Our stomachs sated, we set out for Chharrapati Shivaji Terminus, nee-Victoria Station, the busiest train station in Asia. I’ll post photos as soon as I can – the building is impressive, to say the least. Historian Christopher London puts it well: “the Victoria Terminus is to the British Raj, what the Taj Mahal is to the Mughal empire.” It’s kind of strange, actually, to see this great beacon of neo-Gothic architecture in the middle of India…but the great Subcontinent nation seems to absorb everything into its churning, glorious diversity, even the remnants of its former colonizers. Anyway, our less-than-rested brains didn’t pick up on the fact that we couldn’t circumnavigate the station since it had several busy railways thrusting from one side. But we did begin to get a sense of the jostling, crowded, infinitely interesting nature of the city. People everywhere. Think of throngs a la college football games or the last night of FunFest …except that crowds are omnipresent in Mumbai. And the people are doing things that I thought existed only in the pages of National Geographic: women deftly balancing huge bundles on their head as they weave their ways through the masses, men frying samosas and other savories almost too good to be termed ‘street food,’ other men asking if they can clean out your ears, Indian yuppies yapping away on their shiny cell phones (in a way not unlike their American counterparts), and – hardest to take – beggars, scores of them, whole families living on the street with not much else but a blanket between them. I had never seen poverty like this – and I live in a poor country. Poverty so obvious it’s almost not to be believed, like a smack in the face from a stranger. But this isn’t a silent poverty. You are forced – especially as a foreigner – to interact with it on a daily basis. There are different strategies…the friendly approach (favored by children and teenagers) “Hello! What is your name? Give me some money, please!”, the plaintive stare (used mostly by mothers with a child at their shoulder), the aggressive hounding (which can turn into a pick-pocketing), and, hardest for me to take, the telling of one’s personal history, usually accompanied by a “gift” of some sort – a flower, little sugar beads, or the like. Our first evening in Mumbai, I was overtaken by a little girl who thrust a small garland of jasmine in my hands. She soon began to tell me how she couldn’t go to school because her family was too poor, how she was hungry, how the flowers were only a gift. After a couple of minutes, I relented and tried to hand her a couple of rupee coins, a gesture which she refused, saying that she could only accept food, which was to be found just around the corner. She wouldn’t leave me alone, until I finally had to refuse more firmly than I would have liked and rush away. The thing that really broke my heart was that this little guy, at maybe 7 or 8 years of age, had already learned how to dupe people. The “food stand” that she kept trying to drag me to may well have been a set up for a robbery. After that incident, I did (or tried to, at least) the that most tourists – and Indians, for that matter – do: pretended that the beggars didn’t exist, that I had some sort of shield around me that prevented me from hearing, seeing, or feeling anything toward them. And this, this is perhaps the saddest thing of all.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself here. Back to dinner on the first night. Our lack of sleep, by evening, had begun to catch up with us, so we decided to hit the restaurant next door to our hotel, which just happened to be one of the ex-pat and tourist meccas of Mumbai: The Leopold Café. Unused to Hindi terminology for various dishes, we decided to order the things that we had absolutely no idea what they were, which ended up being a pretty good call. On this night, I began what will likely be a lifelong love affair with Indian food. I plan on writing an entire email/blog entry on the cuisine, but, for now, I’ll suffice to say that Indians make becoming a vegetarian a totally painless proposition. Vegetables and spice and flatbread (naan – oddly enough, this is also the Kyrgyz word for bread…oh the linguistic escapades I’ve uncovered), oh my! Anyway, what we really wanted that night were a few cold beers, and the Leopold Café was more than happy to fulfill this wish. The only hitch was that their “pitchers” were 3-meter-high cylinders that looked a lot more like bongs than beverage receptacles. I should probably mention at this point that we were sitting in the first table, so everyone passing by could see us easily (there being no door, just big open windows and a threshold). Oh, and Gregory David Roberts, the author of the wildly popular (in India, anyway) Shantaram, was sitting at the next table. Needless to say, there was a pretty constant stream of his fans snaking up to his – and by proxy, our – table. We Peace Corps Volunteers, who are usually out of the loop of nearly everything, had no idea who the guy that insisted on keeping his blond braid despite his receding hairline was. Our focus at the time was that our waiter was having trouble reaching our table to bring us our food and drink. We had the last laugh, though, when the very archetype of a Japanese tourist, camera round his neck and floppy fisherman’s hat atop his head, came up to our table and asked not to take a photo with the famous author, but with the table of Americans and their giant beer tower.
Ok, I’ve made it past Day 1 now. More later. I’m starting to realize that my account of my trip to India is going to be considerably longer than I’d anticipated. No matter…things are pretty slow here in snowy Kyrgyzstan. Stay tuned.
Happy (belated) Super/Fat Tuesday!
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