"A Genuine Indian Home"

I've had a rather large day, filled with adventure and stories.  It's left me with a meager energy supply.  So, for todays post, I've decided to honor a request to see pictures of my real-deal Mumbai digs. and leave the real writing till tomorrow.

Let's start with my bedroom.  Ranjiv explained when I checked in that the colorful spreads you see on the beds are to be slept on, not under.  There is a thin cotton blanket you can see on the foot of the bed on the right, it's under my dark scarf and white shawl, for sleeping under.

My favorite things might be the orange bolsters that move around for easy lounging.  Very practical.

 My Guardian.

Now the all important all-in-one bathroom.  Notable features include the shower head in the middle of the room.  The sprayer for cleaning oneself up after using the loo.  The giant bucket which I have used to soak my feet at the end of the day and also as a basin for shaving my legs.

I adore the kitchen especially.  So does Rajiv, I think he likes what it says about Indian practicality and color.  Or maybe that's what I like about it.

I know it's dorky, but I just love that the micro-wave settings are country specific.  Of course they would be.  So, ethnocentric to imagine otherwise.

And one fullllll course Indian Breakfast.  Ranjiv expected me to eat it all.  I think he was distracted by Payel being at the hospital so he just threw everything he could at me.

I ate as much as I could, put some in a little baggie for later and still had to apologize for not being able to finish it. 

I can't figure out how to turn this....oh well.

Finally, Payel and I in the living room, which I believe doubles as a bedroom for the family when there are guests.  I'm not sure. But, as you can see we are wearing our Punjabi suits.  When I look at this I see how beautiful Payel is and how exhausted I am.  That's not me fishing for compliments, just an observation on what it felt like to be me yesterday.

That's the tour.  Pay your nickel on the way out.  Be sure to tune in tomorrow when I fill you in on the harrowing adventure to the other sides of Mumbai.

Culture Shock~Part Two: Why It's Often Better to Just Sit and Wait.

Three Posts in 12 hours.  There's a whole lot of processing going on.

I couldn't go out today.  I tried.  I headed for the train, hoping to make my way to the Chor Bazaar, which some call the greatest flea market in the world....THE WORLD, think about it.  How could I miss that.  Fridays are the best day, too, because that's apparently when all the Muslim men open their stalls and I guess that makes for even better picking.

But after hemming and hawing and writing all morning, I made a late start of getting ready and by the time I walked outside, the heat and my own nervous energy had grown too great.  No big deal, I thought.  I never go out every day at home, why should I be worried about needing down time here.

Then the realization that I was in full blown Culture Shock started to set in.

I spent the day either in my room or talking with Payel who was meant to go into the hospital this morning for some tests.  When she arrived they told her that she had no bed, she would have to reschedule.

"That's India," she said.

Though she was a bit flippant, I could tell that she was quietly, but obviously, upset.  Usually helpful Rajiv could hardly answer a question.  Concern permeated the house.  There were many people working on her behalf to get her into a bed.  She thought her chances were good since, "well, my husband is a famous human rights advocate".  Through our language differences I think she was basically saying, "wait till the papers get ahold of this."

As the day went on and she waited for the hospital to call, I sifted through my disconcerting array of emotions.  Finally, come dinner time, we both found ourselves in the kitchen having spent our days waiting and wading through some of the harder and more frustrating realities of living in India.  I asked her if she had any news from the hospital.  She had none.  "But," she said, "everyone has something that they are dealing with.  Nobody's life goes smoothly."

I got up the nerve to ask her how she and Rajiv, who volunteer all their free time to help ease other people's suffering, deal with the beggars, do they ever give them anything.  She said, like everyone else I know who's been to Mumbai, "No.  You Can't."  Instead She and Rajiv give to a charity that helps with education for the poor and to another that helps the elderly in Mumbai.  She says it is the government refusing to control the population, like they do in China, that is the problem.  There are just too many people.

In the back courtyard, a group of women had started chanting under a homemade tent.  The songs were sort of familiar, haunting.  I thought they reminded me of the song the children sing at the end of Out of Africa.  While I listened to the women sing, my friend Gary and I started chatting on-line.  He didn't know the full extent of my Culture Shock, but he sensed that I might need something uplifting so he put into process the possibility that I might go tomorrow to an orphanage and read to kids.  Gary and some friends have a charity called Bookwallah.org that gives books to orphanages, one of which is nearby.

As Gary organized from the other side of the planet, I asked Payel another question, "What might all the chanting in the back yard be about."  She told me it was a pre-wedding celebration where all the women from the community come together to bless the impending union.

While she explained this, the phone rang.  It was the hospital calling to say Payel had a bed and that she must go right away.  It was almost 8 o'clock in the evening.

When I returned to my room it hit me why the chants coming from the back yard were so familiar...they were eerily similar to the chant sung in my dream last week, the dream about weddings.

I was overcome with relief.  I knew then that I was, that I am, exactly where I'm supposed to be.

It's not easy.  My heart and my soul are cracking and shifting and lashing a bit with all the new information that is flooding every one of my senses.  But whatever it is that I am meant to learn from India, I am learning it.

I just have no frame-work yet to make sense of it.

Lumbering Together Towards Home

I was glad to make it home last night.  Don't be alarmed.  Nothing bad happened.  The day, however, carried a fragility I have not experienced before, a tenderness which opened the edges of my experience a little wider, like a camera slowly expanding it's lens and my view from a small point to a larger frame of reference.

I decided to return to the tourist hub and have a gander at the old majestic buildings from the days of the Raj, and to check out the Colaba Street Market.  It meant another long journey on the train.  As I set out, I stopped to say my "good-days" to Rajiv, this is when I noticed the first flutter of nervousness, like I could be leaving an old friend for the last time.  Such a delicate way to start the day.  Part of what made me uncomfortable was that I had chosen to wear a blouse without a camisole.  It was the first time I had not had layers and I felt perhaps that I was too exposed.  Which, if you saw me, I think would make you laugh; I'm sure I looked rather frumpy.  Regardless, I promptly went to the little market at the end of the street and bought a long scarf to drape about me.  I felt a little better.

At the station, I encountered many small children who started to reach into my bag for my water bottle, or my bright orange security whistle which hangs on my purse, anything that was exposed.  Only later did I realize that they had managed to take the caps of both my pens.  Waiting in line, I watched three young kids, one girl around 5 with two boys closer to 3.  She had a little plastic phone that made music and she was cradling the smaller boys head in her lap, holding the phone to his ear so he could listen to the tune it played.  She held him so lovingly, tenderly, like a small mother would hold a large baby.  She smiled softly, genuinely when he would smile.  Then she looked up and saw me; like a movie star when the camera turns on, her smile became radiant.  Both boys turned to see what she was looking at.  The boys started to come towards me, reaching into my bag.  The larger boy reached for the same thing the younger boy went for, there was an altercation.  The big boy hit the little boy on the nose, the girl smacked the big boy on the top of his head, the little boy began to cry.  The small mother picked up her large child, gave the big boy a stare that would melt ice, and walked away in a huff.  The large boy stayed to try and win something from me.  I bought my ticket and got on the train.

Getting on the train was a relative breeze. The stairs were less daunting than the day before.  I had left later, and many school kids were on their way home for the day, so I shared the car with several groups of both girls and boys.  Where my tender edges had been frayed earlier, they started to breath and expand.  One of the girls smiled at me with such genuine warmth and curiosity.  I smiled back.  I pulled out my camera and the boys really perked up, swarming to see it.  I started taking pictures and showing them to the kids.  The first girl who'd said "hello" with her eyes did not want her picture taken, but changed her mind when she saw the other photos.  Here she is, the tall one holding the very old school primer.

And one of the boys:

When the girls left the car, they all waved or said, "Good-bye."  There was such tenderness....tenderness meeting tenderness.

It wasn't just kids either.  One mother wanted me to take a picture of her children.

Another woman riding in the second-class car behind mine, saw my spying camera, and subtly, warmly posed.

 It was like drinking water on a hot day, these connections.

Downtown was more harrowing.  Even more than the day before, the streets were buzzing with noise and people and beggars.

I have tried taking so many pictures of the streets trying to capture, I think, the pure cacophony of sound and movement.

It's impossible.

But trust me when I tell you that not even New York can compare to the sound and chaos and color of Mumbai.  I imagine Tokyo, maybe, with all its technicolor neon might hold its own, but somehow I don't envisage Tokyo carrying with it such an assortment of crumbling mansions and troops of armed police and groups of people sleeping in the middle of busy thoroughfares.  It's amazing what kind of emotional noise and light all of those things add to the experience of a city.

I gave into one family of beggars.  A mother who managed to tie a bracelet of flowers on my wrist, saying, "no money, no money" then wanted powdered milk for her baby.  I bought her a can of formula.  I wish I could carry around cans of formula.  This makes sense to me.

I decided to invest in a couple of traditional Punjabi suits, you know the long flowy shirts that can be worn with leggings or billowy pants.  I chose billowy.  I am not feeling brave enough for a sari yet....but I'm sure the time will come.  In one shop, I was helped by the oldest man in the store.  He was 85 if he was a day.  He pulled out top after top after top, a measuring tape for me to make sure I had the right size.  He spoke little English, but understood enough to say, when I said I had to think for a minute, "Thinking?  Don't think.  Thinking not good for you."  We haggled over prices.  He let me feel I'd gotten the better of him.  Connection.

Back out on the streets there was too much connection.  I was hounded by vendors and beggars and even one grumpy British expat who was annoyed by my "pre-occupation".  I was trying to get away from a particularly persistent vendor, but doing a poor job of it, my politeness getting the better of me.  I realize now, I need to follow that old Brit's lead next time and just barrel down the sidewalk with little consideration for anyone else's feelings.

Shortly after the encounter with the Grump, I crossed the street to seek refuge in a tiny Methodist Church.

Looking out at the noisy world

Looking into quiet and peace.

With it's open air windows, fans, wicker pews, it was not hard to imagine English missionary ladies in white linen dresses congregating on a Sunday morning.  I sank thankfully into a chair and closed my eyes and just breathed for a few minutes.  I was reminded of a similar refuge in a different city, St. Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.   That was a magical Bedouin tent in the middle of the financial district in London.

As I sat now in Mumbai, aware that at some point I would have to go back out into the noise and traffic and mass of humanity, I began to understand the role a Christian God might play in a place like India.  It was suddenly very clear why a person who lived in the chaos of such heat, both environmental and emotional, navigating the harsh societal chasms between the wealthy and the untouchables, vying for space amidst the pure press of so many souls crowded into one place at the same time would be drawn into the quiet calm of a properly ordered Christian sanctuary.  If Jesus' Father could make the noise stop for twenty minutes or an hour a day in the little house on the corner, what kind of eternal peace might he be able to grant at the end of one's days?

Eventually I tore myself from the Church, but sought a different kind of refuge a few blocks away in a Western Style cafe.  Even after a delightfully bland lunch, I was unsure I could carry on in the city.  I was truly shaky at this point.  Feeling almost threatened by everyone I encountered, the cars, the noise, I ordered a cup of tea just to stay in the cafe a little longer.

Here's where I learned about a good strong cup of tea.  Geez Louise, did that tea both perk me up and fortify me.  After just a wee cup, with three sugars, no cream, I was ready to try and find the last landmark that called to me in the major downtown area: The Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue.  The guidebook told me it was "an impossibly blue", old building "lovingly maintained by the city's dwindling Jewish Community."  I knew from the map, that it had to be somewhere close by in the warren of streets shooting off from the large round-about just outside my cafe doors.

I set off in the late afternoon sun, dodging traffic, stares, peeing men, in search of my synagogue.  Yes, I had a map, but as street signs are impossible to find, I was going on instinct.  This being the case, and as I was feeling so tender, edgy, and therefore vulnerable to God knows what, and let me tell you my brain started creeping in all sorts of bad ideas about what that "what" might be, I felt certain I wouldn't find the building.

You see, I have a theory that I developed while traveling in Europe.  I began to understand that I would either love or hate a place depending on how easily I could navigate it.  Rome...I got lost for hours, even though my map and the street signs were very easy to follow.  I did not care for Rome. Paris, on the other hand, I always seem to know which way to go.  Paris and I have an understanding.

I went in the direction I thought sure the map wanted me to, but suddenly knew it was the wrong way.  I turned around and, almost like a hound dog, I circled large museums, stopped in a little art bazaar, hesitated when my fear and the fading light began to alarm me, and then just as I was about to give up, something told me to walk a few steps forward, look to the left, and voila: peeking out from a tiny corner of an alley was an "impossibly blue" edge of a building.  I made my way over, got through security and went upstairs to yet another of God's sanctuaries.

Did I ever tell you that I've wanted to be Jewish since I was a little little girl.  It's true.  It's not just that I think Jewish men are kind of the dreamiest, the culture, it's people, just calls to me, speaks of a kind of home.  Like this beautiful little sacred hall.  I wondered as soon as I set foot in it if I hadn't been there before, if I hadn't known it like an old friend you'd forgotten but remember suddenly when you meet again years later at a reunion.  It was not gut punching, shake me to my core familiar, but it was known to me, warm.

When I left, I found my way easily to Churchgate Station and the train home.  Based on my personal Theory of Navigation, Mumbai and I must be better friends than I had first supposed us to be.

At evening time I spoke at length with Rajiv and Payel.  Or should I say, I listened at length while they told me why they love running the B & B.  They have made friends all over the world, many of whom return again and again when they could easily stay in five star hotels.  Their guests love them and have featured them in magazine articles from around the planet.

Turns out, Rajiv and Payel also have second and third jobs as social workers in their "spare time." Rajiv is interviewed for tv every few days on some matter pertaining to social justice which they relate to running the B & B.  They explained that when the government gives them a license to have people stay in their home, it requires them to introduce travelers to a genuine Indian home and experience, right down to the bedding, the cooking, the all-in-one bathrooms.  But Rajiv and Payel take it further.  They often host medical tourists, some of whom have needed rushing to the hospital in the middle of the night.  They have saved one guest's life by making calls at three a.m. to friends in order to track down a rare blood type when the guest needed a blood transfusion to survive the night.

Rajiv said, "This, too, is part of the Indian culture.  It is what our forefathers expected of us.  Mumbai has become so commercialized.  Other hotels will kick you out at the first sign of sickness, of trouble.  That is not our way.  They have forgotten what it is to be truly Indian, to be part of humanity."

This reminded me of the train ride home.

If you ever make it to Mumbai and you have occasion to ride the train, you might want to follow some advice that I didn't follow: don't ride the train at rush hour.  If you do ride the train at rush hour and you are a woman who has bought a first class ticket, then you might want to at least wait for the first class car to appear.  Don't think, "oh, here is a second-class women's only car, it is not too crowded, I will just take this one, how different can it be from first-class".

Sardines, I think, have more room to move in a can filled with other sardines.

I was in awe of the amount of human beings that can cram themselves onto a single train car.  As the car filled and filled and filled and I debated wether I should get off and wait for a first-class train, I pressed myself up against a partition and let myself be held in place by the sheer weight of people a few of which exchanged themselves while departing with new passengers coming on.  Sweat poured down the backs of my legs.  I couldn't move one arm which was wedged firmly against my body.  I covered my face from time to time with the sleeve of my other arm when women would cough in my direction.  (There is a cough here in Mumbai that is prevalent, a deep and raspy cough.  What it speaks of, I do not know.  I do hope, whatever it is, that I got that particular vaccination.)

Despite the fact that it was so exhausting to be surrounded by that many people, there was something wonderful about it too.  There was one particular woman who stood sometimes next to me, sometimes a person or two away from me, depending on how other folks pushed and pulled their way into "our" space; she kept checking in.  We would see each other and smile, as if to say at the same time, "can you believe we live like this.  Isn't this absurd?"  She was not comforting me, or apologizing.  I was with her.  I was part of the "we".  One of the mass.  I felt so deeply in the thick of it.  Wholly myself and wholly of the great wide world all at the same time.

It was amazing to see women who just stood in the car with their eyes closed, peacefully held up by their "sisters,"seemingly oblivious to the angst of some of the other women who pushed and argued and vied for a quarter of an inch here or there.  A couple of ladies managed to carry on long conversations on their mobiles.  This was a regular part of their days.  Life was simply being lived while we all held each other up with the weights of our bodies; the train lumbering us towards home.

Night Arrival

After 26 hours of traveling I am settled in my room in Mumbai.  I am the honored guests of Rajiv and Payel Patel in an area called Santa Cruz West.  It is right in the flight path of Mumbai International Airport.

That I would be listening to airplanes land and take off was told to me in the trip advisor review.  But also, as the review told me to expect, my hosts are so sweet and amiable that I feel right at home.  Rajiv came to the airport and met me, negotiated with the pre-pay taxi for 10 rupees off my fair because my bag was so small bringing my taxi fare to about $3.80, and made the taxi driver follow him on his motorbike so that I would get to the B & B quickly and without hastle.

Right off the bat I was asked for money while waiting in my cab.  A beautiful young woman holding a sleeping baby tapped on the window.  I sent her love through my eyes, but did as I had been told by so many and did not give her any money.  Ten seconds longer, and I probably would have rolled down the window.

I was met by mosquitoes.  The cab driver spit constantly out of the window, just like the woman in my dream had.  And just around the corner from my Mumbai home are people sleeping in the streets next to other people who were peeing in the streets as I drove by.

I'm not staying in the slums.  But I am staying in a very REAL neighborhood.  Nothing about the place we pulled up spoke of hospitality.  The room is spare.  The bed has one thin blanket (though lots of pillows!)  The bathroom and the shower are one room and toilet paper is obviously not the method of choice when it comes to "cleaning up".  But that's ok because I already had encountered the spray down method of "clean-up" a the airport, so I'm already an old pro.  Granted, I haven't had to use a hole toilet yet.....

As strange and very third world all of this is, I have no desire to switch to the high end of town to the Marriott or something else equally "western".  It just feels right here.  Of course, I haven't seen it in the daylight....but, most things are scariest in the dark...so I think it might be ok.  I shan't be strolling about here, I don't think.  But it is a very nice place to hang my hat.