Over the years, Mumbai, a second home after my marriage, has charmed and frustrated me in equal measure. The drive in yellow cabs that reek of damp skin and onions from airport to home is not a joy ride, but the smiling guard of our housing complex who salutes me and volunteers he is feeling “100 per cent excellent first class” makes it up.
The city always looks better from the outside.
The home of Bollywood and the economic powerhouse of India, Mumbai is too exciting to stay indoors. My 14-year-old niece, who spends her summer holidays in Mumbai every year, suggested a tour of Mumbai in rains this time. And so we hopped in a yellow cab to soak up the sights and sounds of the city.
And yes, every time I curse the taxi or auto driver for his lack of personal hygiene or speed-racer ambitions, I am thankful that he has a meter that actually works. This isn’t the case in Chennai and Delhi, where you will grow a small ulcer trying to convince the driver to take you to your destination without paying double the fare.
We passed giant glittering skyscrapers sitting alongside colonial wrecks stained with pigeon poo. The Gateway of India monument at the water’s edge and the curving arc of Marine Drive caressing the soft shoulder of the Arabian Sea. Way past midnight the pavement pumps to the beat of beggars, bar hoppers and cricket matches, while coconut sellers squat outside the bookstores.
It’s grimy, steamy and bohemian. Its organised chaos has exuberance and optimism, a pride and strong celebration of life. It is a city that dares to be different, but it has the same old poverty.
We passed tin suburbs of slums full of flickering televisions and smouldering mountains of methane-charged garbage; high above them, huge billboards cruelly tease with the treasures of luxury apartments and villas and diamond necklaces.
India’s maximum city is overrun by human beings, stray dogs, crows and pigeons. The combined noise level is deafening. There’s another kind of sound of Mumbai — the chatter between strangers. In which other city can you strike up a conversation about the weather and the state of television with a taxi driver?
But there’s more to it than meets the eye. Mumbai is also a metaphor for striving for the impossible. This attitude is prevalent everywhere you look, whether it’s a young man squeezed in a crowded train or bus pursuing his dreams or a child dancing at a wedding procession, everybody’s grooving to their own beat. The sheer exuberance of a billion individuals and their pantomime of life as it is.
While the old rants of soaring real estate prices and potholes, of inflation and pollution, the short-sighted young is obsessed only with what can be had, by any and all means, in the here and now. Frenetic preoccupation with immediate material gain and self-obsession is strangely unfamiliar to me. Gone are the days with finding beauty in small things – the tattoo of circles on a camel’s rump at Juhu beach, a bright silk sari in a dark slum, a delicate earring glinting by a worn face, and a lotus painted on a truck.
Slightly seedy and slightly Blade Runner, Mumbai smells more of the future than the past — it could be a post apocalyptic world. There are special housing complexes for the survivors of the economic evolution of the city. These self-sufficient biospheres have an individual water supply, power generators, tennis courts, pools, clinics, shops and landscaped gardens.
But the reality is one million people live in a square mile. One-third of the city’s population occupies 95 per cent of its space. The city has the latest cars but traffic snarls limit the average driving speed to less than 10mph.
The garbage is piling up, crime is rising, pollution levels are rising, green spaces are shrinking and the more its borders expand, the more the chaos.
Super-saturated with human beings and their goods, glowing in the evening light, each one of the ancient buildings around us looked like a metaphysical taunt: “If you can solve me, you’ll solve your problem.”
Yes, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
Suparna Dutt D’Cunha is a freelance journalist based in India.
