Mumbai: Mondegars, Wifi, Beggars and Morality, the usual

Boats in the harbor.

I stayed at the Sea Palace hotel, again. It's on Apollo Bunder, about two blocks down from the Taj, and has the great advantage of being located right along the sea and near enough to Colaba, but not near enough that the tourists-and-hooker contagion of Colaba actually carries over. It's 3000 rupees a night which is very profligate by 22 year old punk standards *but* Mumbai budget lodging is not exactly what you'd call salubrious. Nightmarish actually. Bed bugs are the least of your problems - hookers and horny guys attempting to beat down the door are apparently the other occupational hazards. Can't say I'm thrilled. First time I came to Mumbai, I was going to stay at a hotel very near the Sea Palace, which turned out to be the kind of scuzzy-ass accommodation so deeply beloved by European backpackers with creative piercings and Saudi sex-slave traders the world over.

I was prepared to make the best of it, but as soon as my friends came to collect me, they demanded that I move out immediately. "That place is horrible! It was all over the paper last year - some Saudi drug dealers were running it - you have to get out of there"! So I decamped to the Sea Palace. The primary attribute of the Palace is that it is sort of quiet and no one knocks on my door at night wondering if I would like a date. There's a mossy scent in the air and insofar as I can determine no one ever cleans the rooms, but the AC (importantly) is Arctic-level chilly. The entire facility is done up in 1973 pastels, which I always found a bit comforting.


Cafe Mondegar's art, as done by the beloved Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda. He is fabulous.

Colaba, is of course, the tourist-backpacker central of Mumbai. However, having been in backpacker ghettos in places other then India - it's not such a bad offender. There's plenty of 100% legitimate Mumbaikers prowling around here, and the cafes and restaurants are usually packed with young Indians with similar hipster ambitions as their Western counterparts. The Leopold Cafe is of course Ground Zero for that kind of shit (as was perhaps previously mentioned). The food and the booze are overpriced. For my money, I prefer the Mondegar a little further down. The cartoon art on the walls is fantastic, and the staff seem a bit more friendly.


More of Miranda's work, as seen on the Mondegar walls. Good, good stuff.

I spent that first day walking around Mumbai and feeling inordinately pleased to be there. I love Mumbai, down to its filthy and slightly disreputable heart, and I derive great pleasure from wandering the streets and dodging the taxi-cabs that want to pick me up, for to the Indian mass-pysche, apparently, no white person walks on the street *by choice*.



A friend of mine described Mumbai as London on acid: this is a bit approximate, but gets at the spirit of the thing. I think of it more as, say, the demented love child of London and Miami with a bit of a stimulant problem. The architecture is glorious here, England as viewed through an aspirant and highly Indian filter - everything has pillars and spires and soaring granite and has a patina of age and mold on it. Everything in Mumbai is slightly moldy and slightly damp, everything that is older then a couple of months is growing or has grown a considerable covering of lichen, everything is sliding or sinking into the sea. If the British intended to be here for a long time, they picked the wrong place. Mumbai is capable of regenerating itself, but I doubt anything can last *that* long in this climate - this is not the dry museum-air of Dehi, this is organic, the swamp.

I ended up spending that first evening lurking at the Woodsides, lured there by the promise of free Wifi. There were a lot of attractive and fit young Mumbaikers standing around the bar and talking about their scintillating and culturally signifigant jobs in IT or whatever all around me. The bar was atmospherically lit, and as the name promised, decked out entirely in wood. I ordered a Royal Challenge and set up shop. The wifi, to my great pleasure, actually worked. (To find functioning wifi overseas is miraculous, albeit a miraculous event that has become more and more common in this day and age. It is almost a pity that wifi has become so vastly easy to access, even in the strangest of places, to say nothing of phone network based internet connectivity.


Hellaciously Raj statue as seen in downtown Mumbai, near the museum.

I have of late sat in a bumping and body-odor filled share jeep heading out from Sikkim to Darjeeling, passing through the misty tea plantations of the Raj: I briefly called my mother to let her know I was alive, and also had my Gmail account updated. From 17,000 feet in a jeep, looking over the edge of a precipice, thinking I might die: someone wanted to ask me where was good to eat in New Orleans because they liked my blog and Slow Food was having an event in Sacramento and did I want to purchase a ticket, and Tulane wants my goddamn library book back, and I am going to plummet over the edge of a Sikkimese precipice and die in a horrendous inferno of twisted metal and screaming children and Dutch tourists, my Iphone melted to a hockey puck beneath me.

I made a friend at the bar, which is what often happens when you're alone in an Indian city and run into another foreigner. Charles Assaf from Canada, now working in something involving computers in Mumbai and really, really liking it. He had, many years ago, begun a site called The Steak Guys devoted to reviewing good places to consume cow the world over. The irony of his move to Mumbai is noted. It is always deeply refreshing to me to meet other foreigners who actually like India and find it both pleasurable and interesting (albeit in the manner of "challenging" movies in languages you don't understand starring unattractive people, or food products that involve minor feats of hand-eye-coordination to consume, or well, you get the point, India requires some *effort* to parse out...) We spent some time discussing Mumbai and the impending world domination of the Internet, which is what I always seem to discuss with people when I say I have got a blog. Especially people who have got a blog themselves. Give his a look, it's rather good.

The weather was good that night, with only a few bursts of warm rain to keep the gutters running and the taxi drivers predatory. (The rain in Mumbai is always extremely warm and a bit odiferous - to make the piss reference is a bit uncouth, but it is there). The shop keepers who line the street all the way down had put the plastic wrap up over their wares of knock off purses and t-shirts with offensive phrases on them. They cried out HELLO MADAME to me when I walked by but in a half assed fashion. It was getting late and I had not trained them yet, they were not familar with me.

A few nights later, coming back from Woodsides around 1:00 AM or so, I would be confronted with one of The Mumbai Scams as discussed in detail on India Mike.com. Me padding down the dripping column of shops quickly and intently, for it was later then I liked to be out in Mumbai alone - I was remembering the time when an incoherently drunk and thankfully extremely clumsy man had followed me down the street for a good 15 minutes, plaintively asking me to cross over to *his* side of the road so I could Get To Know Him Better. Something like that. A young guy around my age is lounging in an alleyway with a woman and a baby. I walk by and the woman lazily nods to him: he shrugs, stretches a bit cat-like and shoulders the baby, and begins to follow me. He tugs at my sleeve. "Milk for baby! Baby hungry, madame, you buy milk for baby."

It's a scam. Apparently they take you into a shop that's in on the fix, and you are instructed to buy a large carton of instant milk for a ridiculously inflated price - something around 5000 rupees. Once the earmarked sentimental mook pays up, the conman and the shopkeeper merrily split the profits. The kid gets nothing other then a chapati and a slightly less forceful daily smack across the face then usual - the lot of Indian beggar children. It's a hard life.

It was dark, the street was quiet and slimy and rather profoundly creepy, and the man followed me, wouldn't give up. I ignore all beggars, just look right through them - that's what my Indian friends have taught me to do. It generally works pretty well, but this guy was insistent, and I was the only person on the street so why the hell not? I got enraged, really enraged, which is unusual for me. I wanted desperately, really desperately, to punch the man in the face, to go at him with the nearest bamboo stick, to pulverize him into jelly.

The kid irritated me even more because it was the only thing standing the way of this fantastic and delicious fantasy of violence. I couldn't even roar FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT YOU DOG FUCKING CUNT - usually effective - because of the kid, the damn kid, he had put a cultural veil of protection over himself, he had outsmarted me. I hated both of them utterly.

(Here is where nobility and idealism about poverty in the third world in relation to my own (relative) ostentatious wealth falls apart, on a smelly street in Colaba at two in the morning, right exactly here.)

I admit right here that I hate kids.

India is a terrible place in one sense for those who hate kids, because India will make you hate them twelve times more then you already did. It's the way in which beggars and the poor use kids around here, especially in tourist areas, as cute, insistent, and un-punchable avatars. Street kids in India are almost always under the sway of some sort of begging master or pimp, who deftly extracts every rupee from their grubby little hands and thumps them if they don't cough up. Even the really little kids, as in this case -this particular child was covered in dirt and, apparently totally used to the routine, was limp, inert, and seemed blissfully asleep in a bean-bag like fashion in the guy's arms. Pissed me off all the more that some innocent little squirt was being carted about on a trash-strewn Mumbai street in the service of a renowned scam, a scam that has been going on for twenty years - possibly the man himself was once this limp and smelly child, and had grown up to take part in the glorious and eternal cycle.

"These people want to be poor," some of my Indian friends have said, in reference to the career beggars. "They can't be bothered to do anything else."

I don't know.

I didn't buy any milk.

The Bangalore City Market, The "Real" India,

The Bangalore City Market (some of it).

So. In a Facebook controversy of sorts, I had been accused (fairly gently) of doing India too plush this time, of avoiding the Real India. Now, the Real India concept is one that I find vastly irritating, mainly because it seems to escape the lips of everyone in the West who has been to India, is thinking of going to India, or has ever even vaguely noticed the base existence of India.

I took the Real India question to a number of Indian friends of mine. My Indian friends, I hasten to add, are definitely not what you might define as salt-of-the-earth types. They're uniformly well educated, hold down good jobs (or have done so in the past) and have generally traveled at least somewhat, either nationally or internationally. No, these are not the people of Mumbai hovels, Calcutta orphanages, or Bihar's baking and miserable plains. However, all of them, every single one, took serious umbrage to the notion of a "real" India.


Apples for sale at the market.

As a friend of mine observed: "Why do Westerners think the Real India is something out of Slumdog Millionaire? What, am I not a real Indian because I have a BA and I don't live in a hut? Where the hell do you people get these ideas?"


Flowers at the market.

I suppose it's wrapped up in the Western, educated notion of Authenticity Tourism. In other words, we want to get away from the beaten track and tour-buses sort of travel and get at something real, touch the heart or the soul of a country in a fashion closed off to the average and lazy-minded tourist. This is, I think, a noble goal. But I also think that this goal causes some Westerners to point-blank dismiss all that is not gritty, difficult, and mildly disturbing about India (or any developing country) as "not real" enough for them. As I overheard while in Sikkim, a little-known and incredibly attractive and well-maintained area of India: "Yeah, I mean, I like it here...but it's so Westernized. So clean."

The Sikkimese had better knock that civic pride and prosperity shit off if they want to draw the Western bohemian tourist set, apparently. Maybe they should import some starving children and leprosy-ridden beggers from nearby Calcutta to jazz the place up.

This notion that a clean, safe, and functional place is somehow "false" is, to put it plainly, a load of hooey. And highly offensive to the Inspiring Native People to boot, who are often extremely proud of what they've achieved in just those areas of cleanliness, safety, and functionality.

Think of it this way. When you receive friends from overseas or out of state, do you immediately drive them to the nearest ghetto-area (and there are plenty, even in the USA) to show them the "real" America because your nice house and interesting neighborhood somehow lack "authenticity"? Somehow, I doubt it.

Now, I think that a tourist should take it upon themselves to get out of the "nice" areas and officially sanctioned tourist areas. Slum tourism is a sticky moral issue in my book, but it seems to work for some. Volunteering is another popular, if somewhat controversial, way of getting at a reality not accessible at the immediate surface. These are things that are good. But they are not the only things.

I refuse to buy that you are somehow being a decadent and ignorant Westerner if you occasionally skew towards the "nice" end of the tourist spectrum, even in developing countries. If staying in a safe hotel that is refreshingly bed-bug free and avoiding cheapie night-buses is a flagrant denial of the Real India on my part, then, well, I suppose I am guilty as charged. To quote Anthony Bourdain, I guess I am a mere tourist and not a traveler.

Another surprisingly uniform thought emerged from my Indian friends.


Dried fruit cart.

"There's no such thing as a single India. You can't define a Real Indian, or even a stereotypical India. India is a bunch of different things mashed together, more so then anywhere else." In other words, there is no Real India (just like there is no Real America) and you are out of luck if you intend to find it somewhere untouched and off the tourist-track. There is no real India, and the notion will set off a fiery and impassioned debate if put to a group of Indians pretty much anywhere.

That is one blanket stereotype about Indians that is 100% true. They are incredibly argumentative).

But anyway. I was feeling guilty about this Real India thing, and so I decided to go out and have a look at the closest thing wealthy Bangalore offers to the Real India of tourist and literary fame. I headed to the Bangalore City Market.


The market building.

The City Market is technically located inside an ornate and lattice work-ridden building in the center of town. This is not actually the case, because the Market is an enormous and tentacle-bearing organism, an organism that has spilled out of its original surroundings (if it was ever contained by them) and has grabbed at most of the neighborhood nearby.


The City Market is nearish to Lalbagh Gardens, but it is easy enough to tell when you're almost there: the automobile and hardware shops increase in numbers, a lot of signs in Arabic and people in white robes appear, and the number of free-roaming cattle and women carrying stuff on their heads increases exponentially. Congratulations, you've made it to the Market.

I like the Market for a few reasons.


Pomegranates at the market.

The first is that the Market clears up a number about mysteries about the operation of Bangalore as a mostly-functional civic unit. The Market is, to put it simply, where most stuff comes from.



Ever wonder where your neighborhood fruit guy gets his stuff? (yes, the one who shouts about fruit while wheeling about his cart at 6 in the morning, turning your thoughts to murder, that guy.)



Why, of course, he goes to the local pineapple wholesaler, who crouches spider-like in the middle of what looks like a pineapple massacre, and sells his stuff to all comers. There's other Guys for all manner of other fruits: bananas, melons, pomegranates, apples, custard apple, guava, you name it, it's here. Don't ask where it came from.




Many restuarants in Bangalore serve their thalis on banana leaves. Paan sellers also use smaller leaves to wrap their mildly narcotic goodies up in. Well, this is where they get them. From this lady. Let's pretend they are given a good chemical bath before coming to the table. (That's a good one).



I am endlessly fascinated by these enormous cones of spices and sandal-paste. I have no idea how they are made or how they manage to stand up like that, without losing their structural integrity. If someone can tell me how this is done, I'd be very grateful.



Ever wonder where the endless, endless buckets and mounds and bags of flowers used for puja come from? Well, here. The Central Market may be better termed the Flower Market, for that is the good that now dominates the entire central area of the building.



It's an absolutely magical sort of place - the corriders are small and incredibly crowded, and you squeeze through as if conveyed by an outside force, shoved along in the crush of bodies, past stall after stall of fresh and heavily scented flowers. The flowers mask the usual India scent of body-odoer and cattle dung, or at least they mix it up and turn it into something more roundly appealing.



The boys at the stalls shout when you go by and hand you armfuls of roses and marigolds: I am totally inept at tucking them behind my ear in the demure fashion of the South Indian girls, but I do them the honor of trying.



The flowers are everywhere being fashioned into garlands, piled into immense structures, or crushed into the ground by the millipede-like churn of a thousand almost conjoined feet. You come in and out of the flower trading area very quickly mainly because you are not able to stop moving, not unless you find something sturdy to hold onto, an anchor in the sea of chlorophyll.




The first time I came here, I was somewhat terminally stoned. The combined effect of the flowers color and scent and the constant movement of the selling arena was, well, psychedelic. You might want to try it. It's not like half of the sellers aren't stoned themselves, you know.




The flower market's best aspect is from above. If you walk up the stairs, you'll find yourself with a fantastic view of the action below. Great photo ops. You tourist, you.



A lot of people in India like it when you take their photo. You have to be careful about this - it's often a scam involving pay-per-snap moolah in touristy areas - but is usually an entirely authentic request in places like the Market. This old lady just wanted to see what she looked like these days. Like this. There was some gesturing in broken English and Hindi afterwards. I recall that I got a marigold out of the deal. Life goes on.



There's quite a few restaurant supply stalls up here. If you ever wondered where you might acquire a karahi big enough to cook a reasonably-sized person in, well, here you are. Not that anyone would ever want to do that.



The Mosque near here. This and Commercial Street are the more "Muslim" parts of town, which is apparent enough judging by signage and what people on the street are wearing. I was in Bangalore at about the height of Ramadan, which meant the faithful were taking especial pains to play by the rules.



India is defined by its street-side food sellers, isn't it? What a shame that us Westerners are advised to stay away from the street-stands, for fear of stomach bugs and possible death. Tragically, the warnings are extremely sensible. But what tasty looking stuff is on offer.