A month in Mumbai

So, where did April 2015 go, exactly?

It was admittedly with not just a small amount of trepidation that I headed off to India once more. Mumbai was to be the third Indian city I’ve lived in - after unsophisticated, friendly Chennai, and powerful, aggressive Delhi, Mumbai is a different animal again.  Mumbai has only been Mumbai since 1996, but it has an identity of its own quite different to the rest of India. 

Mumbai is the Bollywood capital of India and I’m fortunate enough to be living in swanky Bandra, right in there where the celebs live and on the shores of the Arabian Sea – in fact my hotel room on the 20^th floor overlooks the ocean, with tiny boats bobbing about on the tide and the ubiquitous red kites swooping hugely past my window. This area of Mumbai at least is savvily sophisticated and cosmopolitan. One of my favourite things to do is to walk along Bandra seaway – Hove seafront it may not be but it’s pretty special; the corn sellers and coconut vendors on the rocks; the public doing their laundry; the smells and the oppressive heat of India tempered by the cooling breeze; torpid dogs lounging in the shade; guys selling bhel puri from little carts; all intermingled with the lycra clad power walkers and joggers and loved-up couples sitting in the shade.

Mumbai is such an easy place to live. People are so laid back here it’s as if hassle is  way too much bother – even the tuc-tuc drivers put their meters on for a foreigner like me. Mumbai is justifiably described as he foodie capital of India and you can get pretty much any food here; take for an example the menu at my personal favourite the Palli Village Cafe includes none other than a Quinoa Formation – manna for a healthfood nut like me.

I say you can get pretty much anything, well yes you can as long as it’s not beef. Pro-Hindu President Pranab Mukherjee has banned the sale of meat from cows on religious grounds, which hasn’t gone down that well with the Muslim population, reigniting fears of a replay of the riots of 1992 which saw 900 people die after the destruction of a mosque in a move supported by the Government at the time.

My first weekend in Mumbai saw us embark on a tour around one of the most famous slums in a city that it is renowned for its slums – Dharavi.  This was led by a young guy who used to live in the slums himself and was an utterly fascinating insight into this city within a city, with its myriad interconnected businesses and residential quarter housing half a million people. Depressing it was not, but an eye opener it certainly was.  Everyone in the slum is gainfully employed and the living spaces although cramped, were not in any way squalid.  Dharavi slum is where a huge proportion of Western countries' recyclable waste ends up, from plastic bottles to paint tins.  The plastic is sorted – (pity the poor guys whose job it is to separate the needle bit from the plastic syringes sourced from hospital waste, no gloves worn) and melted down to little plastic nuggets which, depending on the purity, can be worth a fortune.  Paint tins are cleaned and used to make shacks.  Aluminium cans are melted down at ridiculously high temperatures by a man with a huge ladle, no mask, no shoes and inadequate gloves and recast into aluminium bars a bit like gold nuggets, Many of the workers sleep in their workplaces, fumes radiating into their lungs 24/7.  It’s tempting to think that recycling is great for the environment, and who doesn’t feel virtuous as we sling away our old plastic bottles and food cans but in reality it’s a dirty, smelly, polluting business – although a lucrative one.

Dharavi slum is where part of the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was filmed, and if you look carefully in the film you’ll see briefly in the background an early 1980s Space Invader’s machine, the slum’s must-do attraction for the kids; or at least it was when we saw it and at one rupee a pop actually quite pricey.

The opposite side of the slum is given over to housing as well as industries such as pottery and food production.  We watched one strong–armed young lady rolling out endless balls of poppadom dough with a tiny rolling pin and draping the resultant discs over a wicker dome to dry in the sun.  Once she has produced 1kg of these paper-thin poppadoms which takes her about a day, her wage is 100Rs, roughly £1. Apparently a fair bit of Mumbai food is produced in the slums, although it will never say on the wrapper that it’s made in Dharavi, otherwise few people would buy it.  Hopefully some of the food produced is a bit more hygienic than the poppadoms, as the backdrop to the rolling out was a young girl having a poo on the pavement…

She could be forgiven however as there are only two sets of public toilets in Dharavi, which means there is often quite a wait, and costing 2Rs a go, a big wedge out of the poppadom lady’s daily wage.  The slum is massive, but it is not allowed to expand any further by law, which means that the early slum dwellers have much more space, and their houses are far more substantial and roomy than the later arrivals, who basically could lay claim to less and less space.  The slum is more or less full to bursting now so people are now reduced to sleeping on the streets outside.  The Indian Government is calling for the demolition of the slums, to be replaced by tower block housing, and a couple of such blocks were erected a few years ago but proved unpopular when the residents discovered after they had moved in that living in a  tower block, even one that had toilets and a kitchen meant that they had nowhere to carry on their businesses and therefore no income, Add to that a bizarre law in Mumbai which dictates that if one lives in a place long enough – and I mean as few as 10-15 years – you then end up automatically owning it.  Thus it’s not in the landlord’s interest to have tenants stay long term so they basically fail to carry out any repairs.  It’s this which explains the beautiful but sadly neglected and crumbling mansions all around my neighbourhood in Mumbai.

As a complete contrast to the slum, our next stop was the Taj Palace in Colaba, The hotel stands near the Gateway of India and was one of the targets of the Mumbai terrorist attack along with nearby Leopold’s café, a backpackers’ hangout.  People go there, now, to gape at the bullet holes which still dot the walls, but to my mind 2008 is not very long ago and whilst lightning rarely strikes twice, I found the whole place quite sobering. A total of 173 died in the attacks, and I remember the whole thing very clearly.

The third item on our agenda that particular day was Dhobi Ghat, where the men (on one side) and the woman (on the other) wash their clothes in what is a an open air laundry. If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire, it’s where Jamal’s mother is killed.  Seemingly even commercial laundry is washed here at the Ghat with hotel sheets and towels fluttering in the polluted Mumbai breeze.

The other Friday after work we decided to make a trip to swanky Juhu, a beach suburb about 20 minutes north of Bandra. It’s the haunt of celebrities apparently, who often jog along the beach flanked by their minders.  Not that we saw any celebs amongst the throngs on the beach, splashing about in the filthy water and playing endless games of beach cricket. It’s a curious thing about the Indian psyche, as it was a large beach and either end was relatively quiet, but everyone chose to bunch together in the middle.  In a country where personal space is so limited, it must be strange to be on your own.