Mumbai: a Life of Pretensions

After two and a half months in India, Mumbai was an oasis of wine, steak, cheese and yoghurt granola...

Most travelers we had met spoke as Mumbai as being a crazy, chaotic, dirty, noisy city, that if one was not careful could traumatize one's fragile Western conception of the world for life. However, for most of these people Mumbai was their first stop in India, and they would soon realize how much crazier and more adventurous it gets once one leaves the magalopolis.
          We decided to stay in a very cheap hotel; it was CAD$14 a night for both of us: no AC, shared bathroom. The hotel was located in the south of Mumbai, close to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, some fancy restaurants, and art galleries and museums. It was on the fourth floor of a small building beside a sixteenth-century, sky blue sinagogue (India contains one of the oldest Jewish diasporas in the world). The stairs wrapped around the old elevator which had a metallic acordeon door. In the elevator a drunk man would spend his days working as a lift operator. He would bring the elevator up and down after the hotel guests pushed the elevator's button which was mechanically connected to a music box that played a Lambada.
           When the lift conductor was not working the elevator would go out of service. This would force us to take the stairs, which were covered in garbage and construction detritus--including a toilet seat--and whose once white walls were now finelly decorated with red-tobacco-stained spits.
           At night many homeless people would find refuge in our hotel's stairwell. It was hard to come back to our hotel after our nights of indulging in wine and steak, and step over and around these well-dressed women and men that simple had no place to sleep. I believe the race for a spot in our hotel's "stairwell hotel" started early in the evening because we never saw the same person twice; no one was entitled to the space, only he who arrived first and a golden mutt that always slept on the third step of the first floor.
          Sadly (or not), the extreme reality check that we experienced at our hotel every night after spending lots of Rupees in food did not stop us from pretending we were part of Mumbai's wealthy scene. We even had Japanese food at Iron Chef Morimoto's restaurant in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. It was absolutely delicious! but we are, of course, absolutely broke after Mumbai.
          Luckily, Kerala is cheap (we have found accomodation for CAD$20 a night: private bathroom and three meals included) and communist, putting us back in touch with the possibility of a well-educated, equal society.

On the train from Jodhpur to Mumbai

Taj Mahal Palace Hotel

India Gate

Yes, very blurry, but Caleb was trying to picture my love for audio tours!

At the Prince of Wales Museum

Yeap, driking champaigne

Shanty Town

Choor Bazaar: Buying Antiques

Ghat

Jaisalmer and Camel Safari: "La última Coca-Cola del desierto"

Only a few people are interested in coming to India, and most of them come from November to May. So when we told people in Toronto that we will be traveling in India from May to October they said we were crazy. First, we would experience India's Summer with temperatures as high as 48°C, and then the monsoon would come. In an act od bravery--and stupidity--we decided to reject all advice and head right into the desert.
          Jaisalmer, a city of 70 thousand people, 150 km. or so East of Pakistan, is a magical, Medieval place, literally built out of sand. There are no trees, there are no rivers, there are no plants growing on walls; there is no vegetation anywhere--except from the bautifully ornate sand-stone carvings that display intricate organic configurations and that appear to cover the whole city.
          Our hotel room, which took us a couple hours to find, was beautiful. It was in a 300-year old house and had a haveli feel. It also had the most amazing balcony window! When the hotel owner showed us the room we suspected he did not know the difference between a window and a balcony; what he kept refering to as a balcony looked like a shuttered window. We opened it, and we realized that our room contained the most wonderful, tiny, sand-stone engraved alcove balcony, in which one could not stand without hitting one's head.
         We spent pur first three days in Jaisalmer reading in our balcony, going to the fort for mango juice and playing karam in our hotel's rooftop. On the fourth day we had arranged to do a "desert/camel safari." Typically these safaris can have as many as 20 tourists and 10 guides, all trekking out into the desert to, as all the traveling agencies say, "sleep under the stars." But, since we were traveling in the Summer season, when few are insane enough to go to Rajasthan, our camel safari would just be the two of us, one camel boy "named" Muna (Hindi for boy. Later we discovered his real name was Mool) and three camels, Marco, Baloo and Chocolate.
          Caleb was very excited for the camel safari, and had--under the advice of a travel agent--gone to purchase "authentic" desert safari clothes, which oddly none of the men in the desert seem to wear.
          A jeep was coming to pick us up at eight o'clock in the morning. Caleb put on a white-cotton shirt, a red Ali Baba or Alladin pants and a green turban; I put on some pants and a shirt.
          The jeep took us to some sights before dropping us off in the desert. We went to visit the local Maharaja's family cemetery, with tombs dating from the 1600s to as late as 1960; then we went to a Jain temple which was beside a dried-up lake that was probably very beautiful at some point; and finally, we visited an abandoned village. The legend has it that this was a Brahman (Priest caste) town in which one beautiful woman lived. The local Maharaja, from the Kshatriya (Warrior/Prince) caste found out about this girl and told the village he was coming to take her away for marriage. So rather than facing the shame and bad karma of allowing one of their daughters to marry into a lower caste, the towm collectively decided to abandone the village. Ironically, because this village is empty, it is now where young couples come to hold each other and give each other shy, little kisses, away from the scolding eyes of their protective parents.

Maharaja's Cemetery

Maharaja's tomb. He is accompanied by his widows, who in the Hindu tradition were force to comit sati, a ceremony in which the widows would burn themselves to accompany their husband in death

Abandoned house. It was full of bats!

Abandoned village

We wentt back on the highway and drove for another ten minutes. All of a sudden we saw a guy and three camels waiting for us. That's when our camel safari officially started, steps away from the road.

Baloo and Chocolate, and a wanna-be desert man

***

FIRST DAY

-Loaded up the camels and road them to a close-bny village to give them some water.
-Then walked to rest under the sahde of a single tree. Ate lunch and had a nap.
-Muna told us the story of a friend of his, another camel boy, who married a rich Japanese tourist; Caleb became suspicious.
-After napping and feeding some goats we headed off to the desert.
-Caleb began to feel sick and begged Muna to stop the Safari. Muna said that we were 30 mins away from the big sand dunes where he wanted us to sleep. But because we were already at a sand dune caleb said "good enough. I feel sick," and collapsed under another tree.
-Being the intelligent care-giver that I am? I proceeded to feed Caleb the last (only) Pepsi we had.
-30 minutes later Caleb was doing Mahraja poses on the dunes.

Ahora entiendo de verdad el dicho que dice "se cree la última Coca-Cola del desierto" y pienso que en Colombia lo usamos a veces sin pensar en el poder y el peso que este popular dicho tiene. ¡La  última Coca-Cola del desierto hace milagros! La persona que se crea la última Coca-Cola del desierto debe tener la abilidad de traer personas de vuelta a la vida y de curar diarreas instantaneamente.

-After a delicous dinner, we carried blankets upto the top of the sand dune, and arranged three "beds."
-Muna sang us some local Gipsy songs.
-We fell asleep beneath the stars. The travel agents were right: it was beautiful!
-I was very happy; Caleb was doing so-so.

Caleb on the verge of dying

Marco and I: it was love at first sight

"Running Maharaja"

Sunset and wind turbines

Our beds

***

SECOND DAY

-We road the camels top Muna's village.
-After the success of the previous-day-Pepsi medication, Caleb was determined to buy as many Pepsis as possible. When we arrived to the village, a semi-dilapidated town with randomly organized mud/concrete houses, the store was close, and instead of Pepsi Muna's uncle offered us piping hot, spicy masala chai (tea).
-The village girls decended on me and try to persuade me to give them my engagement ring. When I said no to giving them my engagement ring, or my bracelets, or one Rupee, the girls were no longer my friends.
-That night we went to a bigger sand dune were we slept, and Muna told us two fascinating things. Firstly, he told us about his American girlfriend, Maya, who was a 20-year old waiter somewhere in the States. She had gone on a solo, four-day safari a year ago. Muna pointed to the three where they had met. He was very secretive about it because his family could not know that he had any romantic relationship. We felt bad for him because he was clearly holding onto the indea of his American girlfriend as a possible escape from his life in Rajasthan, but we were pretty sure that--given our understanding of the differences of Rajasthani and American sexuality--what might have been considered three very meaningful nights for Muna might not have been other than a playful anecdote for Maya.
          Secondly, Muna told us about the insane amount og money Rajasthanis spend in their weddings. His older brother jad just been married the year before, and they spent Rupees 300 thousand (CAD$6,000). To give you a sense of how much this is relative to their income, Muna makes Rupees 2,500 a month (CAD$50). It would be as if Caleb and I spent CAD$500,000 in our wedding!
          Another way of looking at it is that Muna and his family are all camel boys who work for the owners of the camels used for the safari. So although we were paying the camel owner Rupees 3,000 a day to go on the safari, Muna was making less than that a month. As Muna said many times, his business dream would be to buy his own camels and start his own company, thus increasing his income 20 times over. Here is the crazy thing: a full-grown, trained camel costs Rupees 25,000, so if they had spent half of what they spent in his brother's wedding, they could have bought six camels, more than enough to start a camel safari company. Muna also told us that Maya had even given him as a gift some money to buy a camel, but that he had been pressured by the men in the family that knew about his relationship to give the money to his brother.

Muna

Muna's nieces

***

THIRD DAY

-We woke up and saw a wild peacock right in front of us.
-We tried to chase after it to take his picture, but soon learned that peacocks can actually fly!
-We road the camles some more, came back to Jaisalmer and upgraded our accomodation to an AC room.

Wild peacock!

Amber Fort

Srinagar's airport and Jaipur (The Pink City)

One of the differences between Caleb and Juliana is our relationship to airports. We woke up in Srinagar and went out for breakfast (boiled eggs, toast, and juice—of all our meals, breakfast is consistently the least India); our flight was at two o’clock, and we had read that because of the political tensions in Kashmir we had to give ourselves more time than we usually do for a domestic flight. The problem is that while Juliana’s family had her flying alone in Colombia from the age of six, Caleb’s family has never been later than half-an-hour-early for everything. So, what Juliana considers to be the “usual time” before a domestic flight is considerably shorter than what Caleb considers it to be.  Predictably, after breakfast, Juliana wanted to go for a latte and a chocolate cake, while Caleb was ready to hire a helicopter and flight directly to the runway. Also predictably, we found ourselves drinking lattes and eating cake. Also predictably, we found ourselves in a tuktuk, in a traffic jam, two hours before the flight, with Caleb being reduced to shallow gasps of air and evil looks at his fiancé, and Juliana having to make soft apologies, while secretly savouring pieces of chocolate cake that she could still find in her mouth.

We arrived one hour and forty minutes before the flight. This might seem like a lot of time, but there were thousands of Punjabi tourists all trying to push their way through a single door (when it comes to lining up, Indians have a distinctive Hobbesian outlook: “man to man is wolf to wolf ,” and there is no compassion for the one who arrived first; it is one’s natural right to push, shove, elbow, and verbally insult anyone and everyone who stands between one’s self and one’s destination). Caleb was about to cry.

 Amazingly, this system that is the absence of system, ended up working out in our favour. The airline that we providentially selected, Kingfisher, wisely foresaw the potential paralytic confusion that tourists would suffer upon encountering the scene at the airport reminiscent of Michealangelo’s Last Judgment’s hordes trying to escape hell; like the hand of God emerging from the heavens, a short, middle-age, mustached man in a Kingfisher uniform, took our bags, tunneled his way through the crowd, like Moses through the Red Sea, and in what seemed like five minutes passed us through two security gates, check-in counter, and the foreigners registration office. “Cool as a cucumber,” Caleb ordered a Fanta and started joking around with military officers. The man vanished, as miraculously as he appeared, without asking for a tip—presumably off to save some other foreign couple on the verge of a mutual nervous breakdown. Turns out this is a service included in your ticket fare. Thank God we flew with Kingfisher!

Srinagar’s airport was crowded and hot, but definitely more modern and comfortable than any Colombian airport. Their bookstore was great! Finally we found a decent selection of academic works in English about Kashmir (why the only bookstore that carries this politically charged literature about terrorists/freedom fighters would be at the airport is anyone’s guess). Juliana was very interested in a book called The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir by a man she had never heard about before, Prem Nath Bazaz, but Caleb scoffed at its tacky cover a dove flying into the sunset. So Juliana decided to buy another book, two pages into it, she realized that the book with the tacky cover was written by the most influential Hindu political activist in Kashmir, who also started a socialist party and whose scholarship has been very influential on modern historians. So she went back to the bookstore and bought Bazaz’s book (one with a cooler cover though).

Leaving Kashmir we were filled with mixed emotions. Because of Caleb’s sickness, the amount of moneyed domestic tourists, and the lack of non-Punjabi food, Kashmir had been one of the most difficult place we have visited. However, we were saddened by the fact that we had missed out a rare opportunity to meet with and talk to the kind and modest Muslims we had met in the old city about why they feel their community deserves autonomy. Ironically, on the plane that took us away from Kashmir, we were the most engrossed in texts describing Kashmir’s political struggle.

***

The more you travel and talk to other travelers the more you realize how much our conceptions of places and people are influenced by factors that have no connection to these places. In the same way that our impressions of people are often projections of our prejudices and insecurities onto them, so too our impressoins of places are intimately tied up with our emotional, psychological state at the moment we enter them.

                 Imagine a couple arriving in a city; for the past month they have been living with a kind, but socially conservative family. They have been having Masala tea everyday at 5 p.m. and vegetarian meals that seem to taste the same. One of them got sick in a very "unsexy" way, and they both were starting to consider taking a break of the Indian subcontinent with an abortive trip to Russia. This couple arrives to Jaipur, a city with very bad reputation among Western travelers. They say it is dirty, crowded, and frankly, boring. As the capital of Rajasthan, Jaipur is for most tourists just the gateway to get to more exotic places.
                 
                   But for this couple, which is obviously Caleb and Juliana, the sight of familiar, Western franchises--McDonanld's, KFC--made them feel like old dwellers of the city...

Caleb's insight:

"One of the humbling lessons that I have learnt from India is how pretentious I am for considering myself independent from Northamerican culture. In Toronto, it is very easy to participate in a culture that thinks it somehow exists outside of the world of shopping malls and big brand names, and imagines itself capable of living far away and free of such "trappings." India has taught me how arrogant that position is; we all come from a place and the manifestations of that place, whether good or bad, will always carry within them a kind of comforting nostalgia. In other words, India has taught me to admit that I am the most comfortable living within a system that I do not necessarily agree with."

Juliana's insight:

"Yes family, I do enjoy luxury, despite all my socialist airs. And even though such pretentions still remain, Jaipur made me aware of how much I appreciate shopping, wine, and sometimes, why not admit it, air conditioning (ouch!)"

One of the nice things about Jaipur is that it is a relatively new city (Nineteenth century) and it is modelled after Haussmann's Paris. The boulevards are wide, the streets meet at (OMG!) right angles, and it is very hard to--unlike other cities we have visited in India--get lost.

                  Jaipur was fun! Shopping at the Pink City markets was amazing. We spent most of our two days in Jaipur looking for, learning about, and buying Rajput paintings. Juliana got a sari and a bedcover, Caleb had a McChicken with coke, and they both enjoyed a Maharasthran bottle of red wine and an erotic puppet performace.