At 1:45am, I arrived at Mumbai airport, and was driven to my new apartment to get some sleep.

At 4am, the explosions started.

Most were off in the distance, but every few were powerful enough to shake my third story bed. I remember thinking “I don’t know what I’ve just gotten myself into, but it’s gonna make some awesome comics.”

I learned hours later that I had arrived on Diwali, an Indian holiday celebrated with firecrackers loud enough to make a fine mist of dust fall from the rooftops of nearby apartment buildings.

I’ll start with the pleasantries, since my mother reads this. I live in a nice, modern room in a walled in apartment complex. My meals are all included, via the building’s room service with 50+ vegetarian options, my laundry and cleaning are taken care of by the housekeeping service, and I have a car and a driver to take me to work and wherever else I wish to go. I spend my mornings between the pool and health club before dropping in for fresh fruit and such at the breakfast buffet.

But of course, none of that is what I’m excited about.

This isn’t the big city livin’ I thought I was getting into. I remember driving through the slums of Metro Mumbai en route from the airport, thinking about how I might be a little disappointed when we drove out of there and arrived in a city like every other one I’ve been to.

But we never arrived there.

My inkling that this was like no plce I’ve ever lived before came when I woke up to a sunrise over the mountains outside my window. After I put on my glasses, though, I noticed that all over the mountain where dozens of men from the shanty village squatting in the grass, leaves in hand, to do their morning business while wild boars ran around them unnoticed.

Imagine an entire town made up of clay, corrugated aluminum, and garbage. With the occasional residential district made up of burlap and sticks. This is where we arrived. This is where I live.

Every street is a bustling blend of traffic from all directions, including all four diagonals. And by “traffic”, I mean cars, buggies, people, small children lighting off explosives, and goats. At one point, I saw a pair of conjoined twin dogs standing in the middle of a busy intersection, each dog trying to walk in a different direction while cars honked and sped around them.

But everyone seems busy, content, and take no note of me as I wander about. This isn’t the touristy poor areas I’ve been to, where people have made a living out of begging. Everyone here has merely settled into a simpler life. After all, this is a place where all it takes is a plank of wood to lay across a ditch, a milkcrate on top for customers to sit on, and a pair of scissors, and you’ve opened a barber shop. Everyone is an entrepeneur.

I got lost during my first day here, and asked a taxi driver to take me home, except I didn’t have the address. Eventually I had a team of 12 cabbies and two worried passersby on cell phones, asking local businesses, trying to find my home for me. They found out where it was, and four of them piled into one taxi to navigate me home. When I got out my wallet to leave a huge tip, they all insisted there was no charge.

This adventure is going to be like none I’ve ever been on before. Im not in a westernized city with easy access to McDonalds, and I’m not in a tourist town. I’m in the thick of it. And I love it.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 at 4:49 am and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.