My Mumbai
Sunday, November 6th, 2005
Tales from the Train:
People often scoff at me for refusing to research places before I go there. At best, it’s seen by people who know me as a “silly Ryan thing”. At worst, it’s seen by new people I meet as “not caring enough to research the culture you’re moving into.”
But I’ll tell you what.
Everything I’ve ever researched about a place before I arrived, or what friends have taken upon themselves to research on my behalf, has been wrong.
Everyone I know who thought I was silly for not knowing anything about Mumbai (example: that image above is the first map of Mumbai I’ve seen, and I just downloaded it to write silly things on it for y’all) did their own research, and told me what they’d learned, while I tried to cover my ears. I was told that Mumbai was the New York of India. Big city livin’. Swimming pools, moviestars.
Well yesterday and today I took the train into the city. Let me rephrase that. I took The Train. I need to say that as a title, not a description, because The Train is a thing of beauty. The old, decrepit piece of machinery fires in a straight line, North to South, often so full that it’s not like Japanese subway cars, which get so full they have pushers to shove people in, here, at each doorway are 7 or 8 people hanging OUT of the train as it rockets over rough terrain, bridges, rivers and the like. Some are lucky enough to have one arm in the car, some can only hang for dear life onto the paper thin crease where the top and side of the train are welded together.
It turns out I actually paid for a first class ticket ($1.50) but there’s no way I was gonna go sit alone in first class when the cool kids were in the sardine roller coaster.
The neighborhoods I rocketed through with the wind in my hair and traffic lights whizzing past my head ranged from trash back villages (for those who could afford to live in the high end burlap villages near my place) all the way up to the fancier villages made out of old billboards. And when I say trash bag village, I’m not talking about just a row of temporary dwellings, like when you see cardboard boxes in a big city alley, these are full fledged communities, with trash bag restaurants, stores, temples, and a park (garbage filled field) where children fly kites made out of egg cartons and trash bags. They stretched for a while, with main roads, side streets, and looked like generations had been brought up there.
It was on odd mix of low tech vs high tech when I noticed that if I looked at my cell phone, the screen told me which stop was coming up next.
When I arrived at the final stop, Churchgate, home of The Gateway to India, I hadn’t noticed much difference. There were the big tourist hotels, and some beautiful but out-of-place looking old English architecture, but it was no big city livin’. I remember when I was a kid being surprised to hear that in some countries, if you bought a drink on the street, it was served in a plastic bag because they couldn’t afford cups.
At the stands here, they have one glass, and you have to wait for the customer ahead of you to finish drinking out of it.
Luckily, my misguided expectations didn’t take anything away from the experience. I am loving every minute of this.
