First Poverty

My first jet-lagged 5PM block outside my hotel after a dizzying, disorienting amount of sleep (with the intention of recovering from jet lag), I find myself on Colaba Causeway. It's a four-lane job that stretches for miles, tiled with Western retail shops encased in glass and A/C, Indian diners, wood and lumber shops, hindu temples (complete with holy cows, incense, and the to-go station on the street where one might pray for a moment and continue walking) and piled atop those are thousands (literally thousands) of street vendors, selling everything from wooden statues of Ganesh to pashminas to sarongs to rotten fruit.

As I was saying, my first block, I meet a young woman, no taller than 4'9", carrying a one, maybe two-year-old in her arms. She's barefoot. She asks me, "Please, sir," and will not accept no for an answer. "I do not need your money, sir, please follow me to this shop; my son needs milk, and cooking rice." She followed me down the Causeway for at least three blocks, and waited for me outside Hutch Mobile's glass door for at least five minutes.

The dim cell

Two florescent lights on opposite walls flicker to life when you enter the room, after the 2 lbs. padlock. Dominated by a massive mat of a bed, the room is simple, poorly painted in an ivory color, and flickering in a dim, purple light. Sleep is equally interesting, as there are no windows, one cannot tell what time it is at all. One might as well be sleeping in a refrigerator, a meat locker, a time machine.

Dreams of late have been filled with violent, unpleasant imagery and complex plots. A struggling police drama, treason, ends with me, a sergeant, trying to strangle the traitor to death at the edge of a building, unsuccessfully. And after the appropriate information is gutted from our former colleague, my boss gingerly places a 1930's pocket revolver at the prisoner's chin and blows his head off.

Wake up in Bombay

The monsoon has left a dirt residue over all the buildings. High rises are cast concrete and appear to be abandoned. Everything looks like the abandoned Masonic Temple in Providence, RI. Covered in dirt, grime; like the city's been underwater for a few months. I'm assuming it pretty much has.

There is no glass in Bombay; open air, florescent lit apartments are closed in with screens and metal bars. These are taxied by slum villages, labeled the way Americans label their gated communities, with big signs, and stone entrance ways. A permanent Porta Portese. Vague, metal plated architecture held up with two-by-fours covered in moldy, rotting garbage, picked through by packs or rabbid dogs and stray cats. The taxi ride in was jaw-dropped wide-eyed red-light running amazement.

My hotel room, no windows, florescent lights, a double bed with damp sheets is comfortable enough. There's a private bathroom and shower, air conditioning. You can't tell what time it is in there.

The long hallway outside my room to the only window at the end of the hallway, shaded with palm leaves, asks the question "What are you doing here?"

On the street I'm a walking ATM machine, my zippable knees scream TOURIST so loud I might as well be walking around beneath a flashing ROUGH GUIDE LONELY PLANET sign. Every vender, every cripple, every homeless mother strapped with her infant child begs for my money, "My friend!" is around every corner.

Mumbai is a sprawling metropolis with intense, impossible amounts of traffic and almost no rules. Crowded with Hindus, Muslems, Catholic school children, and dogs. The prices here are adjusted for Western wallets; there's two prices. The Indian price, and the Westerner price; which tends to correspond with Western prices. $20 hotel, $4 drink, 25 cent bottled water.

The humidity is stupefying, the heat (even at night) is enough to stop you in your tracks. The smells around you wake you up to how little you know about this place. You can't even place the stench, let alone qualify it is a bad or good; it's simply overwhelming.

Hope to get out of Mumbai as quickly as possible.