After visiting both Bombay and Calcutta, India’s two most populous cities, I feel obliged to make this note. Calcutta is a very special place. It was our first impression of India, and I guess we assumed then it was what a normal Indian city is like, but it is not. Central Calcutta is all of India on one street corner. It’s the most raw, chaotic, cluttered, immense, ugly, seething, stinking, noisy, vibrant, dynamic, life-affirming, horrible, wonderful, welcoming and challenging city in India.
Anyway, on to Bombay/Mumbai. All forms of accommodation here, from high rise apartments, to slum huts to guesthouses, are far more expensive than anywhere else in India. We paid more than we’ve paid for any accommodation before, to get a room with no bathroom – although we did have a tiny balcony that looked out on to the backside of the famous Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Nice enough, except repairs are still being done here after the 2008 terror attacks, so our view was mostly of construction, queues of workers lining up for security checks, heavily armed guards and the occasional bomb squad sniffer dog.
We stayed in Colaba, tourist central, drank beer every day, had our first (and last) experience with Indian McDonalds (the Chicken Maharaja Mac is garbage), and saw Iron Man 2 at the Metro Cinema (only worth it for the air conditioning). We even went for an overpriced beer at Leopolds Café of Shantaram fame, and found the bar absolutely rammed with pissed British tourists. Bleh.
Mumbai was a great city just to wander through, and we spent lots of time on our feet, strolling along the wide pavements (refreshingly free of open drains) in Colaba, Churchgate and Fort, surrounded on all sides by magnificent Colonial era buildings. We sweated it out navigating the narrow streets of the central bazaars, and walked all the way to the popular seaside strip of Chowpatty Beach (swimming here highly not recommended) to eat bhel puri (kind of like Bhuja Mix but with fresh tomato, coriander and roasted peanuts – unbelievably delicious) and kulfi ice cream. In other food related news, we had lunch in a Muslim restaurant and enjoyed a "spicy masala brain fry" curry. Creamylicious.
Here we also signed up for a guided tour of Dharavi, a district of Mumbai comprising of Asia’s largest slum. Some might wonder why anyone would want to take a tour inside a slum district. The word slum conjures up images of mass misery and desperation, of people without hope and nothing to do but sit around and rot in their own filth... right?
This might be true of other slums, but Dharavi is one of India’s economic miracles. Spread over an area of 175 hecatres, Dharavi is home to over one million people. Something close to 5000 small scale industries operate in Dharavi, most of which recycle the discarded waste of Mumbai’s 19 million citizens. Dharavi is said to recycle 4000 tonnes of waste every day, including 80 percent of Mumbai’s plastic waste, turning over an estimated $650 million USD per year. Dharavi is a thriving city within a city, crowded with homes, workshops, communal areas, schools, medical facilities and shops. There are distinct areas for different industries – paper, plastics, metals, textiles, pottery, leatherwork. We found a guide invaluable for navigating Dharavi’s fascinating, narrow streets and explaining how plastic water bottles are turned into buttons and beads, workers engineer their own plastic-crushing machines (no degree required), smelt aluminium (in incredibly unhealthy conditions mind you), clean and sell back paint and oil cans and produce leather goods that end up with brands like Samsonite on their labels.
We were able to peek inside some of the residences Dharavi families rent from the ‘slumlords’ at exhorbitant rates – 10 by 10 metre cells (spotlessly clean though) where between four and eight people will cook, eat and sleep. Dharavi’s biggest ongoing problem is the lack of toilet facilities. Around 1500 people share one toilet in Dharavi. Needless to say, for the duration of the tour, we decided it was best to ‘hold it in’.
We picked out a Colaba sports bar that had TV screens pointing in every direction, settled down at the bar, ordered liberally and reeled in the nervous enjoyment of being the only Australians in a bar full of Indians watching Australia versus India in the T20 Cricket World Cup. India were absolutely annihilated, but we held out on cheering too loudly, instead settling for solemn handshakes and ‘good games’ with the people sitting closest to us. One turned out to be an Indian diamond merchant from Cairo, and after another couple of drinks he invited us to another bar in Colaba. It turned out to be some kind of strange Indian version of a girlie bar (the girls all dressed in alluring yet perfectly modest saris of course). Very weird, but at the time we were happy just to be carrying on. The realisation that we’d spent well over a day’s budget on beer hit us along with the hangover the next day.
