Holy Cow! We’re in India!

We arrived at the airport in Mumbai around 11 p.m. after a smooth flight from Paris. The arrival is surreal. How else to describe it? I keep having to remind myself that I am not in a movie, this is the real thing. The first thing to impact me is the air. It’s palpable. I had read descriptions that you could taste the air in Mumbai and it’s true. The atmosphere exudes/oozes descriptions of every kind and yet eludes adequate reflection of any kind.

We are met by a couple of men apparently employees of the Park View Hotel, where we will stay for the next two days. A short walk takes us to a van for the ride to the hotel. We are immediately shadowed by a mother and child begging for money. They say nothing but shadow us with their palms upraised. They both look just like any telethon charity fundraiser that I’ve ever seen. As soon as the bags are loaded in the van, the haggling begins. They want $20 US for loading the bags, then $20 CDN when they realize we are not Yankees. Then 250 Rupees, finally they settle most begrudgingly for 50 rupees (more than twice the amount our guide books tell we should pay). Diana handles the negotiation and stands firm for the final settlement.

The ride to the hotel is fascinating. The van driver blows the horn approximately every 10 seconds. Apparently it’s a driving courtesy to warn when you are close to someone (most all of the time) and when you intend plow through an intersection. There is a sea of vehicles all around us moving and merging and surging. In a kind of ordered chaos the horns, all going at once, seem to be having a conversation of sorts that somehow determines who will pass and when.

It’s 1:00 AM and dark but the scene along the road is stunning. Street after street looks like uninhabitable shacks. Then you realize that they are all active businesses, apartments, restaurants, hotels, etc. I notice that there are hundreds of people sleeping along the side lanes of the street. All manner of cobbled together shelters line the roads. Some apartments looked like they’ve been bombed out and then reinhabited by draping canvas and tarps over the crumbling walls and missing doors, windows and roofs. It’s frightening and fascinating and despairing all at once. I spend most of the night tossing and turning trying to process just this one 20 minute ride to the hotel. Finally I get up and start writing some notes at about 6:45 AM. It is totally dark. At 7:00 AM God turns on the light, it’s morning, just like that. No sunrise. I’ve no idea how I am going to absorb what lies ahead in the next two weeks. It’s fantastic to be sharing this with Luke.

“The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. I could smell if before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I walked along the umbilical cord that connected the plane to the airport. I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Bombay minute….but I didn’t and couldn’t recognize it. I know now that it’s the sweet sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate, and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It’s the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them human and rats. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense and freshly cut flowers.”

- David Gregory Roberts, Shantaram