Mumbai Memoirs

WARNING - Long-ish post. If you are looking for the punchline right now - nope, I think the mission bombed. Go figure!

And now on to the verbosity...

The rush to the Bangalore airport was a photo finish – thanks to the traffic and my lapse in judgment of the traffic. Reaching the airport eight minutes before check-in closes, being the last to check-in and gulping down a large rum-and-cola in the little remaining time post-security checks made for a flight that I will remember for a long time. A fairly uneventful flight with the welcome bantering that Indigo pilots are ever wont to – Capt. Krishnan ranted about the absolute stupidity of the Mumbai ATC despite having reached ahead of time and yet having to circle around for thirty minutes.

The thing that strikes first when one sees Mumbai from the air is the sheer size of the city and the blaze of lights that it is. Bangalore is little patches of light with one fairly large patch, but Mumbai is a massive mass of twinkling brightness. The Ganesh Chaturthi season just added a little more character – long strings of blinking colored lights. Even at half-past-eleven the city was still awake. There were buses and cars plying on the road – I even saw a couple of traffic jams.

A little after midnight and past the usual touts at the airport I got into an autorickshaw with a vague idea of my destination and instructions from my aunt on the phone. I have this thing - if the driver thinks you are new to the city then you are setting yourself up for a rip-off and I usually pretend that I am just coming back home. But, surprisingly this wasn’t the case – I wasn’t overcharged and the meter, despite having seen better days about ten years ago wasn’t tampered. And, that was generally the deal with every auto or taxi in Mumbai. These guys have managed to figure out one very important thing – if you refuse a passenger or overcharge them then there are twenty others who are going to be willing to take them to their destination at the standard fare. If an auto or a taxi in Mumbai refuses to come to someplace then that means that he really doesn’t want to go there – no saar-kaali-bar-beku-vonnand-half or meter-mele-extra-kodi-saar. He will not come. Period.

Mumbai is a city that has changed, is changing and will change. It’s changed quite a bit from when I was there four years ago, a lot from when I was there six years ago, and I really can’t connect to the Mumbai that I lived in as a kid for five years from 1992-97. There are just these little slivers that seem to have remained intact from what I have in my memory – my school, the old house, the neighbours and the shop where I used to buy my pencils and notebooks, but there is an enormous amount of new things that have sprouted up.

What is, though clearly, still imprinted in my mind is that sense of urgency that everyone in Mumbai has – everyone is in the process of getting somewhere. Constantly. Only for a moment will you see a man relax with a cup of tea and a cigarette at the street corner before he rushes to work, the housewife smoothen her hair before she continues peeling vegetables in the crowded local train or a college kid taking a second to salivate at a svelte model on a hoarding before running to hang off an overcrowded bus.

The city is crowded and bursting at the seams with more and more people pouring in each day. Everything is scrunched up – right from buildings to people traveling in a local train during peak hour down to the vada inside the pav. It’s a mad fight for space in a city that is spilling over with people. There are people everywhere – swarming and seething and moving around in waves. People and vehicles move around in a strange ballet ducking, skirting and jumping over each other. The bus will just stop for an instant and without the driver blowing the horn the pedestrian move out of the way. Getting off the train just requires you to put yourself reasonably in the line of sight of the door at your station and the crowd will do the rest. Of course, you’d want to carry a can of deodorant with you at all times.

At night, the city doesn’t sleep and a significant portion of it parties – and on Fridays and Saturdays I was told it parties hard. I had the fortune of meeting up with friends from college on Friday night. First at Toto’s in Bandra which I located with Google maps on my phone (have Google maps, will travel) where my friend pointed out the lead guitarist (or was it the drummer?) from Indus Creed. Toto’s is a trippy pub bordering on being psychedelic - it has an old car with bright neon tubes around it hanging off the roof. The bottom of the car doubles up as the roof of the bar off which cocktail glasses hang. The music is ranges from reasonably good to stuff that I don’t care much about. A smallish place which on that Friday night was pretty crowded – there was hardly any place to move around.

After that, we headed off to the Hard Rock Café. Now, I’ve never been to the Hard Rock Café in Bangalore (well, for that matter any Hard Rock Café) – primarily because I don’t see the point in going alone, plans that happen with friends to catch a live performance never work out and people who promise treats at HRC never make good on the promise (yes, I am looking at you, you fat little kid/pig). Despite that, I am quite confident that the crowd in Bangalore can probably never match up to the crowd that was there in Mumbai that night. There were the usual investment banker types, rich-dad-sons, amit_123s(ugh! and double ugh!) and women. Oh…the women – in every size, shape, color and state of skimpiness. Boy, do they know how to dress and they know how to flaunt what their mama (or the cosmetic surgeon) gave them. Drop-dead gorgeous would be an understatement. All this glitz and glamour – my friend swore was nothing extraordinary; it was just another Friday night.

A look-see in Shiro next door was another one of those culture-shocks that I thought I’d probably never see – only just hear about it. Shorter clothes and tipsier women – light years away from the Shiro in Bangalore. The dance floor was full of the incorrigible amit_123s(ugh! and double ugh!) and their brunette/blonde bomb-shells. I was probably the only stereotypical Bangalore-techie in that place that night with a bulky backpack to boot. So, I quietly parked my burning bacon (for the Kannadiga – urkondiro thikka) on the edge of the artificial pool – a little wall about four feet or so high and about eight inches thick. Five minutes later there were three very beautiful women in very short clothes up on that little wall dancing. The desperate software engineer voyeur in me was dying to swivel neck to the left with tongue out and jollu dripping to watch those curves flow ever so smoothly in time with the music – ah…! – but then their hatte-khatte Punjab-de-puttar companions – the smallest about thrice my size and my sense of propriety made me continue gazing at the hundreds of red bulbs hanging off the ceiling on twenty feet long wires. That and what was to come the morning of Sabbath. In the wee hours of Saturday, we walked out of the place and I headed back with the friend to his place. Party scene in Mumbai – check. Actually partying – epic fail. My social ineptness – for the win!

As I write this, I can’t think of a word better than chaos to describe Mumbai in a word. But, it is a controlled organized chaos – if you look long enough carefully, it is a complicated dance that is being danced to an even more complicated tune. Everyone plays his or her part, whatever it might be, and moves on mindful of their own personal agenda – from the auto drivers who scream for ten-seconds at each other on the road for cutting lanes without warning, the poor laborers who sleep in the open leaning shanties made of four sticks and a ragged leaky tarpaulin or the random couples who hook up in pubs and discs to spend that one night together. The Mumbaikar knows that time is money and in the end it is money that speaks - even the BigMan above in his places of worship gets just about the right time from his devotee before he rushes off to get on with his task of finding food, money, love and life in this crazy city.