station. Sale number two began.

Would I like to see the sights before boarding the bus? I had about three hours. I hired a cab and the young English speaker and we were on our way to the Gateway of India. There are times when you travel that you want to see what you’ve already seen and this was one of those times. The great arch, which was built to commemorate a visit by King George V and Queen Mary during the 1920s, was built on transversing arches. The open area around the arch is an area where people gather to socialize and to sell. There were several hundred people there looking for some fresh air and possibly a cool breeze off the bay.

One of the hawkers showed me an odd curio, a pair of egg-shaped pieces of magnetized steel. The huckster matched the polarity of the two “eggs,” tossed them into the air, and caught them. While the eggs were aloft, they reversed polarity and in their turning, they pushed a fraction of an inch apart. Because they now attracted each other, they slammed together and bounced apart a hundred times before you could catch them. This made a buzzing noise that would attract at least my attention. I was not in the buying mode but the novelty was interesting.

The seller wanted me to toss the eggs. I held them but didn’t throw. I didn’t feel I could catch them and if they dropped to the pavement…. In the days to come I’d look back at the why of my feelings. The trick was nothing more than tossing a golf ball a foot and a half in the air but I was sure that I couldn’t do it. But why? I think I was still running on Eastern Standard Time and the LP fumes from my entry into Mumbai.

We drove west across a neck of land to park and walk along a broad walk paralleling the crescent of Back Bay. Lights dot the walk and since it was getting on toward evening, the curve was very pretty and two or three thousand residents and I enjoyed the view and it could be that the air improved here, if not in reality, at least psychologically. We were at the edge the Arabian Sea.

Across the bay stood Malabar Hill which was topped by a park, which next on the things to see. But we made an unscheduled stop by a house where Gandhi stayed from about the time of WWI and the mid thirties. This place, although closed (it was dark now) was like a drink of water. There was no press of people. The street, although narrow, lacked fender to fender traffic. And all the houses along the street were worth looking at. We walked for about a block and then back again on the other side of the street. The houses were not ostentatious but very comfortable. This more than the peak was really a relaxing high point of the evening. There was a Jain temple which was a must and then down to the bus.

I arrived in plenty of time, paid off my guides, and met two Dutch ladies who were backpacking and on their way to Goa and then the bus came and we boarded. The bunks were over the seats and I crawled up (after several attempts, the bus was moving) and stretched out. I’m not sure but I think I awoke at the outskirts of Mumbai.

Part of the deal was that if I wanted to reserve the bunk all to myself, I’d have to pay another twelve or thirteen dollars. Well, nobody else is going to Goa and I went back to sleep. The bus stopped in any village that looked like they might have a passenger but most didn’t. It was new moon dark out there and of course, I couldn’t see any of the country. The guy who served as my fence to keep me from falling out of the bunk climbed up in about an hour. He weighed a little over two hundred fifty and didn’t snore. Then he was gone but only to be replaced by a guy of about three hundred who stayed on for a bunch of miles. I slept a little, climbing down for rest stops. It was odd but I wasn’t drinking water and hadn’t eaten anything in hours but was neither hungry nor thirsty. Sometime during the night I fell asleep; sometime I fell awake. Not restful but I could have slept on rocks.

Then dawn gave shape but no color or detail to trees and building we passed. Traveling at night or over snow covered country is no way to see what a place looks like. With each fifteen minutes I could see a little better. The trees were of a hundred varieties and many covered with vines. It rains here, which is not always the case in other parts of India. There was no rain forest, not because of lack of rain but because of no real forest. The small farms along the road were alive and while the houses looked to be returning to earth, fighting winter cold was not a problem here.

I began to watch the driving, not a relaxing activity. They drive on the left but we drove on the right because we passed everything in front of us. This looked to be a bus driver’s hell, keeping a schedule with trucks, motorbikes, cars, and anything else including busses that could use the road. Coming toward us was a stake bed truck with “Jesus” painted in yard high letters on the forward part of the box which sheltered the bed. I was either in Goa or surely approaching. The traffic became heavier and we made more stops at the villages. The driver called, “Panaji” and I had arrived, more or less. The cabbie took me to Church Square and I made my way to the Hotel Republica.

Bosco, the manager, touted the “English” bathroom (there was a commode rather than a squat toilet,) a shower (no hot water,) and stained glass. For ten bucks a night, how could I say no. Stained glass! No towels, no air conditioning other than a ceiling fan, no toilet paper, and no screens, but stained glass! The beds were rock hard which made the place absolutely perfect and I proved that by sleeping the rest of the day and the night as well. It would be in the heat of the next day that I would make a most unpleasant discovery but that’s another story.
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