Which Mumbai?

Is there more than one Mumbai, in India, I mean? I expected mass chaos and was not the least bit disappointed when I didn’t see or experience it. I arrived here in the early afternoon. My checked luggage arrived when I did, almost the caboose on the conveyor, but I’ll take laggard luggage over a no show any day. The airport’s only ATM worked like a charm. Got rupees! The pre-paid taxi line was short and efficient. I was assigned cab 5991, small and black with yellow trim like many of Mumbai’s 40,000 taxis. As I lowered myself into the back seat I noticed a six-inch grayish pipe disappearing beneath the front and back seats where “the hump” would be in an American car. I touched it to see if it would melt the bottom of my hiking boots—slightly warm, but that could’ve been from the hot, muggy ambient air. My driver wasn’t sure where the YWCA was and had the good sense to ask for directions before we left the airport. Things were going far more smoothly than I’d expected.

I assumed our trip to they Y was unfolding at peak driving time, so I planned on it taking about an hour and a half. There was traffic but it was not the logjam of humanity, animals, and vehicles of every size and shape and the cacophony that I’d imagined. In their little black and yellow boxes, the cabbies assert themselves by using their high-pitched horns liberally, a lot like barking Chihuahuas. At one point, when we hit Marine Drive, I had a hunch the driver was lost, and realized he might be very green. I asked if he knew where the YWCA was. After he responded affirmatively, I remembered that it would’ve been better for me to have asked an open-ended question—because culturally-speaking he may not have wanted to disappoint me with the truth. My suspicion was confirmed when he began asking other cabbies for directions. I pulled out my Lonely Planet to point out our destination on its small map. I ended up having a nice tour of Mumbai for only an extra thirty minutes’ drive. To top it all off, there was room for me at the inn, so to speak, and it included dinner, breakfast, a morning paper, water and electricity that worked, cable TV (that worked), and it was immaculate. What a pleasant surprise. The other Mumbai?


Late yesterday afternoon, and again this morning, I took a walk around town. By now I realized how steamy it was. Soon I looked like Michael Jordan at halftime, soaked. As I peered at a red-lipped sun on the façade of a Parsee temple, a man who could have passed for a Persian stopped and asked what I was looking at. I told him the temple. His face radiated pride as he followed my eyes across the street. I knew that Mumbai had a small and shrinking population of Farsis, but suddenly I couldn’t remember what religion they practiced, so I swallowed my pride and asked him. “Zoroastrianism,” he said. “Yes, of course,” I said.

Street scenes: a couple sitting, making garlands out of marigolds, roses, and other flowers. What a shock of color! For a dime street vendors will squeeze the liquid from raw sugar cane and mix it with water. If only they’d used bottled water! Hmmm, how sweet must the milk be from those two dairy cows champing on the spent cane stalks? I was pleased to run into about a half dozen games of cricket underway on a grassy field that reminded me of Washington’s mall. I don’t understand a thing about the game but it really intrigues me.

Around another corner there was an Anglican church dating from the sixteen century, St. Thomas’. Many of those buried there were barristers or military types. I took a seat on a blue eight-inch square cushion perched atop the caned chair, under a whirling ceiling fan. Ah, how good that felt, how quiet and peaceful—in the midst of a city of sixteen million souls. I read the days’ passages, 1 John 2:1-11 and Psalm 90. I’ll be here tomorrow morning.

I was having the hardest time finding a synagogue I’d read about. As the hotel doorman I'd asked about this began gesturing his ignorance, just over his shoulder a sign emblazoned with the word “SYNAGOGUE” written vertically in bold block letters caught my eye. It was an electric blue and white building. Inside, workers were fashioning palm branches to the walls and stringing up the kind of white lights we’re used to seeing at Christmas. They were preparing for Succoth, the Jewish Feast of Booths (see Exodus 23 and Leviticus 23). This is one of the three annual Jewish festivals God commanded. It commemorates God’s provision for the Jewish people as they wandered in the desert for forty years after being freed from Egyptian slavery. I was disappointed that the only Hebrew I could decipher in the place, “YHWH,” the Tetragrammaton, really isn’t even a word. For me, the scramble of Hebrew letters I tried to make sense of was far more chaotic than the Mumbai I was experiencing. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, characterized his country thus, “a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads;” yeah, maybe.