Through Mumbai

I’m so brain-tired, but can’t sleep.  I’m awestruck and horrified, overwhelmed and captivated.  This is a city birthed from the jungle, with new limbs and appendages emerging all the time.  On the Arabian Sea, Mumbai and her slums rise above the murky brown shoreline a dusty mirage of rainbow-colored shacks and crumbling imperial mansions.  From the back of my rickshaw, I try to shrink into myself, to be as inconspicuous as possible.  I want to be in the middle of this steamy madness and breakneck shuffle, but just as much I want to curl up in a ball in a cool, dark, sanitized hiding place.  I feel the weight of a shame I didn’t expect; I understand nothing.  So I try to be present in all my senses, to yield to the sweat streaming into all my nooks and crannies, to unclench my fists at the always overt, occasionally lewd stares.  To dredge through the translucent fog that burns my throat and bleeds my nose, beneath the smells of hanging animal carcasses and a shit-filled ocean, and to breathe in the marsala and cardamom and curries, the burning incense that wafts from the millions of shrines across the city.

Gateway of India

As far as the senses stretch, the horizon is full of gold-shellacked dreams and dazzling despair.  Ethereal street babies crawl along the sidewalk fence, barely separating them from the mayhem that is Mumbai traffic.  Their toddler caretakers wring filthy water from blankets, as the eldest among them, not older than 8, rakes heaps of trash equal to her bodyweight from the sidewalk; the sidewalk is their home.  There are packs of feral dogs and cats, I can’t tell if they’re living or dead until they subtly flinch under the weight of too many flies swarming their hiding place under cars parked on the street.  I wonder how they survive until I see a man butcher a still-bleating goat in the midst of a crowd; his goat siblings look on, tamed by their fate.  The nearby dogs and cats however, perk up considerably.

I feel like a fake.  Am I exploiting this ancient history, the streets lined with maimed and disfigured "untouchables” because I'm too determined to draw conclusions, to make sense of things that are far, far beyond my scope?  I see beauty everywhere.  Soiled, unkempt, astounding beauty.  Skeletal slum grandmothers washing and laughing together in their jewel-toned saris.  Men sharing tobacco and dough balls over a gutter as jaunty street kids playfully and purposefully hustle what they can to share with one another.  And the people.  Old and young, poor and wealthy, the people.  So, so beautiful.  With luscious hair cascading to their waists and gold embroidered everything, I can’t stop staring.  Wealthy families enfold their little ones in outfits embroidered entirely in gold, accentuating their enormous kohl-lined mahogany eyes: extraordinary measures to protect little ones from the evil eye.  Can't.  Stop.  Staring.

Yesterday, I almost fainted on the train.  I knew it was a risk when I hopped on in the morning, suffering the previous day or two from a circus of flaming-nunchuck jugglers in my stomach: I felt like a big white raisin, cavernous and dehydrated, in this land of juicy red grapes.  Seeing stars, I mentally slogged to the conclusion that if I didn't do something quickly, it would be lights out.  Through my fading periphery I saw the humor: there was no way I would have fallen, as tightly packed as we were on the female-only car.  Before I realized what was happening, I was surrounded and shuffled by no less than 4 women into the seats that each of them, simultaneously, were scrambling to give to me.  A young Muslim woman kindly ordered me with gentle pats on the arm to sit and rest, assuring me that it happens to everyone: it's a million degrees here.  When I was finally able to open my eyes, the English-speaking nationals checked in verbally, while from others I received shy smiles and the Indian head wiggle of greeting that I'm coming to love and trying to master.  It was the grace I needed in the form of an undeserved kindness, a sweaty, humbling reminder: I'm here, I'm finally here, and if I surrender and allow myself to be enfolded into their world, I think I'll be okay.