If I'm in Bombay, why aren't I at the movies?

Well! I just used my first bathroom in India that didn't come equipped with a water spigot and jug for washing oneself (in place of using toilet paper) after. How very chi-chi and western. It figures: I'd just finished eating dinner with a fork for the first time in 3 weeks. And where did I find these unusual amenities? At the Taj hotel, of course. Not the beautiful old one just across the street from the Gateway to India, sadly, but a modern highrise almost at the very southernmost tip of Bombay. Despite the lack of aesthetic allure, however, the restaurant had superb Konkan coast cuisine (Goan, Keralan, Bombay). I dined on some mysterious fish topped with a masala paste, folded into banana-leaf packets and roasted. I very much wanted to try a crab in garlic butter starter, too, but I didn't think I'd be able to finish it. I'm not eating very much here, which may explain my lack of food posts.

I arrived in Bombay yesterday evening, having successfully smuggled my leatherbaby on the plane in my bag (must be the high priestess aura I'm exuding). Despite news reports that passengers in Bombay were becoming ill due to the lack of garbage pick-up and latrine cleaning in the airport, the terminal seemed about as sanitary as I'd expect. There are murmors that the strike may be over soon, and I'm definitely hopeful that the trash will have been collected before I have to spend 2 hours at the airport on Tuesday.

My cab driver tried to cheat me, of course -- it's getting to be old hat by now. And I've learned to revel in the fact that in order for them to succeed, they're entirely dependent on their passengers' ingrained good manners. To wit: I emerged from the airport shrugging off the touts, and went directly to the traffic police booth. I was informed that a cab without a/c would be 350 rps to my destination, and one with a/c would be 550. Since it was 32 degrees out, and Bombay's traffic jams are legendary, I decided to spring for the a/c. The traffic policeman wrote down my name on his clipboard, handed me into the cab, and said, "you pay him 550 rps." Well, about 15 minutes into the ride, the first time we hit a spot of traffic, the cab driver informed me that because of said traffic, I would be paying him on the meter. Aha, I thought: thanks for warning me. I made sure to have my two-part bag neatly zipped together, and when we arrived at my destination, got myself and my luggage out at the same time as the driver was whipping a towel off the dashboard to reveal a previously-hidden meter, which read 715. With my bag on my back, I proceeded to hand him 550 rps -- or to try to, at any rate. No, I owed him 715, he insisted. I told him I owed him 550. No -- 715! Well, I was going into my hotel now, and he could take the 550, or take nothing. It was too expensive to begin with. And if he hadn't tried to cheat me, he'd have gotten a tip. Bad move on his part.

Despite my bravado, I decided not to leave my room for a while, just in case he was lurking outside to berate me. Actually, to be honest, I was feeling rather intimidated by Bombay. The Rough Guide (yes, I know I should stop listening to it, but it's all I've got -- and it did direct me to the absolutely lovely restaurant I'd never have otherwise found tonight) warned that Bombay's heat, humidity, and crowds made it more of an experience to struggle through than one to enjoy, and after several days in the relaxed small(ish) towns of the South, I wasn't necessarily looking forward to big-city chaos again. I even found myself thinking, as a form of reassurance, that I didn't actually have to go out and do anything -- I could just stay in my hotel room. The only trouble is that my hotel room doesn't even have any windows to speak of, although it's quite nice in other respects -- huge, and with an odd private entrance off to the side of the building's main door. I think it used to be a nightclub of some kind: there's a hand-lettered sign outside the door noting that "Turcoise" is closed, and people shouldn't ring the bell. Truly bizarre. I decided, eventually, to just stay in for the evening, and settled in peacefully to watch the British version of Animal Planet. Did you know that in order to work as an RSPCA inspector, you have to be able to abseil down a 60-foot cliff? The organization does more than 100 cliff rescues every year. So there's another occupation I'm utterly unsuited for.


This morning, after my quiet night pretending I wasn't in India, I was awoken by the sound of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of crows, and went outside to discover what I'd suspected last night: that if my room had had a window, it would have been looking directly over the sea -- and I just might have been able to see the Gateway of India, a few blocks up the street, out of the corner of my eye. Said gateway is near and dear to my heart, as it was erected in honour of George V's and Mary's visit to India in 1911, and was also the site of the last British withdrawal in 1947. I photographed it in the morning mist today, but I really have to get a picture of it with the sun going down over it tomorrow night. Since it's on the eastern edge of the penninsula, I'm not quite sure how I'll manage this artistic feat, but I do intend to try. Maybe I'll get lucky.

As I'd wasted an entire evening (during which, I discovered later today, I could have been watching a free performance of Hamlet in the park), I decided to get an early start on the day -- and perhaps do my sight-seeing before the heat struck. First, though, I enquired at the front desk as to whether I could be moved to a front-facing room with a sea view. I was told the answer was yes, and that if I had my bag all packed, it would be moved to my new room at mid-morning. This meant packing up my still-damp laundry, but it seemed a small price to pay. I then set out, heading northwards towards the bulk of the city. Stopping for breakfast at a small cafe (yes, recommended by the RG, and rightfully so), I was still on the road by 9:00. And here I will just note that I have no idea what the RG's writers were talking about: Bombay is great. No more crowded than any other city I've been to; less, even, than Calcutta or parts of Delhi. Now, this may have had something to do with the fact that it's Sunday, when about 2/3 of businesses and attractions are closed (the remaining 1/3 are shut on Mondays: convenient, isn't it, that those are the two days I'm here for?). Still, though, enough was going on that I'd be surprised if crowds were seriously diminished. I guess I'll find out tomorrow if I'm wrong.

One of the reasons I like the city, I'll admit, is the immense concentration of good, 19th-century (and some 18th) British-built buildings, all in much better shape than the significantly smaller number that remain in Calcutta. Walking up MG (yes, it's short for Mahatma Gandhi) Rd., I might be in London -- except for the sidewalks crowded with vendors hawking sunglasses, sugarcane juice, and every kind of worthless junk imaginable.Oh -- and the pedestrians walking 4 and 5 deep in the streets to avoid them. Bombay, unlike other Indian cities I've been to, has not only traffic lights but pedestrian lights as well -- only nobody really seems to pay any attention to them. Traffic's much less chaotic here than elsewhere, though: rickshaws (auto and cycle) are banned from the downtown areas, so most of the vehicles are travelling pretty much the same speed, which helps tone things down a bit. No one's quite as eager to pass, so something resembling lane discipline exists.

I walked up out of Colaba, the neighborhood I'm staying in, and paid a visit to the campus of Bombay University, which rivals St. Martiniere, the boys' school in Lucknow, in gothic embelishment. The latter is still more eccentric, I think, for for a lover of turrets and curlicues, it was hard to beat the university library, both inside and out. Several librarians followed me around suspiciously as I wandered through the reading rooms taking photographs, but nobody actually asked me to leave. I did bring my college ID with me to India, and I was planning to whip it out to prove my bona fides if necessary, but it fortunately didn't come to this. What next? The high courts -- similarly ornate. David Sassoon's library, embellished on a smaller scale -- and, sad to say, private. The lobby, though, which was open to the public, had an absolutely gorgeous exhibition on of photos of the city from the late 19th century. I was positively drooling. The one time in the past few weeks I wished somebody were trying to sell me postcards, and I'm utterly out of luck.

I decided to skip the Prince of Wales museum (which has actually been renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya -- so pardon me if I stick to the old nomenclature), figuring that I really wasn't in the mood to poke around through museum galleries. My luck thus far with museums in India has been pretty poor: they've tended to exhibit an odd, ill-lit collection of whatever happened to be sitting around that day, which huge numbers of people are for some reason rushing to view; since my patience with both museums and crowds can be indifferent at best, this was probably a wise call on my part. Instead, I went to the nearby synagogue. The gatekeeper, after asking me if I was Jewish and hearing me reply in the affirmative (would he ask me to prove it?), let me in, and I was shown around by an elder in the community who showed me a miscellany of photos and documents related to the temple, and told me about Bombay's apparently thriving Jewish community. He asked why I hadn't come for services on Friday or Saturday, and offered to give me the address of the Rabbi, so I could pay a call on him. At this point, I was feeling a bit over-Jewished (and a bit gulty about going to Mass instead of temple two days before, even though The gentleman I was talking to confirmed that there are no synagogues in Goa), so I thanked him for his time, and wandered further north towards the railway station. Victoria Terminus. It's now also called something else, only no one ever calls it that. And the neighborhood I was in is still called after the mounted statue of Edward VII that used to grace one of its traffic circles. Where is it now, I wonder? I was told about a statue graveyard in Bombay, but I don't know if I'll be able to track it down tomorrow.

The reason I was going to the train station, by the way, was not to catch a train, but rather to gawk at still more Victorian architectural excess. By now I was getting quite envious of the Indians: they got an awful lot of the good stuff. In case it's not apparent by now, by the by, I think I walked about 5 or 6 miles today, all told. I was out and about for almost 10 hours. My farthest point north was the station; my farthest south was the church erected in memory of British soldiers killed in the Afghan wars, in the military cantonment almost all the way at the southernmost tip of the city. Yes -- more churches. That was only one of two I went to today, the other being St. Thomas's, near the station (more or less), and -- I think -- the oldest British building in the city. It has the best collection of memorial tablets I've seen anywhere, both in terms of their carving and of their verbiage. After trying to photograph a number of them, I was inspired to buy a (large, heavy, relatively expensive) book on the church that includes, among other nice details, an appendix transcribing every tablet in the building. Saves me work. Except for the work of carrying it. Oh dear.

Since it's my penultimate day, I also did a bit of souvenir shopping. Most stores were closed, but I went into one chicly traditional fabric and clothing store and tried on multiple garments I couldn't entirely identify. The fabrics were beautiful, but the shop wasn't airconditioned, and pulling clothes on and off my sweaty body was pretty grim. They only let me take 3 items nto the fitting room at a time, so I had to continually drag my clothes on and off. And, let me point out, when the customary costume is made up of TWO pieces (salwaar and kameez), 3 pieces doesn't really compute. And trying on clothes over a moneybelt is a tad difficult. And Indian women apparently have thinner leges than I do. Or at least the hip ones do. So it's loose trousers for me, thank you very much; actually, the tight ones wouldn't fit over my feet, never mind my calves.

And that pretty much takes me to the point where I trudged back to my hotel, stood under an ice-cold shower for a full 5 minutes -- then took my clothes off, and continued to stand there for another 10. The laundry, it is needing to be done, ne?

(Oh -- and just for the record, they hadn't moved me to a new room. Nor had they cleaned the old one. At least I didn't have to worry about my stuff getting nicked in transit, I guess. No window for me...)