My week in Mumbai: Part I: Getting there

Why Mumbai?

I visited Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, the first week of February. I’ve always wanted to go to India, and conveniently, Mumbai was the site of this year’s “Tall Buildings' Conference,” which my engineer dad regularly attends. My mom was tagging along for the tourist opportunities, and I decided to join my long-lost parents. (I hadn’t seen them for six months).

Mumbai: Bling vs. slums

Swarming with some 14 million people, Mumbai is one of the most populated cities in the world. Mumbai is India’s largest city, and considered the country’s financial capital. Mumbai is also home to Bollywood, India’s uber-productive Hollywood, plus most of India’s TV networks and publishing houses.

All these money-making industries mean money-making people ­— lots of money-making people, making lots of money. Assumedly, these moneymakers live and work in the gliltzy towers and mansions bejeweling the city. Mumbai is also studded with an abundance of monstrous hotels for its moneymaking tourists. (My parents and I stayed in two of these urban castles.)

Despite all the bling, there’s also a dark side to Mumbai — a well-illuminated dark side. Stroll near many of these glitzy buildings and you’ll see this dark side, in the form of beggars and scamps, outdoor sleepers and street urchins (Mumbai slang for young hoodlums). This dark side is made up of those left behind by Mumbai’s speedy growth.

Sixty percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. What’s a slum? According to Webster, it’s “a populous area with very poor living conditions.” In Mumbai, make that very populous.

Dharavi, the slum featured in “Slumdog Millionaire,” is barely larger than half a square mile, but crammed with maybe 800,000 people — a figure that is growing by the day. But despite its heft, Dharavi is hardly Mumbai’s only slum. It’s simply the city’s largest legal slum — (whatever that means).

Nearly innumerable other slums make up Mumbai’s dark, dingy side. These slums, recognizable by their corrugated tin roofs and collapsing bodies, aren’t tucked out of sight. They’re everywhere. They line the highways, invade the sidewalks and even crouch next to all that glitz I mentioned earlier.

With many Mumbaikers making about $2 a day, it’s no wonder so many live in slums. They want to live in slums. An Indian friend of mine told me a shocking but true story: In an attempt to eliminate slums, the government built subsidized housing for slumdwellers.

Nice idea, but unfortunately the government didn’t create any conditional oversight for the new housing, and shortly after moving in, the compound’s new, former slum-dwelling residents simply sold their new units and returned to the slums. After all, many Mumbai slums are outfitted with TVs, electricity, water and sparkling clean public toilets. Perhaps slumming it in Mumbai isn’t always a hard-knock life.

But slum dwelling is surely not a desirable life, either — for the slumdwellers or the government. That’s why my dad and more than 1,000 other engineers and construction experts from around the world visited Mumbai for this year’s “Tall Buildings’ Conference.” They came not to ooh and ahh over the city’s tall buildings, but to help Mumbaikers pull the plug on the city’s ever-expanding slum life.

My dad spent much of the week in seminars and on field trips. Meanwhile, my mom and I hit the streets, eager to explore this sprawling city of glitz and glamor, poverty and peril.

The way there:

I fly to Calcutta, India from Bangkok, Thailand. Bangkok is about six hours north of my Cambodian town, Serei Sophon/Sisophon/Svay in Banteay Meanchey province — which I still don’t know how to pronounce. Getting to Bangkok takes a one-hour car ride, walking, a short tuk-tuk ride — a tuk tuk is a cart pulled by a motorcycle — and a five-hour bus ride, plus more walking and a taxi ride. Whew!

First impressions of Bangkok:

Wow! Concrete! So much concrete! So many sturdy houses, and an actual highway — with medians — painted medians! Black and white striped. Overpasses and underpasses and bridges, oh my! Where are all the garbage-strewn dirt roads?

The grassy median dividing the highway to Bangkok is lined with billboard-sized photos of the Thai king smiling down on his lowly commuting subjects. With his glasses and dainty features, the Thai king doesn’t look like a king, but like a meek office worker. Where is his crown and purple fur robe? He looks nothing like the bloated, ruddy-complexioned royalty of yore, with their glittering jewels and fur pelts. Well, at least the European royalty of yore.

7-Elevens everywhere! On every corner, like Starbucks in Seattle. But at least the food at Starbucks is edible. The food in the Bangkok 7-Elevens is terrible. Thai junk food crammed next to packaged brownies and Twinkie-like creations. No unsalted or unsugared food here.

Urban Outfitters hostel

I stay at a hostel that looks like it was designed by Urban Outfitters. Outside, beyond the wooden hipster deck, lies a small zen garden and pool. Inside: funky cube chairs and couches. Cutesy robotic cartoon characters are imprinted on the bathroom and shower doors.

Seen-it-all-before outdoor night market

For dinner that night, I eat Phad Thai that tastes like it was made in a mall food court, except worse. Is it bad because it’s served in a touristy area? This touristy area is an outdoor night market that I am sent to by one of my hostel’s smiling staffers. He sends me here after learning that I’m in Bangkok for only a night and not interested in clubbing or “Thai massages.”

The night market’s mazes of good-stocked tables spans several streets. But I don’t buy anything. Many of the goods were probably made in Thailand, yet, despite never coming to Thailand, I’ve seen many of the items before. Thanks, globalization and world trade! I already have a beaded elephant purse (bought in Cambodia), and the elephant statues, landscape paintings and screen-print tee shirts that read “Little Miss Sunshine” are nothing new.

I wander by each of the stalls anyway, pretending to admire the goods in the detached but interested air of a window shopper. After completing the maze, I head back to UO hostel, where I experience the stay’s only downside: a screeching, venomous mosquito determined to keep me awake. The needle-nosed bugger attacks the instant I remove my head or arms from the too-hot comforter. Ultimately, exhausted, I choose sweat over bites.

Breakfast help from a transsexual

My flight to India leaves before breakfast at the UO hostel. So I find my own. Food is for sale at several nearby stalls, but I see nothing but meats on sticks. I try asking a seller if she sells anything besides meats on sticks. I ask her in English and Khmer, and she speaks only Thai.

Then help appears. This help is wearing a barely-butt covering pastel pink dress pasted above stiletto heels. She smiles and out comes a deep-throated man voice. And she calls me sir. “What do you want, sir?” she asks me. “Breakfast,” I say. She smiles again and leads me to another meat-on-a-stick stall. After thanking her for her guidance, I decline, and retreat to 7-Eleven for a brownie and can of Nescafe.

Thanks to my nonexistent sense of direction, once outside 7-Eleven’s automatic doors, I am hopelessly lost. Fortunately, I again stumble upon the friendly (assumed) transsexual, who points the way to my hostel.

Flying next to Blanket Man

Two breakfasts later (on the same morning) I am on the plane to Calcutta, sitting next to a man wearing a blanket. It’s white, and gridded like a large dishcloth — a really large dishcloth. The blanket’s tasseled edges drape my seatbelt buckle, and I have to reach under the blanket’s folds to adjust the volume on the movie I’m watching. I don’t talk to the blanket-wearer on the flight, but am tempted to shiver and then ask to borrow his blanket.

The movie I’m watching is Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds.” An explanation for the misspelling is probably given in the movie, but frankly, I soon get bored and stop watching. Because of the poor sound quality always present on airplanes, I had stopped listening soon after the movie started. Still, it’s Tarantino, and I hope to catch the end of the movie on my next two-hour plane ride.

Unfortunately, the next flight is from India to India, and features a measly two Hollywood movies

drowning in a sea of Bollywood movies. Too tired to enjoy an overly dramatic non-English sing-a-long, I end up watching a Richard Gere movie that looks like it was shot in the '80s.

Hello, Calcutta. Goodbye Calcutta.

Despite landing there, I don’t see much of Calcutta. Only the dinky airport armed with rifle-bearing soldiers and the parking lot. In the parking lot I have the sensation of stepping into a bygone era. The lot is filled with miniature black and white cars that look like they were made several decades ago. I later learn they’re Fiats, and are the official taxis of Mumbai. I also learn that the Fiat contract will soon expire, to be replaced by a new contract with some other car company.

In Calcutta, I also see a construction site, which I almost become trapped in during my search for the domestic airport. After directional help from a couple construction workers, I finally end up in Calcutta’s other dinky airport.

Killing time with the non-AIDS-patient German

I have a couple hours to kill before the flight to Mumbai. The minutes easily evaporate while talking to a 60-something German man with a pitted face and a fannypack. He’s on his way to Goa for some sort of medicinal treatment. His jaundiced, sallow skin and scrawny frame give him the look of an AIDS patient, but he insists that the Goa visit is a simple, routine general health procedure. Maybe his AIDS look is simply the look one receives after 28 years in India. He says he spent maybe a decade of those years meditating in the Himalayas.

The non-AIDS-patient German tells me about his past lives over paper cups of chai tea, which he calls India’s national drink. He also calls Bangkok a “terrible city”— “the city that never sleeps.” (I thought that was New York...) Maybe Bangkok doesn’t sleep in the section where he stayed — in a $5 windowless box where the partiers and prostitutes roam. But the city definitely slept in my section, despite the perseverance of my friend, the mosquito.

Although I admittedly didn’t see much of Bangkok, I didn’t see much to refute the German’s scathing critique. Like the wares at the all-night market and the omnipresent 7-Elevens, the city seemed to be constructed of tired sights I’d seen many times before.

I don’t sit next to the German on the flight to Mumbai, and I'm not in the mood to talk to my seatmate, so I have only the boring Richard Gere for company. Fortunately, it’s another measly two-hour flight complete with delicious Indian food.

Waiting, and finally settling, in Mumbai

I eat still more — yet less delicious — Indian food during the four–hour wait for my parents. This long wait is outside — in the airport’s only waiting area. Although it’s nine at night, it’s India, so it’s not cold. But also because it’s India, there are mosquitoes, and their bloodthirsty attacks cause me to spend much of the wait cowering on a stone bench with my fleece wrapped around my bare feet. Of course I didn’t pack any socks — need I remind you it’s India?

Many mosquito bites later, my parents finally emerge from the airport’s open glass doors, and we hitch a cab to our swanky hotel — supposedly Mumbai’s finest. We unexpectedly get upgraded to a suite — honeymoon style — which further ups the swank. I have to sleep on a too-short cot, but hey, we have a killer view of the boardwalk, see-through (sexy?) doors to the shower and toilet, and constant attention from the hotel’s crew of “maám”ers and “sir”ers. Example: “Would the maáms and sir like their free welcome massage now? No?" Five minutes later… “How about now?”

To be continued...

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