Until the mid-90s, Mumbai was known as Bombay, and before that as Bombaya. The islands of Mumbai were a Portuguese possession, then given to England as part of a dowry. The Portuguese named the bay of Mumbai "Bom Baya", for "Good Bay" -- and thus the islands were the Bombaya Islands. The English Anglicized it into Bombay, and the Indians renamed it in the 90s to Mumbai, a name that had been in some use locally for many years and comes from the local name of a goddess -- Mumba. In general it seems that nearly everything in India and especially in Mumbai has been renamed since Indian independence. Victoria Terminus, the airport, the Prince of Wales Museum, Crawford Market, and even the famous Colaba Causeway all now have extremely long Indian names, though nobody seems to use them.
Anyway, my week in Mumbai was a great chance to more fully acclimatize to India, which, especially in the cities, can be seriously overwhelming in its size, pace, and foreignness. Mumbai is the most crowded place I've ever been -- it's like the entire city is made up of one large crowd trying to leave the Verizon Center after a Hoyas victory, including a large contingent of poorly behaved, sore-losing Syracuse fans. Add to this that sidewalks are scarce, traffic patterns practically nonexistent, and everything from carts to beggars to feral dogs are constantly getting underfoot and the first day or two in Mumbai is an exercise in nonstop hyperawareness and persistent mental fatigue. So many of the things I take for granted in the States, like crossing the street, required my complete focus when I got here. I've gotten fairly used to it, but still the frenetic energy of the city is palpable and alternately invigorating and exhausting.
On to the sights! As people who have backpacked on their own know, at the beginning the hardest part tends to be being on one's own, especially at night and especially in one's room. This has certainly been my experience, but I've been fairly lucky to have met a variety of other backpackers and to have had a few friends sprinkled along the route. My first night in central Mumbai I met two Canadians on the last leg of their eight-week backpacking journey across India. I got to know one of them, D, by lending her my netbook so she could check her email. They invited me to join them the next day for a day trip to Elephanta, an island between Mumbai and the mainland.
Getting to Elephanta involves taking a one-hour ferry from the Gateway to India. The walk there was my first long walk through Mumbai, down the Fort business-government neighborhood where I was staying and through Colaba, the central touristic section. Man, this city is smoggy! Combine its extreme air pollution with the humidity and fog coming off the bay, and on this particular morning visibility was probably about 100 meters. Still, I caught my first glimpse of the Prince of Wales Museum, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, and Gateway to India -- and we were on the boat.
The only thing to do on Elephanta is to visit a set of caves containing ancient Hindu temples, the most famous of which honors Shiva. I could write a page or two about these caves, but this post has already gotten fairly long and I'm still on Day 1. I'll just hit the highlight of the higlights, the central stone carving of the three forms of Shiva -- the Creator, Maintainer/Protector, and Destroyer. Here, Shiva the Creator is seen in his creative dance, arms flailing while his face remains calm and serene. To the left and right you can see the faces of his alter-egos. The rest of the cave is full of magnificent carvings of other episodes in the tale of Shiva, from the creation of the Ganges to his defeat of various other gods to his marriage to Parvati.
Oh yes, and this particular island was crawling with monkeys, which while adorable at first are extremely bold and can be a nuisance. We saw one steal a bag of chips from a small child, and when we stopped for a drink at an on-island bar we were treated to the comical sight of the proprietor rushing out every few minutes to shoo away (sometimes by throwing rocks at) the half-dozen monkeys who repeatedly attempted to sneak up on patrons and steal their victuals.
Getting up and down Elephanta takes you through this beautiful but kitschy market, seen below. One thing I have to say for India is that even at its most touristy and obnoxious, it can still have some serious charm.
People, including locals, often say that there isn't much to do in Mumbai, but that wasn't what I found. However, "experiencing" Mumbai is as much or more about walking the city and eating its food than going to its museums and official attractions, which are a bit thin on the ground. In Colaba, the main tourist neighborhood, I saw the massive outdoor Gateway to India, took a tour of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel (and on separate occasions visited its bar -- the first licensed bar in the country -- and had High Tea in its lounge), visited the Prince of Wales Museum (according to my guidebook the best museum on the entire subcontinent), and visited quite a few interesting shops. I also ate at Leopold's Cafe, the quintessential and charming Mumbai tourist trap; Busaba, a higher-end restaurant where I went to dinner with some American-educated Indian friends; and Kailash Parbat, a 60-year-old Parsi restaurant where I ate sanitized versions of Mumbai street food.
Fort, the neighborhood where I stayed, and its northern environs are also home to Victoria Terminus, Mumbai's grand and gothic central train station; the old Indian Post Office building; and Crawford Market, a classic Mumbai fruit and vegetable bazaar. There are also quite a few good restaurants, arguably the best and most famous of which is a Parsi place called Britannia, where I ate their signature Berry Pulao.
Moving west, I walked Marine Drive, also sometimes called "The Queen's Necklace," which is the long road running along Back Bay (think Lakeshore Drive in Chicago). In addition to taking in the Mumbai skyline and the boardwalk scene, I stopped for drinks at the rooftop bar of the InterContinental to watch the sunset. Marine Drive leads past Chowpatty Beach, a beautiful-from-far-away, horrifying-from-close-up beach where Mumbaikers come to escape the craziness of the city and attempt to grow gills and flippers by swimming in the water, which is filthier than most sewers I've seen. A bit north of that is Malabar Hill, where the rich build their exclusive homes and where I visited a gorgeous Jain Temple, considered the prettiest temple in Mumbai. Again, I could fill an entire entry with pictures and thoughts on each of these sites, and it pains me not to, but I don't think anybody would want to read that or that I'd have the time to do that and continue the trek.
Mumbai was incredible, exhausting, fascinating, disgusting, fun, and at times lonely. It was certainly memorable. It's very cliched to say that India is a nation of paradoxes: extreme wealth coexisting next to extreme poverty; the lifestyles of the past and the future colliding; blah blah. But it's true, and while it's true to some degree everywhere including the States, the striking thing about Mumbai is how unavoidable these paradoxes are. Yes, we have both poverty and excessive wealth in the States, but for better and for worse you can usually go about your day without thinking too much about or seeing those contradictions. In Mumbai, and probably in India, that's not true. You can't step or even look outside without seeing it. When you fly into the city, you fly over Asia's largest slum, Dharavi. When your private car pulls into the Taj Palace, you're feet away from people living like it's the 14th Century. Feral dogs lie rotting alive in the streets; toddlers learn to crawl on trash-strewn sidewalks; grown adults squat in the middle of an upmarket boulevard to relieve themselves; and among it all, the homegrown rich of India and the borrowed rich of other countries do their shopping and sip High Tea and snap their photographs. Not in different neighborhoods, and not even on different streets. Cheek by jowl.
Perhaps what I'll take most from Mumbai is a new appreciation for how deep the depths of poverty can be. Some of my friends will know that my favorite sports metaphor is "Born on third and thought you hit a triple" -- that many of us find ourselves graduates of great colleges, with relatively secure and leisurely lives ahead of us, and think that we can take credit for it, and I suppose to some degree we can. But never have I felt more lucky for the circumstances in which I was born and raised than these last few weeks. What would I have accomplished if I had been born in rural India and moved into a slum in Mumbai to work years towards earning $2.50 a day for the title "room-boy" in a cheap hostel, working 12 hours a day, 340 days a year, sending most of my earnings home as remittance, and living in a clapboard hut on the roof of the building with a dozen other people as roommates? All the talent and skill in the world can amount to nothing (on my Westernized scale) if the circumstances aren't right. Boy, have I been lucky.
Despite all of Mumbai's paradoxes -- invigorating, exhausting; modern, backwards -- there is one adjective to describe it that needs no hedge: humbling.
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