BOMBAY - THE FIRST DAY IN INDIA
Driving in India (Part 1)
My introduction to driving in India was gradual. The first inkling came
when we were still in St. Louis and I asked Vally if we were considering
renting a car during our trip, as we had almost everywhere else. His shock
and horror followed by an emphatic "No way" clued me in that something
was going to be different here. When I got into Chrissie's car, two things
were immediately apparent: 1) India drives on the left hand side of the
road and 2) there are no seat belts. Driving to Chrissie's apartment was
strange, because everything was on the wrong side, but in some ways it
was similar to driving through Havana on our first night in Cuba, except
that there were people sleeping on some of the sidewalks, and the air smelled
bad. There was traffic, but not enough to slow us down. We talked about
computers and the internet, and even though Chrissie spoke fast and I had
just gotten off a jet plane, I think I understood at least 80% of what
he said.
Chrissie's Place
Chrissie's apartment is in Bandra, a "nice" section of Bombay. We drove
up a narrow alleyway off a busy, narrow street into a kind of courtyard/parking
lot. The watchman was asleep on a piece of cloth in the entryway. After
he woke up he helped haul our bags to the second floor. Chrissie's door
and every door I've seen since in India, is secured by a sliding bolt with
a hasp and lock on the outside, which looks like it could easily be removed
with the suitable application of a crow bar. It also had a keyed door lock
like the ones we have. Chrissie's apartment turned out to be a small hallway,
a medium-sized room on the left, which was mostly taken up by a double
bed, a small room on the right, with a narrow bed on the far wall, a fold-down
table on the middle-wall and a TV (large, 42 cable channels) on the opposite
wall. There was also a small kitchen, to the right and a bathroom straight
ahead. At first I was confused about where to go, looking for a living
room, but that was it. Actually, Chrissie is now very successful in his
accounting business. His job is to help companies navigate the Byzantine
complexities of the Indian tax system and bureaucracy. The apartment I
first saw was his new apartment. When Vally last visited him, Chrissie's
wife and child lived downstairs in the bedroom of in a similar-sized apartment
and he conducted his business in the other room. I think they also had
a servant who slept in the kitchen. Now, he has also bought the apartment
above, and converted the downstairs one to an office. He has connected
the two with a flight of stairs. The office consists of a waiting area/sitting
room, a medium-sized work area with four 486 computers in it, and a small
personal office for Chrissie. The servant now sleeps on the floor of the
waiting room. Each of these apartments is worth $100,000.
Visiting Andrew And Giselle
Well, we were finally in Bombay, and it was 5:30 AM. Our suitcases filled
the entire floor space of Chrissie's bedroom. We unpacked the eagerly awaited
CD player that we had brought for Matthew, Vally's 22 year-old brother.
We had also brought along some Xmas music, including something called "A
Macarena Xmas" which I had considered something of a joke. To my amazement,
but not Vally's, Matthew was totally enchanted and insisted on playing
it, loud. We sat around Chrissie's office, talking computers and planning
the day. We wanted to visit Andrew, Vally's uncle, who because he was only
three months older, was raised with Vally as almost a twin until Vally's
family left the village when he was 11. We called and woke them up, then
gave them until 7 AM before we showed up at the door. I'm not sure what
part of Bombay Andrew lives in. I don't know how many rooms the apartment
had, but we only saw the kitchen and the small living room with its balcony.
Most of the Indian homes we have visited were very simply furnished as
was this one, with a low sofa and mattresses on the floor for sitting.
Andrew lives with his wife Jenny, and daughter, Natasha who is about 5.
He is a businessman, but his businesses have not been successful. Right
now he is unemployed and helping his wife who has a successful chocolate
cake-baking business, but he said he had a contract coming up soon. Jenny
had a warm and generous energy, as she served us chai and cake and insisted
that we stay for dosas (huge, thin pancakes, cooked in butter and wrapped
around a potato-onion mixture). Although Chrissie was in a little bit of
a hurry, we couldn't deprive Vally of his first dosa of the trip. Natasha
woke up and later she recited a long poem for us.
We left there and went on to Chrissie's wife Giselle's parent's apartment,
where she is staying, temporarily, with her new baby, Rohan and their 4
year-old Chriselle. This was one of the few "well-furnished" places I have
seen here, although I only saw the living room. We visited briefly while
Chrissie went home to get the baby's milk which is delivered to their house.
This baby seems to have had a rough start, after his mother spent much
of the pregnancy in bed, compounded by a set of worried parents. He had
conjunctivitis in his early weeks, failed to gain weight in his first month,
began to get supplementary feedings from that point and now, at three months,
is totally bottle-fed. He has had a major bout of gastritis requiring an
injection every 12 hours for 5 days. His parents take his temperature and
chart it at frequent intervals during the day. They also, I was told, record
every other bit of data possible, including a description of each bowel
movement. They did this with Chriselle, too, except that they also photographed
her daily, which they are not doing with Rohan.
Then there is the massage thing...as Vally's mother later explained
to me with an "of course" tone in her voice, Indian babies are traditionally
massaged with coconut oil, daily for the first year of their lives, and
twice weekly for a few years after that. Part of the massage involves banging
on their heads, I'm not sure how much or how hard, in the belief that the
head will not have its proper shape if this is not done. Vally's grandmother
was the village baby-masseuse, although she refused to accept any payment
for it. The mother also receives a massage, at least for the first six
weeks. Chrissie and Giselle debated whether to do this and chose to err
on the side of caution, so every day a massage lady comes to the house,
gives the baby and massage and a bath, then he is fed and put to sleep.
I don't know how Rohan feels about it, but Vally's mother reported having
to sneak up on him and catch him to do it, and he also remembers trying
to get away. Later I found out that for older children the oil massage
also involves sitting there with nothing to do, not allowed to do anything
for one hour while the oil soaks in. Now I know what Vally, to this day,
does not like being massaged-something I consider one of life's great pleasures.
Adventures at Indian Airlines
We left Giselle and the baby, but took Chriselle with us. Chriselle and
her daddy are very close and he takes her with him a lot. We went back
to Chrissie's where I took a nap and Vally, Matthew and Chrissie went to
the Indian Airlines office to turn our 15-day all-you-can-fly pass into
actual airline tickets. This simple operation took almost 3 hours. The
problem was the there were 5 agents using one dot-matrix printer and the
printer had very little memory. The agent had to print 13 tickets for each
of us, but every time she sent the job, which took 15 minutes to set up,
it would crash after printing 5 tickets. Ultimately she had to send our
flights one at a time. Unfortunately, the flight from Delhi to Agra and
back (the Taj Mahal) has become non-existent, even though we have reserved
seats-something about the fog and all flights being suspended for a month.
Driving in India Part 2 - the Nightmarish Trip to Borvili and
Back
We had a lunch date with Vally's mother's brother's widow (Shailesh's mother)
in a place called Borvili, another part of Bombay. If I had know what would
be involved in getting there, I am not sure I would have been willing to
go. Also, there was a cricket match between India and South Africa. Chrissie
was so involved with the match that as we drove to Borvili, Matthew was
required to wear a walkman and report the score at no more than 90 second
intervals. Bombay traffic, in the middle of the afternoon, is as bad as
you can imagine, although it basically keeps moving. This was the second
part of my introduction to driving in India. We were on what is considered
a highway, which is a wide, mostly-divided road. There are many different
sizes of vehicles on this road, starting with bicycles and motor scooters,
increasing to rickshaw cabs, to small cars and vans, to very small mid-sized
cars, to big trucks and buses. There are NO lanes. Instead there is an
ongoing game of something like Tetris, where as many vehicles as possible,
under constantly changing conditions, jockey for position and fill the
road at all times in every possible combination. Thus the two "theoretical"
lanes could be occupied by 5 motor scooters, 3 cars, a car a truck and
a motor scooter, etc. Everyone must have fantastic depth perception because
the minimum clearance is about 3 inches and no one slows down. All this
in stifling heat, surreal carbon monoxide levels and an occasional traffic
stop in which the exhaust of a diesel truck is emptying directly into the
passenger window of the car next to it. Imagine yourself in a locked garage,
turn on a poorly-tuned car without a catalytic converter and wait a few
minutes, you'll get the idea. None of the cars is air-conditioned, no one
has a seat belt or a protective helmet.
The side of the road was also surreal, except you've already seen it
in movies or in National Geographic photos. People walking and crossing
everywhere-women in saris or house dresses, men mostly in western clothing
but occasionally in lungis (a cloth wrapped around their waist either like
a skirt or tied between their legs like shorts), people carrying things
on their heads, etc. I quickly realized that there were two types of people,
those would could keep clean and those who couldn't and it was a clear
class distinction. We passed what I guess could be called squatters camps,
and they were as bad as you imagined-open ditch sewers at the side of the
road, people, especially children, using them as a bathroom. Little girls
squatting down and looking so vulnerable. It took about 1 1/2 hours of
this to get to Borvili. We parked the car, passing a small urine-soaked
park with people lying all over the ground and went up to Auntie Jane's
place.
We met Shailesh, after all that e-mail, and two of his three sisters
and his mother Aunty Jane. During the remainder of the afternoon, we ate
dinner, buffet style and talked. After a couple of hours, we left. The
trip back was equally awful.
A School Fair
Before we could call it a day, we had to go to Chriselle's school fair
in Juhu Beach, an adjacent "nice" neighborhood. Chriselle goes to a Montessori
school, according to Chrissie very child-centered, 15 children in a class,
the staff very personally involved with the kids. Chrissie is very proud
of this and it stands in sharp contrast to the traditional school where
Chriselle would be one of 50 children spending the entire day sitting at
wooden desks and terrified of the teacher. The fair was similar to the
homecoming fairs that we have at Catholic parishes in St. Louis-booths
with games, food, a raffle. The only difference was that the cotton candy
was made using a hand crank, the popcorn was made over charcoal, the games
were short on equipment and there was a display advertising natural living
and homeopathic medicine. Also we ran into a couple, cousins of Giselle's
who, upon finding out that Vally and I were recently married, heartily
recommended going to a Marriage Encounter, and credited their happy 7-year
marriage to it.
Back at Chrissie's
We went back to Chrissie's apartment, hoping to take a lot of melatonin
and go straight to bed. Instead we all sat around talking and Vally attempted
to redistribute our luggage so that we wouldn't take all 200+ pounds to
Goa with us-especially since we were each limited to 1 suitcase weighing
40 kg on a domestic flight. I was overwhelmed by this point. I hadn't done
the packing and didn't even really know (experientially) what we had brought.
As far as I was concerned, it looked like Vally was simply shifting things
from one suitcase to another, although I was content to let him do that
if that was what he wanted to do. Unfortunately, we couldn't go to bed,
because there was a wedding taking place in the schoolyard just below Chrissie's
window and the music was incredibly loud (macarena prominently featured).
Chrissie and Matthew assured me that it would be over by 10 PM. It was
a Catholic wedding, and Chrissie pointed out the standard features of the
ritual, but I wasn't follow it very well. Finally, 10 PM came, the music
stopped, we took our melatonin and our first day in India came to a close.
The Second Day in India
Chrissie's bed was quite comfortable, a foam pad over a platform bed. This
turns out to be typical of the beds we have had in India. We got up, finally
decided what to take with us, and then Chrissie took us on foot, through
Bombay congestion to an Indian fast food restaurant (Udipi restaurant)
for breakfast. It was good and, of course, cheap, although not what we
would consider breakfast food in the US, and we ordered and got bottled
water. Chrissie has a water purifier. Then we went to the airport. We took
a cab with a cartop carrier and Matthew came with us because he had worked
out some kind of deal with a friend at the airport who was going to allow
us to take our overweight luggage without paying extra for it. Matthew
took great pleasure in being able to do this. The domestic airport was
total overload for me, I was completely overwhelmed. It was like an old
and very busy bus terminal, with large, stationary crowds of people standing
out front with an unknown purpose. Although now I realize that they were
relatives seeing off family members, at the time I had no idea holy felt
totally at home. Matthew scurried off looking for his friend but did not
find him. I didn't understand what was going on. One thing that was confusing
was that the airlines counters are inside the baggage x-ray part. You get
your bags x-rayed and they are given a tag, then you check them in. The
next thing I remember we were checking in at the first class Indian airlines
counter, which seemed to have appeared out of the chaos, and, because Matthew
said the magic words, i.e. his friend's name, everything was going fine,
except the tag had come off one of our bags and we had to get it re-x-rayed.
After that we hung out with Matthew and got chai at a nearby stand. The
friend appeared briefly and we thanked him. Then we went to the departures
area, which really did look like a bus station, complete with a crier announcing
the flights, except there were planes outside the doors, not buses. Only
post-security check passengers are allowed there. Carry on baggage is x-rayed
before getting on the plane, and a tag which you are supposed to know to
get at check-in is stamped. Passengers are frisked by hand in some airports
or with a metal detector in others. There is a male and a female attendant
for this purpose. Both are in khaki uniforms, but the women can wear khaki
saris.
In retrospect and after some more experience, the airport doesn't seem
all that, bad but at the time I couldn't imagine doing it as a newly-arrived
tourist.
Indian Bathrooms
Perhaps this is a good time to say something about Indian bathrooms. I
was not completely unprepared because of my earlier experience with the
Hare Krishna people who try to do things in the Indian way. In India there
are two styles of bathroom (actually, technically 3). One is English, exactly
what we are used to. Chrissie has an English bathroom, as does anyone who
lives in the city. Indian style toilets come, as I discovered in a restaurant
in Panjim, Goa, in two styles. The women's style is your basic toilet basin,
except the top of the basin is level with the floor and there is no seat.
Instead, there is a place for your feet, either separately in cement or
as ribbed wings of the porcelain. The men's or possibly the compromise
type is identical except the whole thing is about 10 inches off the ground-but
you still squat on it (except possibly to pee if you are a man), although
Vally says they usually have an optional seat. In reality some did and
some did not. There are two other useful facts about Indian toilets: the
door is ordinarily kept closed, so if you are in there and don't want company,
you'd better lock it (I found out the hard way). The second, as many of
you know, is that there is no toilet paper. Instead there is a spigot,
a bucket and a small pitcher, although sometimes in public bathrooms there
is no pitcher and I'm not sure how people handle this one. The pitcher
is used for pouring water and the left hand for directing the water to
the area that needs cleaning. Vally tells me that men, at least, ordinarily
pour the water from the back. I can't exactly picture this. I carry paper.
Also, many of these squat toilets flush passively, i.e. as a result of
the water that has been poured in, although some actually flush. The major
drawback, aside from requiring some agility and awareness of where your
clothing is, is that you are much closer to the smell of the toilet and
if you use it just after a meal, when your olfactory senses are keen, it
can be rough. The advantage is that it is an efficient position from a
physiological point of view-the leisurely practice of reading in the bathroom
is unknown, and due to the position and the amount of water on the floor,
inadvisable.