This is the fourth in a series of posts made up of photos and direct excerpts from the journal I kept during two weeks of travel in India.
Just to be clear, this post is a bit monstrously long. As Blaise Pascal famously said, “I am sorry I have written you such a long letter, but I did not have time to write a shorter one.”
Perhaps consider it a few minutes’ immersion in the chaos of a long day’s travel excitement in Mumbai!
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March 19, 2012
Today ended up being pretty amazing.
The morning started off humdrum enough. After last night’s misadventure with the hostel’s internet (when they shut off the internet at 11:55 without anything resembling a warning or even an announcement) I woke up today to find that the only reasonable option left for my last two nights in Mumbai had already been booked up. Given that hotels in Mumbai are expensive even by European standards, this was a bit of a downer. With some finagling and a few moments of watching my budget fly off to a happy place in the sky, I managed to book an alternative hotel. The final price? Well, for just two nights’ accommodation I will be paying more than double the cost of four nights in my next hotel in Rajasthan.
Budget miseries aside, the morning’s travel planning went well. It looks like these altered plans will include two extra days in Mumbai and then a week in the gorgeous lake city of Udaipur. Am I excited? Yes. Nervous? To quote a ‘90s elementary school student, “Duh.”
Regardless, it looks like I will certainly have more adventures in the works in these next few weeks!
Today was quite an adventure in itself. Once we wrapped up travel planning, my friend SW and I headed out towards the other end of the city to join her family for an engagement ceremony in preparation for her brother’s upcoming marriage. Apparently her mother had specifically suggested that I join them for the occasion, and I was only too happy to oblige!
The ceremony would be at her brother’s fiancée’s house. After a quick train ride (more on Mumbai’s trains later) we arrived in the area with plenty of time to spare. We grabbed a coconut apiece and then decided to explore the local market and continue the previous day’s quest for the perfect kurti.
SW loves the whole shopping process, which is fortunate given how much time we have spent during this trip hunting for the perfect outfit for me. (She’s also confessed that she’s about as picky as I am, which is reassuring given the looks I got from various aggrieved shopkeepers after I’d turned down their entire inventory.)
I think part of my difficulty was simply that my associations with many Indian prints are thoroughly foreign. That is, foreign to the point where my reaction to many patterns was much along the lines of, “Wow, that looks like a nice shower curtain.”
The marketplace was also draining because the people there were even more amazed to see a foreigner than the people who live near my hostel. So many stares! There it was particularly marked, but really everywhere I’ve been in this city, people have seemed utterly enthralled at my appearance. There it made sense; in the more touristic area around my hostel I’m surprised that people would consider me such a novelty.
In the US and in Europe, I’ve always been quite good at passing under the radar. Honestly, I’ve practically made an art of it. Here, on the other hand, I know that at least one person is probably looking at me at any given moment when I am outside. At times I’ve been tempted to stop and do a sort of queen’s wave at all the starers, taking their assumption of my role as a spectacle one step further (though yes, my wiser self acknowledges that that wouldn’t be a good idea).
SW gave one guy a talking to for attempting to chat me up while we were stopped into a pharmacy; other than that, there weren’t any real incidents. If I were by myself, though, I definitely wouldn’t have ventured that far out of the city center.
After a few unsuccessful attempts at kurti shopping, we made a brief stop into a local café. I toyed with the idea of getting a chocolate milkshake, since my chocolate withdrawal has been gnawing at me a bit lately. (I had no idea chocolate would be so unusual here! And yes, when you’re daydreaming of chocolate while surrounded by amazing Indian food, that is when you know you have a chocolate addiction and should probably get some help.) After a moment’s consideration, I decided to be a good tourist and go with the more local option: a mango pulp milkshake.
Just so you all know, that mango pulp milkshake was AMAZING. Though a part of me is reluctant to admit it, that was almost…..I’m going to say it….better than chocolate. (!)
After the café we caught an autorickshaw for the ride over to the ceremony. That ride was exciting, ridiculous, and possibly took several years off my life. First the driver started going before I’d actually made it into the rickshaw, so I basically dove in as the thing was moving. (There are no doors; the sides of the vehicle remain open during the whole ride.) Then he proceeded to speed through ridiculous traffic, passing within inches of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and of course a few full sized buses and trucks. You’d think the driver of a vehicle so tiny as this would have some respect for a gigantic public bus….but apparently not.
A row of parked tuk-tuks (auto-rickshaws) in Mumbai
The view looking forward(ish) while sitting in a tuk-tuk! Here you see the minute/money counter and the driver's shoulder.
This as the view as I looked out the window as another tuk-tuk passed by the one I was in. I believe the very blurry people standing on the right side of the shot are at a bus stop.
Also, speedbumps? Not super effective. And they’re only fun for the first one or two….by the time you hit five and six (and when I say “hit” that’s your butt whacking the metal seat on the way down) the charm definitely begins to wane.
When we arrived at the home of the bride-to-be (where the engagement ceremony would take place) it was already dark out. Many members of the two families were present, and everyone was incredibly welcoming.
I followed their example and took off my flipflops outside the front door. SW carried out introductions, and then we all smiled and went through friendly (if mutually incomprehensible) greetings. They encouraged me to try various snacks and foods, and insisted that SW tell them what I did and did not like. Then SW’s sister poured me a cup of delicious Indian tea. (In the US and Europe we call Indian tea “chai”—but in India, “chai” literally is the word for tea. I believe the tea we think of as “chai” is called “chai masala” here, or “spicy tea.”)
The ceremony, a Hindu arrangement known as “placing the coconut in the bride’s lap,” was carried out with remarkably minimal fuss. Settled between SW and her sister, whom I really like even if we have minimal language in common, I watched and attempted to take pictures without being horribly intrusive (though of course I had already asked their permission to take photos!). I couldn’t recount the whole ceremony from memory, and would hate to guess and end up butchering other people’s religious traditions, but the basics involved:
1) One of the older women in the group placing a coconut in the lap of the bride (because yes, this is very much a fertility ritual)
2) Another woman dabbing colored liquids on the bride’s forehead
3) The bride leaning down to touch the feet of each member of the husband-to-be’s family.
Now, as I’ve probably mentioned before, SW and I met while working on gender studies Masters degrees in Budapest last year. Given that detail, one might not be surprised that SW is a confident feminist who strongly objects to step 3 of this ceremony. Her sister, another strong advocate for women’s rights, feels similarly. So, as the sweet and rather nervous-seeming bride-to-be approached our side of the room, SW and her sister both broke out in “Nahi, nahi!” (“No, no!”) smiling at the bride but determinedly drawing their feet out of reach.
At least a minute of limbo ensued. Finally the bride-to-be made a quick duck for my feet. I glanced at SW and the rest of the family, making my confusion generally clear as I lifted my hands in that universal expression for “Whaaat?”
Everybody laughed, the tension broke, and the ceremony was complete. SW and I headed through the kitchen towards the bathroom to “freshen up.” I only realized after arriving there that the bathroom was set up in the very traditional Indian style….that is to say, it was a squat toilet with a bucket of water next to it for flushing. Needless to say, it’s very lucky that I was at least familiar with that setup from my visit to Morocco a few years back.
Back in the hallway, SW poured water over my hands from a bucket so that I could wash up. She joked that this was a very typical moment in many Bollywood films: The heroine pours water over the hands of the hero, catering to him, and the two begin to fall in love.
Me, opening eyes very wide: “You know, actually, there’s really something I should tell you.”
SW, wringing her hands with feigned timidity: “No, no, not now!”
I’m so glad that I have a friend here who has a Bollywood sense of humor.
Before we left, SW’s family insisted on taking a photo with me. Frankly, I was glad they’d suggested it so that I didn’t have to.
The sheer joy of that evening’s cross-cultural interaction really made me wish that we had more of it in this world. The width of the cultural/linguistic gulf between us somehow just made it that much more fun to celebrate our mutual foreignness. As I told SW, it was great that everyone was so excited about my presence; I certainly had a good time.
SW’s little cousin was there again. I’m not usually a huge fan of kids, but this girl is just too cute. When she was too shy to jump into the group photo, I pulled her aside for a photo with just the two of us before things began to wrap up. Shyness overcome, she was just delightful in her excitement about the whole thing.
Another chaotic ride in an auto-rickshaw (my life flashed before my eyes a couple times) and we were back in the marketplace by the train station. We stopped into another few places for kurti shopping, and I finally found some fabric that SW said her family’s tailor could make into a kurti before my departure from Mumbai. Then we headed towards the train station.
When it arrived, the train was so crowded that maybe one out of three cars included a bundle of men who hadn’t quite made it into the car. Instead of waiting for the next one (which probably wouldn’t have helped that much) they instead hung almost entirely outside the door, using one hand to grab a bar just inside the door and resting a couple toes on the metal threshold. I’d never seen that before; granted, the fact that the doors generally close on US and European trains discourages such behavior.
We opted for the women-only car, just like we had on the ride out. With those kinds of crowds I don’t even want to imagine the kind of harassment that could take place in the cars in which men are allowed to board.
Even the women-only car was so packed that we barely fit in the door. At a certain point I realized that we were packed in so tightly I didn’t even need to hold onto anything to keep from falling as the train teetered along the tracks. After a few stops, though, the car began to empty out. For the last couple minutes of the ride we even managed to find seats.
This is what the train looked like once it emptied out a LOT. When it was crowded I was standing up and didn't have my hands free to pull out the camera and take pictures 
Children waiting by the door to get off the train, shortly before our stop
The crowds on that train would have driven me crazy in many situations. Here, though…well, it’s just part of the experience. Of course, I might not have felt so blasé about the whole thing if I’d known of any alternative way to get back to my hostel!
SW’s dad met us at my stop and the three of us walked carefully together through the sketchy nighttime streets of Fort, Mumbai before bidding each other goodnight. Now it’s time to take a (probably cold) shower and head to bed, since I bet tomorrow will be another very full day.
