When I Decided to Run Away...: Week 6 and 7ish

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.