Bargain Hunting

Downtown there is a stretch of stands that sell cheap clothes and knock off brand names (Begle Boy, Abidas, DKMY). It is called Fashion Street, and is long enough to be on my map of Bombay. There are hundreds of stalls lining the street here. And I really do mean hundreds. I bought a shirt there once. When I went in, the guy selling said 350. I don’t know how to bargain, but I knew that price was way too high. So I stood looking sad at how expensive the shirt was for a minute and said “Ok, thanks anyway.” and started slowly turning away. The guy stopped me, No, no, wait. What do you think you should pay? Sad silence. (Because I would say too much, and then I would be stuck paying that. That’s how they trick you.) I just stood regretfully looking at a few of the shirts, poking them and sighing, frowning and not making eye contact, until he said 150. Then I said ok. I figured 150 was within reason. I asked the women at the office what I should have paid, they said 100. But I didn’t feel too bad about that, my self respect can handle a 50% mark up. Just not a 250% mark up.

I wasn’t sure going in what a good price was for the shirt; a mistake I try not to make too often. I usually ask around for prices before trying to buy something at a stall. I like to walk up knowing what I should pay. At a stall near my house, a guy told me the price for some shoes was 50 rupees. That sounded about right, but most people tell me over double what the price actually is. I couldn’t believe that he really told me the real price, but I also couldn’t believe that he exaggerated the price that much and that they were actually supposed to be 20 rupees. So I polled my students. Turns out 50 was fair. It was weird- the guy actually quoted me the real price. He must have seen me walking by over the months and knew I lived around there and therefore probably had access to information from real Indians. Or he was super nice, or honest, in which case I am glad I found him before he went of business.

In one of my early forays into the stalls I bought a couple of purses. One guy said 500 for a purse, which I just found insulting so I didn’t bother to bargain with him. Down the street a woman quoted me 250 for the same purse and 150 for another. I said 300 for both. She agreed immediately, so I knew I had gone too high. Probably should have been 50 each. So I guess you could look at it this way, I paid 50 for each purse, plus 200 rupees for the lesson in bargaining. She was funny too- as I was sifting through the purses, she kept telling me that they were made my local artisans. I was like, oh, uh huh, wow. These must be some really busy “local artisans” because these purses are everywhere. So, local. . . as in made by an Indian factory worker? She must have been asked about the local artisan thing by some white lady so she adopted it into her patter. It was funny.

I went to Aurangabad for a few days to check out some sights there. At one of the sights this shopkeeper was really persistent, followed me up to the touristy stuff and kept telling me how great his stuff was and how nice he is and how he’s going to leave me alone, not like all the other shopkeepers, so I should come to his shop- not to buy, just looking just looking. I kept telling him he should go work one someone else because I wasn’t going to buy anything. I think he had a few people he was following anyway though- I saw him tagging along with a few women, (as I snuck around behind them to escape) trying to get them to buy a stone elephant for 800 rupees. The next day I saw that same elephant for sale in a shop for 50 rupees. Quite a markup.

Mumbai in Pictures Part 2

{I am heading home today! I am excited to be getting back to the US. I have a few more blog posts to put up, which I will put online over the next week. My return journey will take over 24 hours. Two 9hr flights and a 7 hour layover at Heathrow. I should be back in Seattle on Friday! Or Thursday, I forget how the timing works out. Either way, Kenneth has the flight info, so I should have a ride home.}

Why are all these guys standing?

On Friday nights I took the train to get home. I usually got in at around 8pm, about the same time the mosque at the train station held its evening prayers. As I got off the train I’d hear the call to prayer wailing over the loudspeakers. I think that Friday is the day you have to go to the mosque, it’s like their Sunday morning. I would weave my way through the crowd of passengers, moving towards the cry of the prayers, up and down the stairs and out of the station. At the exit there would be a wall of Muslim backs. The men were in rows, all facing east, from the mosque at one end to the ric queue at the other. The mosque is a small one, attached to one end of the station’s ticketing office. They would commandeer the pavement out in front of the train station by rolling out long reed mats, and the faithful would come and line up with their prayer mats. There were usually a lot of cops around too, to make sure there was no trouble, I guess. The first time I saw the whole process it seemed very exotic and foreign to me, with the chanting and the everyone in white kurtas and caps. No women though. I guess the kind of Muslim that people are here doesn’t allow women in the mosque. It seems that one kind does, one kind doesn’t.

(The cops are the guys in beige. It is hard to see how big this all was, but I didn't want to be to obvious about taking pictures.)
My last Sunday at work I took a ric to the station, as usual, but the driver couldn’t get me up to the train station’s drop off point because there was too much traffic. No one could get through the congestion. It was Eid,(rhymes with weed) a Muslim festival. (Right at the end of Ramzan, but I don’t know that the two are related. I guess I could look it up.) There were so many guys there. Oh wow. Like four times as many as I have ever seen at that mosque. And they were all wearing gleaming white clothes and it was early, 8:30 in the morning, so the sun was shining all over, turning them into this bright, clean, snowy mass. -Really, it was more than I was prepared to deal with at the time.

I guess you have to have to have to go to mosque for Eid, so people go to whichever one is closest, and the mosques have to accommodate them because the Muslims have to have to have to go to mosque. So the whole road in front of the station was lined with guys in white praying. It was sort of eerie walking through all the guys praying, like I was intruding, wandering down the aisle at their church while they are trying to have a service. But then, they did set up their church in the middle of the train station’s parkway. I think the Eid service must take about as long as my train journey, because when I got off the train downtown one of the mosques near my station was pouring out guys in white. They were about the only ones around that morning. Just me and the Muslims. They were all in white because everyone is supposed to be equal before God- no signs of wealth. So you have to wear the same white thing as everyone else. But of course some guys had nice embroidery and stuff on their white kurtas. .

I heard that in Egypt someone said that the white clothes thing was a misinterpretation and that you don’t have to wear white, you just have to not be ostentatious. You can wear white if you are able to, but only if you are able to. So there they wear regular clothes to mosque, on principle.

One Friday, when I got home, I walked out of the station through the Muslim prayers while reading a newspaper article about some Jewish festival that had been celebrated by the small but entrenched Jewish community in Bombay. The ric I took home that night had a bunch of Catholic crucifixes plastered all around the dashboard, along with the requisite Hindu deities. As we drove by all the Muslims praying, the driver started blasting Hindi music to drive to. It almost felt like culture shock, but it was more like a bizarre cultural hodgepodge confusion. India is weird. Lots of flavah.

It was like when I asked my friend why we had gone and paid respects at the Hindu mandir, before going to her Sikh place of worship, the Gurudwara. (guru=god, dwar=door) Is she Sikh or Hindu? And, come to think of it, why we had hit a mosque the day before? Pick a religion and stick to it. I kept asking her why she could go to each one, I was trying to figure out if there was some religious overlap or something. She didn’t understand my confusion; she didn’t even get my questions, initially. “What.” she said. “It’s all god.” Oh, ok. That’s cool. She was surprised that in the US, a Jew wouldn’t go to a Protestant church to worship. I don’t know if this bleeding of religious stuff is typical or unusual or how far it goes, but it isn’t just with her. I saw at least some of that blending of cultures and beliefs in other places too. But at the same time, people seem to prefer marriages to take place within the same religious group. (Here I use the word “prefer” to mean anything from an expressed opinion by parents to absolute- no discussion- you are dead to us otherwise- requirement by family.) So there are differences. Recognized, clearly delineated differences. But then there is also deep mutual respect. Except, of course, when the riots happened in the nineties and people of different religions tried to kill each other. And perhaps excepting the occasional bomb blasts. And the fact that when the Muslims pray at the train station, there are cops around. But besides that there really is lots of tolerance. From some people. But there are pockets of crazies. I am still not sure I get it. It’s a complex issue.

I went to a street cobbler! The monsoons disintegrated the glue on the bottom of my birks so I got a cobbler at the train station to repair them. My friend asked him to fix them for me. He said 20 rupees, because he had to sew them, he couldn’t just reglue them. I said, Wow, yeah! That’s like 50 cents! Sweet! She quietly motioned me to shut the hell up, and bargained him down to 15. (I think you need to be brought up with that bargaining instinct.) Then while he sewed them I asked if I could take a picture. He thought that was odd. He gave my friend a “crazy foreigner” look. It is a look I have begun to recognize.

I got tiffin lunches for a week. But the tiffin people decided that it was too much of a pain to come just on the days I was at the downtown office and refused to continue, so I only got it a few times. Then I had to order from yucky restaurants again, until one of my coworkers started letting me order extra food from her mom. Which was a big relief, because the restaurant food was edible, but only just. And it was greasy, real greasy. I am done with Indian restaurants for a long time. I am cool with Indian food, I can eat Indian food til the sacred cows come home, but not restaurant food. But, back to my point, I did get real live tiffin lunches a few times. Hand delivered and everything. In true Indian style, there was lots of food. 2 vegetable dishes, one daal (lentil), rice, chappatis (flatbread) and a buttermilk (which I passed on). All the food came in little metal tiffins lined up in a thermos thing.

This is a group of dabbahwallahs (tiffin carriers) that I saw chilling at the train station after duties. The one dabbahwallah appears to have an issue with his foot.

A Jain birdfeeding station.

Home Sweet Home

The beach near my house during a pretty sunset.

Mumbai in Pictures

Why is this guy pissed off?

The monsoon storms would periodically fill the streets around my apartment building with water. The water would be pretty high for a few hours, before finally draining off. Little waves would ripple out along the street, over the sidewalk and up driveways or to the walls lining the street. During this storm I sat in my apartment hoping to get out of going to work (eventually the water went down and I had to go) and watching people pick their way along the street, off to do the things that couldn’t be put off because of a silly little monsoon. People wading to work, women running errands through the calf high water, girls with their jeans rolled way up off to school. My favorite was the guy biking through all the muck.

The guy in this picture must have had to go to work and was bravely trying not to get too wet. He was walking along the sidewalk so he wouldn’t be in the deeper water at street level. He had been doing ok, but Then he fell shoulder deep through a broken manhole cover into the water, dropping his basket of stuff everywhere. Boy, was he pissed. And I couldn’t believe that someone actually fell into a manhole. That was what everyone kept warning me about after the first flood: Watch out, don’t walk around in the water, you could fall through a manhole. But it sounded like an urban legend- like something that everyone talks about but that doesn’t ever actually happen to anyone. But then it did! I saw it! The kids in my classes later that day were impressed.

The guy was ok. I was wondering if I needed to go down to help him or something when he started moving and pulling himself out and back onto the sidewalk. He looked like he was swearing up a storm though. He gathered up the contents of his basket and loaded everything back onto his head, and started heading back the way he had come. I think he had decided “Screw everything, I am going home.” But then 5 minutes later I saw that he had turned back around and had continued on his way to work. I guess he figured, eh, I am already wet. Can’t do me any harm keep going. Besides, my day already sucks. May as well go to work.

She is cleaning her laundry down by the ocean. Because some people live different here.

Cows are everywhere. I thought, when I first got here, “How nice that people bring these cows into the city to hang out for the day. I wonder where the cow train leaves from, to take them all back home at night. They must like getting out, seeing different things. It is probably hard to get out much, as a cow. I wonder if they prefer the city to the farm where they live. Perhaps it is more exciting for them in the city.” After about a month and a half of having this pleasant idea lodged in my brain, I realized: They live here, in the city. They don’t go home at night. And there are a lot of them in Bombay- and they live pretty much where ever they want to. The cows always have the right of way, in traffic and on the street. People sometimes get killed in accidents, cows don’t. The cows hold a godmother like place in Hinduism, because they are the givers of milk. No hurting cows.

A cow hanging out where ever it likes.

Sometimes someone will try to make a little cash selling grass and cow vitamin pills to people to feed to a cow that they have on the side of the road. So that people can earn Hindu points. (I wonder if I have earned any Hindu points by being vegan, I should check at the karma bank.) This is sort of like the Buddhism vegetarianism thing in Taiwan. You didn’t have to be vegetarian to be a good Buddhist, at least not in the Buddhism practiced in Taiwan. But it is good to be vegetarian. So go be vegetarian for a few days a month. Better to be vegetarian all the time, but if not, better to do it sometimes than not at all. You earn a few Buddhist points for being vegetarian for a few days. And then, I don’t know, you get to buy Reading Railroad or something?

I love how there are farm animals just hanging around this city. This rooster is wandering around the front steps of one of the upscale boutiques in my neighborhood. I don’t think he was buying, just looking.

Horn Ok Please is the phrase written on the back of most large trucks here. They want to remind smaller vehicles that the driver of the large truck may not see them, so honk loud and often so you don’t get squished. (I really don’t know why no one is selling pants with that written across the bum.)

A festival just ended here- because there is always a festival starting, continuing or ending here. I count as strange the nights that I can’t here chanting and drums beats going on somewhere. I can’t tell you the number of times I would be eating supper in my apartment and some procession with guys wailing on drums, music blaring on loud speakers and dancing groups of women and children or guys would be moving down the street outside my window. Well, I guess I can tell you, come to think of it. 6. But that’s, like, a lot. That is 6 more times than it has happened in Seattle. And it is about twice a month. People like to celebrate stuff here.

Navratri was the celebration. This is a shrine to Durga, the powerful goddess who is worshipped during this festival. Nam’s mom sniffed at it and said that the one last year was fancier. How?!!??! How was it fancier? You would have to pass out LSD to the audience to make this shrine look more ornate. Nothing is shinier than this thing. It has all the shiny.

Hanging Gardens

Surprise day off. Gandhi’s Birthday, Oct 2.

I thought I would enjoy my surprise morning off with a walk down by the seashore. So I walked to the Bandstand, the stretch of rocky beach near my house. When I got over to the water, I saw that I had the beach almost to myself. “Hmmm.” I thought “No one else here? Odd. Holiday, middle of the day. And usually there are lots of people around. Hmm. Oh well. Off I go.” I went along, humming and looking at the sun and the water. I started to fan myself with the book I had brought. “Wow, it is hot. Huh, I guess it is almost noon, after all. And there is no shade, just the glare from the water. And, oh, I am a lot closer to the equator than I am in Seattle. The sun is overhead. Oooooooooh. That is why I am alone. I am an idiot.”

I was alone except, of course, for the beggars. A bunch of the beggar moms were doing the washing in the ocean. So there were tons of beggar kids around. I haven’t been begged at so much in one 20 minute period before or since. Hello, money. Hello, money. Money money money, hello. Sorry kids. I only give to the elderly and infirm, and I already have my beggars picked out.

After grabbing an iced coffee by the water, I took the train downtown to see the Hanging Gardens, near Chowpatty Beach and the Gandhi museum. After I got off the train, I walked up along the scenic walkway Marine Drive and through Chowpatty Beach. On the map, it shows a park and the Hanging Gardens just north of the beach. In the guidebook, it says there is a little path up through the park that you take to get to the gardens. However, to the north of the beach I saw no path, only an impassive wall of trees.

So I crossed the street and started walking along the trees to try to find a way in. About 5-10 minutes down the street, I found a little road going up towards the hill, so I gave that a try.

At the end of the road was a staircase. At the top of the staircase was a small temple. Behind the temple was wilderness. No path, only brush. I turned to go back down and try my luck elsewhere, but in the temple was a nice monk who stopped me and asked if I was looking for the Hanging Gardens. When he found that I was indeed looking for the gardens, he came out and walked me to the end of the staircase and motioned me up through the brush. He smiled and nodded and pointed and said “Hanging Gardens!” In the face of all that helpfulness, of course I couldn’t go back down and look for another way. I looked skeptically at the steep hill and all the undergrowth and loose looking rocks, then at my sandals and skirt. Then I smiled, squared my shoulders, gave a thumbs up and started trudging up through the shrubs. I scrambled over a few logs, climbed through a few rocks, fell once and scraped my hand, and, thank god, after a few minutes intersected with the path that I had been looking for. The nice wide paved path. Oh good. I was just glad I didn’t disturb any creepy crawlies on my climb.

At the top of the hill I found the Gardens. They are beautiful! Lots of flowers and shrubs cut into animal shapes. (What is that called? When you cut bushes into shapes? Thing-ary) The hill looks out over the rest of the city on one side and out to sea on the other. Some brave soul managed to eke out this valuable real estate for a public garden. I salute them. This is a must see for anyone who comes to Mumbai.

As I entered the gardens I came across a family taking photos of each other. I pantomimed an offer to take a picture for them with all of them in it, which they appreciated. Then to my surprise they wanted to take a picture with me in it as well. So we all stood together while the dad took our picture. Then they wanted one with me and the toddler, but that was not to be. The toddler was not enthusiastic. She was apparently extremely afraid of the scary looking white lady. Usually the kids here aren’t so freaked out by me. Oh well.

To the north of the gardens you could see lots of birds coasting around in the sky, presumably above the Towers of Silence, the Parsi funeral ground. Parsis don’t bury their dead, they don’t burn them, they put them on the top of tall towers for vultures to eat. The grounds are forbidden to anyone not of the burial sect of the religion. Probably for the best.

There was an article in the New York Times a while back about how the Parsis were protesting the erection of several billboards at the edge of their sacred burial ground. The people who run the grounds said that they weren’t making enough money to cover expenses, so they needed the income from the billboards to keep the funeral grounds going. The other people were like yeah, but c’mon. Sacred Ground. No billboards. I didn’t walk around to see if the billboards were still up, but this being Mumbai, I would guess they are.

I relaxed in the Gardens for a while, then crossed the street to look at the park. There is a beautiful view of “The Queen’s Necklace” from the park: the whole of Marine Drive- from Chowpatty Beach at one end to Nariman Point at the other.

As I was leaving the park a kid yelled Hi! How are you! I waved back, and she followed me to the gate, giggling. I said Hi! How are you? Some moms giggled too, and I waved as I left.

I was relieved to find that I am not an anathema to all small children, even if I am Scary White Lady.

The gardens are in a part of town called Malabar Hill, an extremely expensive place to live, with palatial apartment buildings decked out in marble, stained glass and gilt stuff. As I took in a little of the neighborhood, I came across an empty lot filled with trash and a rickety volleyball court and a broken down car. An empty lot with a view of the sea and the city! Who owns that property? The taxes on it alone must be ridiculous. I stood shaking my head and watching what was probably the most expensive volleyball game I have ever seen (at least in terms of location) for a few minutes before heading off.

I went back down the hill to see Babulnath Mandir. Babul = Acacia trees, which used to grow in the area back in the day. Mandir = Temple. The temple’s entrance was at the bottom of the hill, about where I had started up earlier to get to the Gardens. There was a long uphill approach to the temple, and some smaller shrines lining the road. There was also a cow shed and a place where you could buy grass to feed the cows to earn yourself some Hindu Points. (like at the Jain sanctuary) At the end of the road there was a really long staircase to climb, and a one rupee elevator you could take if you weren’t in the mood for the climb. Up at the very tip top was a pleasant little pavillion with the temple and shrine in the middle of it.

The shrine had a lingam (phallic image of Shiva) but I don’t think the shrine was dedicated particularly to any one god, because there were images of Ganesh (elephant head), and Hanuman (monkey head) and a special shrine to a couple that I couldn’t identify for sure (Rama and Sita?) as well as images of Shiva (blue face). It was all very beautiful.

I asked a guard if I could take some pictures of the outside, and he said that would be ok He cautioned me not to take pictures of the inside and I assured him that I wouldn’t.

As I was walking over to the shrine, a chubby little man walked over to me and introduced himself as N-something-with-four-syllables. I said hi, didn’t introduce myself, and walked past him. I really didn’t want a tour guide on my little walk around the temple. I like to check stuff out myself, even if I do miss out on some of the local history or religious trivia. But he was not to be deterred. . .

He followed me up to the shrine. There was a puja (prayer service) going on, but he started talking anyway, in a regular voice, telling me who all the gods were. A few people turned and stared at him. I gave him a quick smile and nodded curtly to try to make him shut up, but he steamrolled right on ahead. He seemed to be warming to his subject of “Hinduism: a religion and a mythology,” and I was marshalling my arguments for how I hadn’t asked for a tour and why I wasn’t going to pay him, when all of a sudden he steered our one sided conversation off the highway of Hinduism and onto the side street of Why I want to marry an “abroad woman.” Ah ha. Do you now. That is nice. (The pieces fall into place. This must be why the security guard gave me that pitying look when this guy started following me into the temple.) What a coincidence that you want to marry and “abroad woman” -as I am an “abroad woman” who happens to be looking to marry an annoying, pudgy man who bores me by talking about things I am not interested in. I smiled (politely, I hope, not encouragingly) and nodded, and turned away. After a little while he moved to the topic “Do you believe in god?” I didn’t even want to ask whose. I laughed (A la Ms. Crabapple, from “The Simpsons,” I am afraid to say) and said I didn’t want to start talking about religion. He started telling me about how he thinks that as long as you are a good person, you can be a Christian too. He was very serious about all this. He clasped his hands in front and rolled his eyes back so you could see the whites and nodded very slowly and solemnly every time he was being sincere or reverential. He went on for a while about how when you pray to god and you are real in your heart god grants your wish, and about how deeply he believes this. You have to pray in your heart (eye roll, slow nod). I think it is important for me to marry an abroad woman (eye roll, slow nod). You must be very serious in your prayers (eye roll, slow nod, pursed lips, meaningful look). I cut him off and turned to watch the ceremony.

I guess my snubs finally hit home, (I think I may actually have the ability to emanate irritation, this may be one of my superpowers) because eventually he wandered away -presumably off to stalk the next unwitting white lady who was interested in seeing the shrine. Hopefully she brought her boyfriend, or a suitor-poking stick. I wonder where my Lothario wants to get, the US or Europe, or if he cares.

The puja was wonderful to see. Everyone was chanting and clapping their hands. The monks started doing something loud, a couple of guys started ringing bells, and some workmen were banging on the sides of the temple fixing something. It sounded like a thunderstorm. I had to block my ears. The chanting and ringing kept going and going, very intense. I began to wonder when the god was going to show up. At some signal that was lost on me, everyone started parting and the group made a space down the middle. It seemed as though that was the path the god they were waiting for would be coming down. When someone from the back would try to stand in the center, where the path had been made, to see better, someone from the front would wave them off to the side. It went on for about 15 minutes, then the noise got very strong and loud for a few minutes, then it was over. People started walking around a bit, rotating up to the front to give their offerings. Facing the shrine was a statue of a cow seated, with a small turtle in front of it. An odd pairing, but I am sure it means something. I feel like I had read something about it, but I can’t remember what. I think the turtle might have been the thing holding up the mountain when the gods and the demons churned the sea of milk with the snake and there might be more but this sentence is already bizarre enough. Or the turtle might be Shiva’s traveling animal, and the cow is just there because cows are important. But I don’t really know, so I think I will just stop talking about it now. Hinduism has lots of fun stories.

For some reason my potential seducer reminded me a lot of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. I guess because he was that deadly lady killer mixture of sanctimonious and wants-to-get-married-to-whatever’s-around. Good luck to the smooth operator. Shoot for the stars, or the green card.

Back at Chowpatty there was some carnival stuff going on for the holiday. Families were spreading blankets around and having snacks. Two little girls thought I was really funny and came up and waved. Then they ran back to their mom. I stopped to take a picture of the rides and lights, and they came up again. The mom walked over too, and they all smiled and said Hi! I grinned back, which was apparently hilarious, and then they waved bye and went off to join the festivities.

(Me eating pani puri)

I decided to grab a snack on the way out of the beach. There are a bunch of stands near the entrance, so I started wandering around. I must have looked lost because several efficient young snack stand workers marched up, ascertained what I wanted, and packed me off to a snack stand in no time flat. It was like being carried along by a wave in the ocean.

(Bhel puri)

I got some bhel puri, a Mumbai snack that I will mourn for in Seattle. Puri is a cracker, and there is sev puri, bhel puri and pani puri. Pani puri is a little different from the other two, it is little fried puff balls that get filled with stuff and dipped in sauce and handed to you. Sev puri seems to have the same ingredients as bhel puri, but is served with a base of a row of crackers with stuff piled on top. Bhel puri is more just a pile of the ingredients that you eat with a cracker (like you would eat salsa with a chip). It seems to be made of some combination that includes any and all of: puffed rice, gram flour, peanuts, coriander leaves, green chili, dates, tamarind, sugar, jaggery, spices, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, curry leaves, asafoetida, turmeric powder, boiled potatoes, cracked puri, chopped red onion, tomatoes, cucumber. My bhel puri was good.

I watched the sunset for a while, then went off home. Happy Birthday, Gandhiji. Thanks for the day off.

Crawford Market

On my day off this week I wandered around downtown, a little north of where I have been before. I went to Crawford Market, a big bazaar in the city.

I got off the train and started walking east, the general direction of the market. The map I had wasn’t very good, but I was pretty sure that I needed to walk down one major street until I got to another major street, and follow that to a third major street, and there it would be. The problem with that plan is that the major streets that are on my map and the smaller streets that are not on my map actually look quite similar when you are at street level. I wandered here and there, generally heading east, but with no idea if the market was north or south of where I was. I wanted to hide in a corner and surreptitiously look at my map, so that I could pretend that I knew what I was doing and where I was going, but there was no corner to be had. In the bazaar part of town, there are lots of people everywhere crowding down the streets. There were masses of people choking the narrow roads and sitting on stoops and every street was lined with dozens of shops with customers milling around, and there were rows of carts in front of the shops selling clothes and housewares and it was so hot and sunny. Finally, giving up my search for shelter from the masses and the sun, I just stood on a corner in plain view of several hundred people (who honestly didn’t care what I was doing) and pulled out my map.

I am not sure what I was thinking, imagining that the map would help. The map had 3-4 lines on it, with a few street names. I was on a street corner, trapped in a labrynthine set of lanes and alleys and streets and roads and walkways with no names on anything whatsoever and David Bowie (as seen in the movie “Labrynth”) dancing around my head mocking me. The names that I was able to see from where I was were all the names of intersections (the intersections, or chowks, get their own names here.) which didn’t help me because that information was not on my map. I shoved the stupid, paltry little map back into my bag.

I scanned around for a shopkeeper who seemed likely to speak English. I realized that I don’t know what someone who speaks English looks like. I scanned around for the closest shopkeeper instead, and asked where Crawford Market was. Luckily, the closest shopkeeper spoke English. Two minutes, that way. The direction I had been headed in. Sweet.

I kept walking and a big intersection opened up out of nowhere with Crawford Market at the other end. It was weird, I had just been in this maze of streets and alleys, a jungle of concrete. I could have wandered for hours and not seen this big thing that was just on the other side of a row of buildings.

Crawford was at first overwhelming. As I walked over to the actual building, one tout kept shoving his place mats in my face trying to get me to buy them. Seriously, he followed me for 5 minutes. Finally I looked at him and said, buddy, I am really not buying any of your placemats. I am not sure what it was about my tone or look, but that got rid of him. He really wanted me to buy some placemats though, and really thought that I would. I wonder why.

In the actual market building, I got stopped at the entrance and told that I needed to have a porter. What? All foreigners need to have a porter showing them around. I am not paying a porter. It’s free. Why do I need to have a porter? You have to have a porter. The big sign on the wall confirmed what the man said so finally, sigh, ok, who is my porter?

The porter walked me around a corner of the market. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to be buying large bags of spices at the stands he took me to, he deserted me. The market was ok, but I felt a little weird wandering around while people were running their errands, sort of like a Japanese tourist wandering around Safeway or Stop and Shop taking pictures of cashiers and poking at the bread. So I didn’t delve. I also left because I wanted to make sure I avoided the animal end of the market, which would not have been pretty. I can’t buy all of the scared looking animals and give them a good home; sadly, they will not fit in my luggage. So I looked around briefly, bought a few mangoes, and fled the weird and inhospitable market.

My guidebook said that there were tin pot sellers down one of the streets off of the market, so I walked down that way for a while looking for them. I thought it might be fun to get a few tin plates and bowls. But all I found were clothing stores. Oh well.

I headed north to look for a mosque and restaurant nearby that my guidebook suggested. I will not speak the restaurant’s name, for it does not exist. I knew that it was on an alley near the mosque that was north of the market. I headed north up an alley to look for the restaurant or the mosque. After wandering in a desultory sort of way for a while, I started to get the feeling that both the mosque and restaurant were hiding from me, the way the market had. And sure enough, just when I had been about to give up hope, I turned a corner and there was a huge mosque. It is shocking how easy it is to miss enormous buildings in this tangle of people and streets. You just take a wrong turn and you could be lost for hours. There is no sense to the streets. They look like a series of veins, or like the little rills that get created when rain starts streaming down a dry dirt hill. I am sure if you live here it is all childishly simple, but to my eyes all the buildings and streets and people seem to be an organic, incomprehensible part of each other. You go down one alley and end up walking through a lane that ends in a dead end but has a walkway through the back of this set of buildings which also has a market set up in it and weaves in and around other sets of buildings and finally you end up in an empty lot or at a church or at no longer functioning school which has a broken gate for you to walk through to get back out onto the street half a block up from where you left it. Mumbai looks not so much like it has been built but like it has grown. I don’t know how some of the buildings stay up. Tradition, I guess. The buildings and structures are like houses of cards that have been shellacked. They look fragile, but you can’t knock them down.

So I found the mosque. I took a few pictures of the pretty outside, but I didn’t want to go inside and disturb the faithful. Besides, I was still on my restaurant mission.

That damn restaurant doesn’t exist. I swear it doesn’t. I looked at every shop front in every alley around where it could have been. Stupid guidebook.

I headed north once again to hit the Mumba Devi Shrine for whom Bombay has been renamed. However, all I saw were store fronts on the street where it was supposed to be. I was wandering around trying to figure out where it was when I saw a little passageway. I tried to go in the little passage way, but the people waved me away- exit, exit. They pointed about twenty feet away to the large entrance that I had not seen. So I went in there.

Mumba Devi was way more chill than Malaxshmi. There was much less of a crowd, and the shrine itself was a lot smaller. The temple is off the street and behind a row of shops. There is a courtyard behind the shops and in front of the actual shrine. The courtyard was smallish, about the same floor space as medium size cafe, and was lined with stalls selling offerings of candy, fruit, and flowers. Like at Malaxshmi, houses had been built up all around the temple, but you could still see it sticking out here and there from the middle of all the other buildings. Poles and roofing had been attached to the walls of the temple in a lot of places. I feel like if you stand in one place too long in this city someone will tie a rope and some roofing to you and try to live on you.

I stood outside the worship area looking around, not wanting to disturb the faithful at prayer. But then a security guard came up and was like, go in, go in, go in! Want to see? Take off your shoes. -Ok, I would like to go in if it is ok. - Go! Go! -Oh, uh, ok.

So I took off my shoes and went in. The shrines were beautiful. One Mumba Devi was red, one had scary looking statues as guards. The same offerings ritual as the one I saw at Malaxshmi was going on, with the offerings coming in and going out, and the monks swiftly moving stuff around. I followed the crowd around the shrine and then back out to the front. I went over to my shoes, which the security guard was watching for me. (Wow, that was nice. He wasn’t watching anyone else’s shoes.) He and this other guy were like, did you get some pictures? Take some pictures? Oh, uh, no. Is it ok? (I remember how they were very anti picture at Malaxshmi.) Yeah! Go ahead! They really wanted me to take some pictures.

So I went back in and took a few photos. I tried to stay out of the way of those who were there to worship, but the people there were like, come up! Come up!! Get a good shot! -Oh, I don’t want to get in the way. -Stand here! Go up front! -Oh, uh, ok. Thanks! So I went up and took some pictures. The people here are so kind so much of the time. It was funny too how the worshipper also seemed to want me to get a good picture of the deity. In most temples I would think that they wouldn’t want you clopping around like a great big tourist snapping photos of their sacred stuff.

I went back out thanked the guard for watching my shoes, and waved good bye. Around the corner from the temple I saw a place with veg food. Woo hoo! Sanctuary! I scurried over and went inside. Oh no! All the tables were had someone sitting at them. I wasn’t sure if they shared tables at lunchtime and if I should sit down with someone or what. A waiter came over and we all gestured around at each other for a while. Finally I sat down at one of the booths, which seemed to make everyone nod and smile. They tried to make the guy sitting there move, but I motioned that it was fine, we could share. Everyone nodded and smiled and there was a round of waving again, then I sat down with my lunch buddy and checked out the menu.

I got a thali plate: a plate of flat bread, rice, papadum, daal, and 2 vegetable dishes. I was soooo full after that. Thali means different things in different parts of India, but I think it always essentially means a plate of smaller portions of a few different dishes. I think there is always bread or rice, and daal. Wiki has some more info, if you like.

I decided to hit just one more area on my excursion. There was a religious market and Jain animal sanctuary up a few blocks, so I headed off.

I, again, stumbled upon the thing I was looking for almost by happenstance. The religious market was a small doorway in the midst of a bunch of shops. It went for a fairly long way once you got inside though. It was cool- lots of stalls with bright shiny swaths of cloth. A lot of them had a 10 by 10 ft floor, and in several of the stalls, whole families of women and children were camped out surveying piles and piles of cloth. It was all very cozy. There were small shrines for sale, and lots of religious icons. I wandered through trying to look like I didn’t want to buy anything, because I didn’t. The market did that thing that I was talking about earlier, where you go in one alley and pass through a bunch of organically grown shops that are part of larger blocks and lanes and then you come out through a fence into someone’s yard which is also a restaurant. I wandered back through and tried taking a few different turns to come out a different way. Around my last turn, I thought “The religious market has started to smell like a barn. A barn? Why the heck does a religious market smell like a barn?”

That was when I stumbled onto the Jain animal sanctuary. I was glad that I had decided to hit the religious market, because the only way to get into the sanctuary was through the market, as far as I can tell. The undependable guidebook told me that no pictures were allowed, so just in case the book finally happened to be right about something, I left my camera in my bag.

From one end of the serpentine religious market, I walked through a big tall turquoise archway and into a large courtyard. There was one large pen with 100+ cows, cages with chickens, geese waddling around, and several stalls with rabbits in them. I can’t imagine any of them were incredibly happy with their cramped conditions, but I suppose happiness is relative. Better to be mildly unhappy and in a cramped pen than really unhappy and on a plate. At any rate, everybody looked well treated and healthy.

It was feeding time for the cows. One guy was walking around giving each cow a mushy pill, I assume with vitamins and stuff in it. Some other guys were taking handfuls of grass and giving it to the cows. I wandered along the walkway beside the cows. There wasn’t a whole lot of room: with the cows’ heads reaching into the walkway for their food there was basically enough room for me to walk straight between their noses and the wall. I could feel them breathing on me. It was really intimidating to walk by all those pounds of animal. The cows were huge. I can see why a predator might think twice before heading in for the kill. I felt very squishable. I wanted to know how to say “I don’t eat you, don’t beat me up” in cow. While I was just sort of standing there trying to look like someone who doesn’t eat cows and, in fact, like someone whose very best friends are cows, a guy walked up and handed me some grass. Huh, ok. I took the grass and started feeding the cows. I tried feeding the cows individually with handfuls of grass, but they weren’t into that. So I took the grass and started spreading it out along the feeding shelf on the other side of the wall separating me from the cows. Once I figured out how to feed the cows, the guy kept handing me grass and I kept feeding them. When we ran out of grass, I stuck around hanging out with the cows for a while.

There was a line of cows in front of me eating, and there was one cow in the back not eating. I have this theory. I think the cow at the back must have been visiting from America, and was being polite, because she was waiting at the back of the line like an American; like I usually do. She didn’t want to muscle into the fray, so she was waiting her turn at the end of the queue. But after a few minutes she got shoved aside. An Indian cow came trotting over and butted her way around the polite cow and through the line of eating cows to get to the food. She was a great fat auntie cow and knew how to use her girth. Probably the polite cow was thinking aw crap. That’s how you do it here. Man, I’m hungry.

The other day I was waiting in line. I was the next one up. Literally right up at the counter. Some guy comes up and steps in front of me, reaches around where I am standing and shoves his money across the counter. And he didn’t have just one ticket to buy, he had this long transaction. I was really pissed, and I wanted to kick him in the shins. But I did nothing, because where I am from that doesn’t happen. I just don’t know what the proper response is, I can’t react immediately. It is so deeply ingrained in me that people don’t act like that.

And there was a bag check to go into this store. Mobbed. I was working my way to the front, and some woman kept hitting me in the head, waving her stupid purse around, yelling Sir! Sir! trying to get the clerk’s attention, for all the world like she had the right to get her bag checked first, before the 15 people who were there in front of her. I passive aggressively stepped in front of her every chance I got and prevented her from getting her bag checked before mine.

When you wait in line here, a lot of the time the next person in line stands beside you up at the counter, like they are with you or something, so no one slimes their way ahead of them.

Back at the Jain sanctuary I said bye to the cows, gave the polite cow a pitying, empathetic look, finished checking out the rest of the compound, and headed back out through the religious market. I put a few hundred rupees into the charity box on my way out.

I saw the grass guy as I was leaving. He was standing at the entrance to the market with big piles of grass. I think that people can buy handfuls of grass to give to the cows, and earn religious points for it somewhere. Like saying hail marys or something. I have seen people in the street with handfuls of grass and a cow on a rope doing the same thing. My grass guy smiled and waved, I waved back and headed off down the street.

I knew that I had to head roughly west to get to the train line, and that if I could get to the tracks I would just have to walk north or south a few blocks to get to a station. I started following the roads west. After a few blocks, the road split, so I asked a woman which way I should go. She wasn’t sure how to explain to me how to get to a station, and eventually pointed me down one road and told me to ask someone which way to go at the end of that road. I went down a couple of blocks, and realized that she had sent me east. I was back where I had been earlier in the day. Hmm. Ok, well I will keep heading down until I find a major road. I don’t think this is the right way, but she is the one who lives here. I turned south, along the way I had come that morning. I went west again at the next road. At the end of the block the road split again, so I asked someone the best way to go. She sent me back the way I had come. Huh. Irritating. Am I completely turned around? I walked back, and at the next intersection, and asked someone again which way I should go. She pointed back in the direction I had originally come before my last turn bqck tracking once again. Huh. Ok, am I just really turned around? Then I noticed that the sun was setting. So I knew for sure which way west was. And I had been heading the right direction, both times I had been told to turn around. Apparently I am stopping idiots and asking them for directions. Damn it. Forget this maze of a city, forget these crazy people who don’t know where the train is, I am walking all the way back to the damn mosque and just going back the way I came earlier. No more asking directions, no more confusion and backtracking. So I walked back, and made it to the train station. It was weird though, how all three of the women I asked pointed me in exactly the wrong direction. They had seemed to understand my question, but it was like they couldn’t figure out what I was talking about.

On that note, I went to a restaurant the other day and couldn’t order what I wanted. I walked into the restaurant, paused, smiled, and was pointed to a table. A waiter gave me a menu. When it was clear that I had decided what to order, one of the waiters came over and asked what I wanted. He couldn’t understand what I said: totally understandable. I am in a Chinese restaurant in India. My waiter doesn’t speak English. Fair enough. So I opened up the menu and pointed to what I wanted. He said something back that I couldn’t understand. I smiled and shook my head and shrugged, not being able to understand him either, and then pointed again to the thing on the menu that I wanted. He said something again. We went back and forth for a minute, and another waiter came over. The same thing happened. I am pretty sure they were not saying “That isn’t available” because that would have looked like “no” or something. I feel that I would have been able to understand that. I feel that very strongly. By the time the third waiter had come over, I had just started pointing at one of the vegetable fried rice things. Finally one of them was like, fried rice? Yeah, fried rice. (I really really didn’t feel like having a big plate of fried rice.) They brought me a big bowl of fried rice. I ate it with as much grace as I could muster. It wasn’t even vegetable fried rice, which was what I had last pointed to on the menu. Sure enough, when I got my bill, it was for a different price than the thing I had been pointing to. I know they got the concept of rice-with-an-entree, because that was what they were bringing everyone else. But the waiters couldn’t get it together for me. And, seriously, what was the problem? I think they may have been morons. This couldn’t have been cultural. They handed me a menu, which is, by definition, a list of Options. Choices. I made a Choice. A Decision. A Selection, from the list of Options That You Gave Me When I Came In. We don’t speak the same language, sure, but what eloquence do you need to communicate a simple menu choice? By handing me the menu, you were saying, albeit implicitly, that you were offering me a choice of these dishes. I didn’t walk in with my own menu and start demanding grilled peacock and nectar of the gods. We entered into a basic social contract. By opening up your restaurant to the public, you offer to make food, I offer to eat and pay for it. Nothing complicated. Nothing tricky. Nothing subtle. This is a relationship that millions of people enter into with millions of establishments on a daily basis. This must be the fourth or fifth oldest business in the world. I wanted Vegetable Manchurian! I would have settled for Vegetable Anything! You didn’t understand pointing! Who doesn’t understand pointing? I insist that I was being neither stupid nor intolerant! Why couldn’t you understand what I wanted? Why why why? Why couldn’t you put together the simple logic of the situation? What, in short, was the issue?

I feel better now. I had been holding a lot inside there. I think I get why McSweeney’s does that “Letters to People Unlikely to Respond” thing now. It is totally therapeutic.

I got some kickass flipflops on the way home from the Chinese food restaurant. So there is a happy ending.

My foray into the Chinese food restaurant was precipitated by the search for yet another restaurant that doesn’t exist from the guidebook. The mockery of fate. I swear I am going to find the guy who wrote that book.

Notes from the Newspaper

At a Nepalese airport flights were delayed for 2 hours due to technical difficulties. Two goats were on the runway.

A water truck driver ran down an old man in a market yesterday. A mob quickly surrounded the driver and started kicking and punching him- the cops had to pull him out. There was a picture in the paper. This mob stuff happens here every now and then. As I was driving home after dark the other day I saw a guy tied to a pole getting hit by some men in a crowd. My friend thought that maybe he had tried breaking into someone’s house. There are so many people here, and a crowd can gather so quickly. I feel like a couple of guys can avalanche into a mob really fast. It is quite scary. And not uncommon. A few weeks ago a mob of men meted out justice to a thief, then afterwards lined up in a very orderly fashion to have their picture taken for the paper. I think this phenomenon just happens when you have this mass of people, things come to a head and bam you have a mob. We don’t have that kind of density very many places in the US. It is very weird to see.

There was an article about the fact that the Delhi bus drivers are really scary. Way scarier than Mumbai bus drivers. They don’t kill people in tragic, impossible to avoid accidents. They kill people with reckless abandon. I don’t think they run people down, throw the bus into reverse, and back over them exactly, but they do blatantly run people down at intersections. And drive through stopped traffic. Literally, stopped traffic. A man and his son were on a motorbike waiting at a light and were killed when a bus drove through them. Not surprising, many of the drivers don’t have licenses.

I should mention that I have recently seen some surprisingly nice action on the part of Bombay bus drivers. Three times now I have seen the buses slow to let people on as they were running down the street, whether the bus was near a scheduled stop or not. The people on the bus reach out and help the runner on. That gives me a nice community feeling. Also, the bus drivers haven’t particularly gone out of their way to try to kill me lately. That gives me a nice feeling too.

You can get past life psychotherapy. I don’t think this is just in India or anything, but it was in the paper here. If you died in a plane crash in a previous life, that may be why you are afraid of flying. You can talk to a psychotherapist about it! Or maybe, since everyone always seems to have been someone mighty and rich and famous in their past lives, maybe the reason you can’t leave your dead end job selling life force crystals at mall is because you are fundamentally afraid of making those big decisions about what to do with your life. Because you were Hamlet! Or you are afraid of elephants because you were Napoleon. You are afraid of commitment because you were Anne Boleyn. Snakes? Cleopatra. Unhappy with family life? Medea. Feel excessively angry all the time? Attila the Hun. Afraid your best friend is going to stab you? Julius Caesar. The possible psychoses are endless!

Current favorite headline: “Many brides in India dress like drag queens”

There is this new Thai book out: Foreign boyfriend, foreign husband. Trying to get the message out to young Thai village girls: Old and white is good, he won’t cheat on you or hit you. What you need to do is hang out in bars to find one, then when you have a guy, clean all the time and have sex with him whenever he wants. The reporter who wrote the article about the book interviewed one Thai woman who was like, yeah, it’s not the most sophisticated book.

Harish Patel is a Hindi speaking Bollywood actor in a play in London. However, he doesn’t speak English. He memorized the English play he is in, and understands enough to put in the right inflections.

Ram Situ/Adam’s Bridge: A ridge underwater connecting India and Sri Lanka. Is thought to be a bridge made by Ram, an ancient king and deity, as seen in the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic. The Indian government wants to dredge it to make a shipping canal, to serve as a shorter route for the ships that are small enough to pass through. People are (probably rightly) worried about the environmental impact of knocking down a coral structure that is so big that you can see it in satellite photos. And of course there are the religious implications of chopping through a structure traditionally believed to be the work of an ancient deity. So someone somewhere thought that a good way of going about justifying the dredging would be to have the Archeological Survey of India question the existence of Ram, in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court. That didn’t upset or offend anyone. Hasn’t caused riots. Good thing the government made its doubts on the existence of a mythological being close to the literary and religious heart and heritage of the nation well known. Big vote winner.
***
Great quote I found:
“I would not lend a book to the man who refuses a Bombay mango.”

Athematic

A correction:
Eyeliner on kid: I guess that people put this black smudgy stuff on their kids called kajal. They think it keeps off the evil eye. It is a cultural thing, not a religious thing, because people across classes and creeds do it. What happens is this: if a lot of people pay attention to a kid, dote on him, pinch her cheeks, tousle the hair etc etc, say at a family function or something, this attention might attract the attention of the evil eye. And then bad things will happen, illness, injury or whatever. The black stuff wards it off. Presumably because the forces that would be raining down destruction upon the kid are distracted by the kid’s looking like a mini drag queen.

I just wanted to set the record straight on the three year old kid I was talking trash about a while back. Not eyeliner. Kajal.

At this point I have seen a lot of kids with this stuff on, not as eyeliner but as large dots on the face. I couldn’t figure out what it was, or why all these kids had large black spots drawn on them, but now, in my vast experience, I have connected the dots, so to speak. Kajal.

I don’t know if anyone has seen the movie or read the book “The Namesake,” (it is pretty good) but in the book some Indian parents who have moved to the US have a problem. They have to name their kid before they can leave the hospital with it. However, in India, people don’t normally name the kid right away, and they aren’t prepared, so the kid ends up with a legal name they aren’t happy with. I was excited to see this naming thing in action today. The wife of one of my GMAT students had twins last week. I asked what they had named the kids, and he gave a casual shrug. The kids don’t get named for 11 days here. The birth certificate just says “boy” and “girl.” Cool, huh? Then, the parents don’t name the kid, older family members do. And you don’t name kids after other family members; a person’s name is supposed to be just for them. Pious people will let a holy book open to a random page and close their eyes, then drop a finger down and whatever letter your finger hits is the first letter of the name. Some people have horoscopes drawn up to find out what the first letter of a kid’s name should be. A lot of people get named after Vishnu, the Hindu Preserver god. He has 1000 names, so you get a pretty wide selection. One of my GRE students from Seattle told me that using Sanskrit words was getting popular too. And the first name you get, the one you get when you are little, is your family name, or pet name: what people close to you call you. Then when you get older you get a rest-of-the-world name. Your outside name has to be chosen by the time you start school. When you enter school; that is the last time you get to change your name. Once it is entered there, that’s it. That is your name.

I don’t know how widespread this is, but in “The Namesake” the author talks about how the wife never calls her husband by name. It just isn’t done. She adopted a sort of phrase like “hey, are you listening?” to address him, so he would know she was talking to him. I enjoy that.

The funny grate that a lot of trucks here have.

There is a lot of begging here. Some eunuchs were begging around the train the other day. I was in the second class ladies car because I was with someone else, and she said I bet they don’t come into the first class car, huh? And she was right, they don’t. I guess the first class car is tighter. Some little girls tried their luck with us on the first class car the other day. One played an accordian type instrument and sang some film song (badly) while her little companion danced at the ladies, hands on her hips, gyrating around. It was creepy, and I would rather have a eunuch ask me for money any day. They didn’t do very well with us. I hope they got more sympathy in the second class car.

I have learned to check the feet when a kid walks up to me. If I see shoes, the kid is probably with a parent and is going to keep on walking by. No shoes, the kid was probably sent over by a parent to beg, and I need to speed up.

Last night as I was leaving the train station to come home a toddling three year old started poking my legs and yammering about money to me. She was really persistant- she followed me through the station and halfway down the road before giving up. She kept up this weird indecipherable background noise the whole time. I found it tricky to escapethe grasp of the toddler, she just kept coming. It was cartoonishly bizarre, how she handled herself.

The other day a few kids came onto the ladies first class car and tried begging from station to station. When I got up to wait by the door for my stop, they got really excited and started jumping at me, hands out. I smiled and shook my head (I always smile my “no”) but they didn’t stop until one of the ladies looked up from her book and hissed at them to stop it. She didn’t even look at me, she just casually glanced up and “hhhhhssssrrrrp.” They took it philosophically and stopped bugging me and turned their attention to determining who could hang out of the train car the furthest. I nodded thanks to the woman, but she was already reading again. It was amazing how simply and efficiently she dealt with them, and how she did it with the casual politeness you use in basic, daily interactions. You say “excuse me” and walk around someone, or let someone go through a door before you, or, apparently, deter a band of mendicants for a hapless foreigner. Effortlessly, she took care of the situation in a way that I simply do not have the capacity for.

Similarly, I was walking home with one of my coworkers and some beggar kids came up and tried to ask for some of the food we had just bought. She shooed them away with the same hiss and swipe, as though they were dogs. And it was sad, but that has started to seem to me like the right thing to do in that situation. It was weird. I have gotten used to the poverty in a lot of ways. The kids coming up to me don’t engender my pity or compassion. Instead, I have started to see them with a certain lack of empathy. They are a nuisance to be dealt with; they are not people. I just want them to stop bothering me. I am not even very guilty anymore.

It isn’t a very big jump for me to see that this is how prejudice gets built, solidly and completely, through long term interactions with different classes of people. How what “quality” people are might seem inherent, or so deeply ingrained as to be genetic. Not simply a function of circumstances. How those people become “those people.” My fine and fragile ideas about fraternity and equality are very learned, they are not automatic or inevitable. And I am uncomfortable with how superficial my egalitarian ideals might be. It is, for instance, easy to think that everyone should have equal access to food and shelter when there is plenty of food and shelter to go around. But when you want some of my food and shelter, even if I have enough, there are so many of you, I am not sure I want to share. My food is more important to me than my ideas. And when the revolution comes, I am afraid that I might want to be on either side, as long as it is the winning one.

Hopefully this isn’t entirely true, and I do have some ethical sense of right treatment of human beings, but making that come to terms with how to deal with the daily begging is difficult.

The kids really run after me if they see me coming. They touch my arms and tug on my bag, which I really really don’t like. I don’t like being touched by grimy little hands. Also, I think that I might have an invisible name tag that says Money. Because that is what they call me. They come up with hands out and say hello, money, hello hello, money. Money money money, please money.

When I do want to yield to the temptation to give, I try not to. Even when I feel sad about it, I have decided, generally, not to give. It won’t stop the begging and I don’t know that it will really help them. Sigh. Maybe it would. But giving is like throwing handfuls of sand into the Grand Canyon. I feel so cheap when I see other people giving, though. It is hard to know what to do. Either way, poverty is ugly. So I don’t give. To kids. I give to the handicapped and elderly. But only on Saturdays. And sometimes Thursdays. That assuages my conscience but makes me feel like I am not contributing to the culture of begging too much.

I have also been keeping track of how much I have been begged. I am going to put the money I would have given to beggars to some microlending organization. Probably the socially responsible clothing store.

There are so many different worlds that people live in here. I am used to being the only one in my SAT class without a cell phone. Now I am the only one in my SAT class without a driver.

I feel like Bombay is the New York (economics/business) and the Las Vegas (entertainment/cheap crap not done very well) and the Los Angeles (film industry) of India. It really is a huge place with a lot of different things going on. It even has a little Seattle (bureaucracy) thrown in. Delhi is the Washington DC (seat of government/lots of crime) of India.

Street shaving

The food here- it is so greasy. I think the problem is that I don’t really have the facilities to make lunch at home the night before and bring it, and ordering is so cheap, that I order lunch every day. So that is part of it, but the food my coworkers make at home and bring has a lot of oil in it too. Also, they are big on carbs here. I have seen people use bread to scoop up potatoes and rice. I just can’t do that, I feel like I need something green or something with a little fiber. Aloo parathas are popular here. You take potato, cook it in oil, then you shove it in between 2 pieces of bread and deep fry the whole thing. I find myself fantasizing about steamed broccoli and dry wheat toast.

There is also a lot of this Indian/Chinese fusion food here. It is an interesting mix, Indian type dishes with Chinese spices, Chinese type dishes with Indian spices, but it still all sort of tastes Chinese. But Indian Chinese.

Food at the grocery store is sometimes cheap, sometimes expensive, depending on where the food comes from. Local stuff is pretty cheap, imported stuff is always at least as expensive as it would be in the states.

I buy fruit and vegetables at a stand by the side of the road near my house. There is one girl I like to go to. I have no idea if I am supposed to bargain or not. I don’t feel like I should, for the produce. The people I work with don’t think her prices sound exorbitant, and they say that you don’t always bargain at the vegetable stalls. I think that some of the other people bargain with her a little, because it looks like they are going back and forth when they talk to her. But it must only be for a few rupees, and I don’t know that I the veg lady speaks enough English for me to be able to bargain. I don’t think she is cheating me though, because none of the other customers snicker when she tells me the price of my produce. I think she upped the price on me once, because her smile was really wide and innocent and the price was a little higher than usual. But she doesn’t normally.

The vegetables are sooo cheap. I know I’m not getting my hoity toity organic stuff, but still- the other night I bought 2 tomatoes, 2 carrots, 2 peppers, some long beans, 2 onions, some potatoes, spring onions, coriander, and ginger for 22 rps, or 50 cents. Today I bought a half a kilo of tomatoes for 5 rupees. And handfuls of garlic for 10 rupees. I love it! I have to keep reminding myself how ridiculous it would be to come back with a suitcase full of tomatoes.

Also, I like going to coffee shops because it is so much cheaper here. I think is it not cheap for the general population, but it is for me. It is about a dollar for tea, which isn’t super cheap, but still. Cheaper than Seattle.

I can tell it isn’t super cheap for everyone because I went to the coffee shop near my house during the Mt Mary fair, with hundreds of people thronging through streets, and it was mostly empty. That was weird. I thought with the crowds it would be packed.

One thing that I can’t get used to is that the cafes are like restaurants. You come in and sit down, and a waiter comes over to you, gives you a menu, and takes your order. I still go up to the counter to order, and then stand there for a minute waiting to pay before they tell me to go sit down.

Beach near my house

I have a huge red cockroach living in my bathroom. I have named him Roommate.

Kanheri Caves

My latest field trip consisted of a journey up to the nature park to see the Kanheri caves, some Buddhist caves that were carved into rock for peripatetic monks to use during the monsoon season, when it was harder to wander. They are up north of the city and date from the 2nd to 9th centuries. (Thank you, guidebook)

Indians were very nice today. That was sort of the general theme of the day.

I got to the train station and went to a platform with a north-going train. I asked a girl if I was in the right place to catch a train for Boravali, and she said I was. Then she let me know when the train came a few minutes later that it was definitely the right one. Then, when my stop came, she motioned to me, and told me which side to get off the train on and made sure I got off at the right place. So that was really nice of her.

I tried to get a rik to the park. I asked one driver, and he said no. Then a nice Indian guy who has lived in Connecticut for five years who was also waiting for a rik explained that the driver was saying no because he can’t drive into the park, but that he could take me to the entrance. So I said that would be ok, and the Connecticut guy offered to share a rik with me and drop me off, since it was on his way. Then he wouldn’t let me pay for the rik, since he had to pay anyway at the end of his trip. So that was really nice of him.

I walked in and was immediately approached by a couple of guys who asked if I needed a ride into the park to see the caves. Yes. Yes, I do. 650 rupees. 650?!!?!? Huh. Wow, that is a lot. Isn’t there a bus? No, not today. Sometimes it is cancelled because of the monsoon. Really? There really isn’t a bus? Well, 650 still sounds like a lot. We went over to the ranger stand and the rangers agreed that there was no bus today and suggested I hire a car. I stood there saying, yeah, but 650? As I was contemplating a 7 km walk through the jungle vs US$14 dollars, a few cars drove up. One of the guys who was trying to get me to pay him 650 went over to one of the cars and asked if I could get a ride with them. They were like sure, but we are only staying hour and a half or so. I said That’s ok, I’ll take the ride. I gave the 650 guy 100 rupees for asking the people to take me. That was really nice of him, especially since he was trying to get a pile of money out of me , and wasn’t necessarily going to get anything if I got a ride with the nice people.
(I would like to complain here that the guidebook was out of date on this point. It said that if there was no bus, you could hire a rik at the train station for 75 rupees or a taxi for 100 rupees to take you to the caves. Nowadays though, no riks or taxis are allowed up to the caves, you have to hire a car in the park or take the bus. Touristy stuff like this is getting more expensive in India. But geez, my guidebook is only from ’05!)

So I drove up to the caves with a guy and a girl who work together, but aren’t girlfriend boyfriend, but who were driving up to the caves to talk about some stuff and who had a conversation about the words friendship and love on the way back. They said they were coworkers.

Also, they confirmed that the buses don’t always run during the monsoon.

The 7 km trip took about 25 minutes because of the roads. I was glad I hadn’t walked. The guy who shared a rik with me from the train station told me that the squatters who live at the edges of the park sometimes lose a kid to the leopards. I don’t think I would have ended up walking.

We got up to the caves, and the guy insisted on paying the entrance fee. He kept saying, c’mon, it’s like 4 rupees. No big deal. But then, foreigner tax. When we got to the entrance we discovered that I cost 100 rupees. I tried to make him let me pay for everyone, or at least for myself, but he wouldn’t even entertain the idea.

It’s like 4 out of 5 people in this country are so incredibly kind- almost too polite, in a practically inconveniencing you, let me do that for you sort of way. They are so hospitable. But then the 5th guy wants to steal your wallet, so you have to watch out.

We walked around the caves. They were wonderful. It was fabulous to get out of the city and into the jungle, see the greenery and the caves. The caves were mostly small cells carved into the hill, little rooms with benches along one side.

One of the first few caves was this huge cathedral type room, with a big arched ceiling and lots of columns, and huge Buddhas on either side of the entrance. There were also lots of smaller sitting and dancing Buddhas, and there was one with legs that looked like snakes. And, of course, there were lots of stupas to worship around. (stupa = lingam, in terms of what they look like. Cylinder with a dome on tope, varying heights and widths)

The caves were arranged in little groups all over the hillside, so that when the monks stayed there they had some privacy but some community feeling as well. There were stairs up and along the rock face of the hill to each cave.

In the center of the main area was a tumbling little stream with a few waterfalls and a handful of pools. There were several caves facing each other on either side of it. One of these was a larger cave with several long benches in it, like a communal dining hall or prayer hall. It was very quiet inside, and must have been a good place to reflect on why you had decided to become a monk. The whole area was, of course, very peaceful, but the stubborn stillness of the study room was reassuringly calm. There was a pervasive hush throughout the room, like in a very solemn library. As soon as you walked back outside of the hall, you could hear the pretty sounds of the waterfall, and nature started coming to life again.

It must have been friendship day (yet another one) because a group of young guys came up to me and asked my name, like those guys at the beach awhile back. Again, I was like, why? Just introduction. What’s your name? Evelyn. Yours? Amit. Do you like swimming?
. . .What? Do I like swimming? Um, I must look like I have been swimming, pointing at my sweaty face, and grinning. Then they laughed and waved bye and went on ahead.

It was so peaceful and relaxing to wander around the caves. The guy who drove me up said that he had been once before and had just sat there for about 5 hours.