India: 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.