Mumbai? It’s the spice of life
From cocktails on the roof of the Intercontinental to families squished like sardines in Slumdog alleyways, Georgina Brown is bewitched by…
LIKE many visitors to India, I had only stopped in Mumbai overnight en route to a beach in Goa or Kerala. I could see the skyscrapers, bleary through the smog, and hear the hectic honking, tooting, hooting and beeping of cars in ten lanes of traffic on the road to Chhatrapati Shivaji, the spanking new international airport. In lazy holiday mode, venturing closer didn’t appeal.
But recently and rather unexpectedly, I went to live in the city. Now when someone says they are off to India, I encourage them to give an invigorating whirl in India’s biggest, fastest, richest, smartest city.
Its nickname, Maximum City – Maxx City – is not a boast. Everything in Mumbai, or Bombay as some still call it, is turned up to the maxx, for better or for worse. The upside is endlessly fascinating, fabulous and fun. Best ignore the downside: filthy, frustrating and frantic.
Mumbai has three times the population of New York squished into three-quarters of the space. That’s 22.5million people in 230 square miles. Teeming, noisy, vibrant streets redefine teeming and noisy and vibrant. More than 70 per cent of inhabitants live in so-called slums, acres of corrugated-roofed shacks visible as you come in to land at the airport.
People talk about India’s organised chaos, but the organised bit on the streets of Mumbai is an over-exaggeration. Vast sections of roads are being dug up to create a metro system, which will hopefully be completed in 2020.
Hopes and dreams are big in this city. Every day more Indians arrive from elsewhere, hoping to grab a piece of the action. This is evident in the massive shopping malls. Admittedly the long queues suggest a bigger appetite for Burger King than Burberry, but it’s proof the Slumdog Millionaire syndrome is alive and kicking.
But tread carefully to avoid sleeping dogs and cars trundling past within a hair’s-breadth of a flip-flopped foot. Even the rats stroll along rubble-strewn streets at such a leisurely pace that my Jack Russell hasn’t yet realised they are something to chase!
Better to call an Uber or take a battered black-and-yellow taxi, apparently fuelled by a prayer for there’s often a handful of fresh flowers on the dashboard, an offering to the god Ganesh, the city’s patron deity.
The English of taxi drivers is as rusty as their cars and, in any case, even the poshest shops are often hidden up unpromising alleyways. Make a friend of Google Maps.
One of the charms of Mumbai is that it is so busy being Maxx City that it leaves foreign tourists in peace, to be taken care of by the grandest hotels or tour companies. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in old Mumbai, built some two or three decades before the glorious Gateway To India close by, is the city’s oldest and classiest. It is worth visiting for the flower arrangements alone: great orbs of oriental lilies out and proud in vast urns, filling the sky-high foyer with scent. The hotel’s art collection is equally impressive and includes works by the Cubistinspired Jehangir Sabavala.
For those too nervous to sample the street food, the Taj’s Sea Lounge offers samosas, bhel puri and pakoras – the same taste but without the newspaper.
The hotel jeweller is solid gold, the antique textiles shop stocks museum-quality stuff, and every hand-painted chocolate is a unique work of art.
Only the bold should venture on the bicycling tour, which starts at 6.30am when the sky is still dark. But it’s a great way to see the shabby yet monumental and magnificent Art Deco blocks which shot up in the 1930s as a visual expression of the Bombay’s Jazz Age and in an intensity unparalleled around Marine Drive.
Behind it is the gorgeous Gothic Victoria Terminus, where the first passenger train service in India started, emblematic of the days when the city’s architecture celebrated times past.
The tour of Asia’s biggest slum, Dharavi, where Slumdog Millionaire was made, is more emotionally challenging. Subdued, thin men sort rubbish into piles of different grades of plastic or metal in windowless rooms, where they also eat and sleep, seven days a week. They earn a couple of hundred rupees – £2 or £3 – a day and send most of it home to their families in villages.
In another weird-smelling shed with a greasy floor, remnants of soap salvaged from hotel basins and bins are melted into vast slabs and cut up into ‘new’ unappetising brown pieces to be resold.
Conditions are appalling but, unexpectedly, also appealing, at least in the bustling markets and residential parts where one gets a cheery welcome from members of extended families squished like sardines in tiny rooms on either side of alleyways too narrow for any but the slender.
Queasiness about voyeurism conflicts with qualms that turning a blind eye is possibly worse. At least tour companies plough profits back into slum schools.
A somewhat cleaner tour of the Dhobi Ghats – built in 1890 by the British Raj – gives a new meaning to the term washing one’s dirty linen in public. On row after row of outdoor concrete washing pens, each with its own ‘flogging’ stone, 5,000 men (you have to be born there to work there) wash the city’s laundry and hang it out to dry.
GREEN hospital sheets are sterilised; new jeans are dyed and ‘antiqued’; powdered detergent and bleach can be bought by the ounce, weighed out into little plastic bags. Wallahs slug away with weighty coalfilled irons – for one rupee per shirt. Somehow, clothes without name-tags find their way back to their owners, collected and delivered on towering piles balanced on bicycles. It’s miraculous and run by mafia masters making millions.
There’s much else to do and see, mostly spectacular, and usually on an excessive scale. One must is having cocktails on the roof of the Intercontinental, a restored Art Deco hotel, looking down on the sea shore better known as the Queen’s Necklace
ITS NEW NICKNAME IS MAXX CITY – AND IT’S NOT A BOAST
because when the lights come on, it resembles a glistening string of pearls. And take a ferry to Elephanta Island – there isn’t a real elephant there, but a stone one in caves filled with ancient sculptures. My favourite place on Sundays is the Oval Maidan, where an army of cricketers play in scores of simultaneous matches, somehow keeping their eye on the right ball. Alternatively, go to the races at Mahalaxmi, an oasis in the city and a breath of relatively fresh air, where you can win a small fortune for a few rupees. Bombay can be a blast. Just brace yourself.