Bollywood
Posted in India | By tim |
Finally, the day comes when we have to wave goodbye to paradise and return to civilisation once more. To be honest, tempers were beginning to fray due to too many card games lost on my part (!) and feet were itching to move on, so it’s probably for the best. Panaji comes and goes uneventfully and we board a 10 hour sleeper train bound for the big smoke.
We arrive mid-morning and after some map-reading confusion, pay 20Rs for a five-minute death trip by taxi to a place we thought was miles away. Our crazed driver drives too fast and we nearly kill two pedestrians who are forced to leap off the pavement James Bond style while this nutter just honks his horn.
This is Mumbai, destined to become the worlds 2nd largest city by the year 2000. Three thousand people move to Mumbai every day, most of them setting up homes in ghettos around the edge of the city. Half of the city’s 15 million inhabitants don’t have access to tap water or electricity. A recent report claimed that breathing the air here is reportedly like smoking 20 cigarettes a day and it certainly smells like it. The oppressive heat is a lot like Hong Kong. We have a day to spend here, bags lodged in the train station, before we catch a flight home this evening.
We find some useful ‘Emporiums’ where we can wander in the air-con cool and spend our last Rupees. I impulsively buy a designer shirt on VISA. It is to replace the shirt I lost to the monkey in Agra and to make up for the fact that my single other shirt now smells so bad I fear I won’t be allowed in the aircraft. I have all my photos developed at a little street lab and looking over them in a dingy back street bar provides some nice reminders of our paradise lost.
In our long and, as it turns out, expensive, taxi-ride to the airport across rush hour Mumbai, I see an advert which simply says “Rule #1: There are no rules”. It’s a jeans advert, hand painted by Indians, but for me it succinctly captures, better than any other phrase, the real India I have experienced. There are certainly no rules to the road and the only good thing about rush hour in Bombay is that none of the crazed Indian drivers can reach top speed…
And so to the airport which provides luxuries at a price. A poor meal and a long wait are all that is left of a great holiday, finishing as always, just as we really got started.
But the sun setting over the dusty streets of this huge mother city is beautifully alluring despite the painfully memorable ghetto sights we are constantly bombarded with. Our own “paradise” back home, so far away, is regularly brought into sickening contrast. But there is no room in the traveller’s emotional toolbox for guilt at how differently we live. For one thing, the Indians enjoy their lives too much for any of that to matter. For another thing, Indian life throws so many beautiful and awe-inspiring sights at you in such a short space of time, that you can only wonder at how unlucky anyone who has never been there really is.
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