Last week work sent me to Mumbai. In general I've been lucky in my business trips - I was dispatched by the Hindustan Times to cover the first and only TED India years ago, on the Vegas-esque Infosys campus in Mysore; a few months later the paper sent me on a tour of small green-tech towns on the Austrian border - and while Mumbai may have a bit less "foreign" attraction, it is still always a place worth visiting.
Although India has many cities, the world really only knows Mumbai. It's one of those cities - like Paris, like New York - that's come to mean something in the world lexicon of notable places. When I first moved to India, I wanted to stay in Mumbai. Delhi seemed as likely as Sri Lanka.
To prepare for Mumbai, I steeped myself in the literature of bygone Bombay, as rich in places as the city itself. I read "Maximum City" and learned about Sainiks and gangsters, bar girls and Irani bakeries. The heyday of many of these things is past; Mumbai's most notorious gangsters have all moved abroad, where - who knows? - they might live respectable diaspora lives and send their children to fancy American colleges. Bar girls - imagine a time, not too long ago, when the Indian equivalent of strippers wore saris on the job - are likewise a thing of the past. Of Sainiks, the less said the better, considering recent events, and Irani bakeries, I hear, are now few and far between. If India began as an idea in the minds of the British, then Mumbai is a collective imagining, a sort of wiki-city to which multiple people, parties and ethnic groups have contributed some notion of identity. Unlike New York City, which despite its fabled diversity remains strongly segregated, in Mumbai it is impossible to avoid rubbing shoulders with almost all types of humanity. And sometimes more than shoulders, depending on how crowded the train is.
A friend of mine once compared Delhi and Mumbai by saying the following: "Mumbai, unlike Delhi, is a city where positive-sum games are the norm." Another once told me, "In Mumbai, no one cares who your father is, all they care about is if you've made money." Democracy =/= meritocracy, and Mumbai boasts kleptocrats galore, but it also has its share of self-made men and women, which is an ideal that seems to have eluded Delhi. The problem with Mumbai's self-made men and women, however, is a collective dissociation from civic concerns. Mumbai is one city for them and another for its other millions of inhabitants. Everyone knows this. Under a series of ineffective municipal governments, Mumbai has strained, burst and now disintegrated at the seams. Public transport groans beneath human weight, the streets are all but impassable, and public spaces are dirty and barely maintained. Whatever industry blooms in Mumbai does so against a backdrop of civic inadequacy.
And yet it's inescapably glamorous. The taxis of Mumbai are muggy and grimed, their foam seats deflated by hundreds of sweating bodies, but when the tide is turning, you can sometimes smell the ocean. It's a reminder, even in the midst of the most commercial bustle, that nearby there is water, openness, and a broad horizon. And the shopping! I took a taxi through Juhu and gaped like a villager at the shiny glass storefronts, at distant Juhu beach under its patina of sun. Perhaps that's the thing that makes Mumbai lovely to me, its sunlight, which falls down endlessly and covers everything with a glow as bright as lacquer.
I was visiting our Mumbai office, and for lunch I went to an Udipi restaurant where I sat alone with a thin, crispy dosa as long as my table. Regarding the fabulous claim that Mumbai has less lechery; well, I can't verify it. Maybe I was just naive, but I have fond memories of sitting alone in busy restaurants in Manhattan, eating lunch and looking out the window at people who never noticed me. It was dispiriting, sometimes, to feel so transparent. I read stories of girls who got hit on in bookstores and on trains and found it all a bit surprising. In Mumbai, as in Delhi, being a woman alone in a restaurant is a tacit invitation. Even the waiters - especially them! - seem suddenly interested in providing company, if not actual service. There are times when I'm annoyed, but also times when I feel bad for them. That said, there is a difference between occasional lechery and institutional sexism. This difference, tangible, might be what people are talking about.
I couldn't finish my dosa and the waiter asked me three times if I wanted to take the leftovers home with me, as if he couldn't believe that I was about to engage in such flagrant waste.
The next day I tried a Chinese restaurant, where I read all through the meal and nobody disturbed me. There was a quiet peace involved in stepping out of my office and into these tiny restaurants a few doors down. In Delhi, I work in a dusty, undeveloped satellite town known as Film City, sequestered miles from Delhi in another state altogether. When I step outside of that office, there's little to see and nowhere to go. Noida feels less like a city than it does like an afterthought.
On the drive back to my relatives' house in Mumbai, I passed through Dharavi, a slum first introduced to me in "Shantaram." The main character spends several years there as a fugitive, impersonating a doctor. It's a wild, poorly-written but brilliantly-conceived adventure story, and it introduced me to a grittier type of expat life than the one my friends and I - many of us diplomats and foreign correspondents - could ever dream of living. "Shantaram" also harkens to a Mumbai long gone, to a time when foreign exchange was strictly controlled and had to be purchased on the black market and hoarded.
In a job interview four years ago, a newspaper editor asked me what qualified me, an American, to write about India. We were sitting in her office in Mahim, and she said, "what about if we assigned you to write a story on Dharavi?" And I said something about the many small businesses headquartered there. As answers go, it was not terrible, but she was determined not to be impressed. "Well," she said with a sniff, "everyone in Mumbai knows that Dharavi is a hub of industry."
Industries were on wide display as I drove down the main street. "This is the famous slum," the driver told me. "It looks like any other business district from here," I said. And indeed, the line between slum and luxury is one of geography but also one of altitude. Apartments on higher floors cost more money, and pay higher property taxes (although there is an ongoing dispute over how much that tax should be.)
I reached the house and took up the lift up. At the end of the day, there are a million things that make a place feel like home. If I felt that in Mumbai, the credit belongs only partly to the sunshine and the storefronts. It is good to be around people whom you enjoy seeing, in as uncomplicated a fashion as possible, and that is what a family at its best can be. (And if I seem more luke than warm regarding Delhi, well, we all sometimes need a change of scene.)
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