Mumbai is a city of juxtaposition. All of India is, in fact, but nowhere is it
more evident than Mumbai – a metropolitan of (conservatively) 20 million people
crammed onto a peninsula on the west coast of India, resulting in an insane
population density of 30 thousand per square kilometer. Let me just let that
sink in. I am currently situated at the Starbucks (fuck off, I know) in a
pretty huge mall (again, fuck off, I know) in Malad, a suburb of Mumbai proper.
If I were to walk a kilometer in every direction, one after another, to form a
square, I would enclose 30 thousand people.
Thirty, goddamn, thousand people.
When I really think about that, it terrifies my Utah heart.
Anyway, juxtapositions.
This is a city in which the super-rich live and work within spitting
distance (true fact, I’ve seen it) of the super-poor. You can see grand façades of multi-million
dollar shopping malls just behind a shantytown of cardboard and plastic homes.
You can be rudely shoved aside and cut off in a half-hour line for a train
ticket by someone who will then kindly tell you on which platform the train
from Borivali to Churchgate will arrive. You can see squalor with tidiness,
modernity with reserve, and business with absolutely no sense of
punctuality. To me, this is how Mumbai
has been defined. Self-definition, in comparison, is found in another example,
which is how one can be quite literally surrounded by people (see above
paragraph) and be alone.
I like being alone.
Being alone is being self-reliant.
It is liberating and wonderful and, to be honest, completely necessary. Which sounds like something people tell
themselves to justify being alone, I know, but bear with me. I like being alone as in being able to walk
up the canyon or into off the highway, behind a bush to pee and not see anyone. First of all, you can’t do that here;
everyone will see you piss. But, the aloneness in Mumbai is internal. It’s
being in a state of forced adaptability and willingness to forfeit aspects of
yourself – ego, expectations, comfort, toes – to the greater cause. I think that’s why people come back from
these trips, claiming they’ve changed, that their three-month experiences
abroad have reorganized the previous twenty years of information into new,
blog-writing people. I’m determined to
be alone here because this is an alone that I haven’t found anywhere else and
because I’m sure not going to find a bush to go behind.
What I’m really getting at here is that my first week in
Mumbai, which also happens to be the first week of the second half of my Indian
adventure, went well. It’s about a
million times more humid here, which my hair is super psyched about, but my
armpits and between-boob and neck and really everywhere capable of releasing
sweat is not. It threatens to rain most
days, but the real-deal monsoons haven’t hit yet, which is unusual and makes
the days pretty hot. I mentioned earlier
that I’m staying in an area of Mumbai called Malad, about an hour and 40
kilometers north of where you would probably stay in a hotel if you chose to
visit Mumbai.
I’ve been placed at two different hospitals here so far, to
both of which I take a public bus. And I
fucking love it. I wish I could live my
life the way a Mumbai public bus driver lives his, with a perfect mixture of
optimism, skill, and recklessness. Allow
me to elaborate:
A Mumbai public bus driver does not question whether or not
the bus will make it through the intersection before the light switches
red. The bus will always make it,
according to the Mumbai public bus driver, even if the light is already red.
A Mumbai public bus driver sees things in the world that
others just don’t. He doesn’t see a
sidewalk. He sees a continuation of the
road, free to utilize. He doesn’t see a
dense group of people in the road. He
sees the future, what the world would be like if said dense group of people
were not in the road, and he acts upon that vision. Most importantly, a Mumbai
public bus driver doesn’t see two white girls, awkwardly waiting for the bus at
nine in the morning. He sees two
ordinary bus-riding customers waiting for the bus at nine in the morning and
treats them exactly as such, not sparing them the raucous yelling and hand
gesturing and definitely not taking the time to actually come to a complete
stop when they stumble on the bus.
Lastly A Mumbai public bus driver is always content. He is happy to be driving a piece of cold-war
era machinery through the hottest part of the day. He is happy to offer raucous yelling advice
to customers. He is happy to sort of
slow down at bus stops. And he is happy
to be working at a job that most Americans would shit themselves over.
It’s brilliant.
But the hospitals. My
main doctor dude is Dr. Nikhil Datar and is kind of a big deal here. Datar
Nursing Home is home base and where I spent my first week in which I saw seven
plus vaginas. I guess it’s important to
note that Dr. Datar is a gynecologist.
I’ve seen a bunch of cesarean sections and tubal ligations. More blood, essentially. I know that I don’t want to be a gynecologist
or a pediatrician, which I think is an important thing to know.
I will spend the rest of my week at Sanjeevani Hospital,
which is huge in comparison to the small privately owned clinics in Lonavla and
hosts a ton of specialists from phyciatrists to oncology radiologists. It may be because it’s mid-Tuesday-evening,
but I don’t really want to talk about work, so that’s all the hospital stuff
for now.
And just to wrap it up quickly, the rest of my time here can
be summed up by this series of seemingly unrelated words and photographs: World Cup, Gateway of India, beer, trains,
beer, writing, hand washing laundry, rain, beer and paneer hotdog.
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| Me, exuberantly standing in front of the Gateway of India |
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| It just says Mumbai, but it says it in Hindi... |
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| My view every morning |
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| Crawford Market |
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| Marine Drive Off in the distance is Chowpatty Beach |
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| If you can't get the sunset on the Summer solstice, at least you can get a cool effect from the massive amount of air pollution. Aahh, silver lining! |
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| Chowpatty Beach iiiis pretty gross |
Make of that what you will.
