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?