Morgalogue

As I was nudged awake by the motion of my sleeper bus, my first glimpse of Bombay couldn’t have been more perfect. We were gunning along a brand new road, across a barren landscape that terminated in a hazy horizon, bleached by a harsh morning sun. The longer we rode towards towards it, the more this white hot haze grew, draining the colour from the sky and the earth in front of us. Vast, desolate salt plains, half filled with dirty water, like no-mans land battle scars, stretched into the void, relflecting the emptyness. The only clue that something was about to emerge from this bleak mirage were the colossal lanes of electricity pylons, galloping into the distance.

When it did finally appear it was something majestic. Like a walled empire or an advancing army riding out of the dusty smog. By now there were scattered camps - to continue the metaphor - like banished tribes, gathered around smoking brickmaking kilns. Fields of finished brick were being slowly loaded onto bullock carts. People were waking up, washing in ditches, watching me as they brushed their teeth.

We eventually drew level with the headwall of what felt like an advancing concrete glacier, an 8-storey estate of Beijing proportions. The edge of the city. Although my new Bombay friends may not swell with pride to hear it, this was something I wanted to see. These Asian mega-cities have grown at an unprecedented rate in history. Where today’s suburb is midtown tomorrow. What on earth must it be like to live amongst this ?

      

I stayed in pretty much the only cheap traveller option in town; the Salvation Army dosshouse, which bizarrely enough, is located in the Bombay equivalent of Mayfair, literally a stonesthrow from the Gateway to India (smaller than you imagine). This area, Collaba, is where the Bombay aristocracy still live, in pretty colonial townhouses. It borders the financial district and is full of leafy boulevards, parks, and all the Victorian austerity of the British Raj era. Like West London developed from a blueprint of Cambridge. It’s also relatively quiet, as even the Bombayites who can afford to go out here, often can’t face the 2 hour journey.

   

Andy hooked me up with a friend of his, Ashima, who is doing pretty well for herself directing films in Bollywood. At present she’s working on a film with Shahrukh Khan, India’s more statesmanly answer to Brad Pitt. She arranged to meet me at a flash hotel near his house (where a crowd of fans is almost permanently decamped) at Juhu Beach. Bombay’s Beverly Hills.

To get there the bus crawled through the guts of central Bombay for almost 2 hours. Looking across the bay at night, through squinted eyes, Bombay could pass for Manhattan. Though during the day I was surprised to find that over 90% of the highrises were residential, with only a thin outer layer of posh hotels and financial buildings reflecting in the water.

   

At street level there are still crumbling old colonial shopfronts with wooden balconies above. The Muslim districts still have their warren of narrow windows and flat roofs, peppered with the spires of Mosques. And the streets, despite being a surging river of people and traffic, are colourful, with bullock carts, wallahs of every description, fruit and flowers stalls and weaving their way through the perpetual exodus. But rising up from behind these main streets, is always a vertcal concrete lanscape of highrises. For a towerblock conissuer, Bombay is a like cramped showroom of models:

There are huge Bronx, ghetto towers. Pinkwashed Rio slum blocks. Enormous Le Corbusier cuboids at odd angles. Miserable, grey Soviet era hulks. Contemporary white ‘residences’ like Spanish beach resorts. Scottish council mega flats (with Tetris panels). Cario complexes, with deatailed Arabic grills over the balconies. Decaying Favelas. Dubai inspired ’statements’ speaking of money and prestige. All at varying stages of the accelerated ageing process that the beating sun, pollution and heavy monsoon rains must create.

   

Ashima was the perfect host and took me to all sorts of flashy pretentious places to give me a taste of the Bombay highlife. We chucked back Fosters and gossipped about starlets at the ostentatious Mariott hotel. The restaurant has a glass facade the height of an aircraft hanger, flanked by a row of flaming torches that wouldn’t look out of place in the Olympic games, and to top it off, an Elton John grand piano, covered with a Princess Diana quota of church candles. Brilliant. We headed out of town to her ‘Lismore’ (Pop Totes Andy ..) to meet some Bollwood pals and get down to some proper drinking.

   

The impression I get of Bollywood is that it’s a little like the Hollwood of the 1930’s. Films are built around stars, and the industry is all about ‘the business of entertainment’. Make em’ laugh … Or sing and dance, in Bollywood’s case. There doesn’t seem to be a market for anything else.

Perhaps it’s because the harder realities of India are inescapable for everyone, and in Bombay paradoxically more so. Even Shahruhk Khan, unless he teleports around the city, cannot avoid seeing through the windows of his limousine, scenes of poverty that Brad Pitt might only read about. And while the wealthy in the West seek segregation and independence from the poor, here the wealthy improve their quality of life by enlisting the constant services of the less wealthy. There are millions of menial servants, drivers, washers, ‘fluffers’, shoeshiners, earcleaners ! … you name it. ‘Reality’ is everywhere.

   

Without such a precious desire to always want to be making a ‘unique artistic statement’, working in Bollwood seems a bit more ‘like a job’. A really good job. Ashima and her friends live well, in nice appartments, they do as they please and drink and party like ancient Greeks. Model ‘New Indian’ Bombayites, the media would no doubt call them. Yet even they had the same reservations I’ve heard all over about New India’s ‘money culture’ and the dizzying pace of change.

I read a book a couple of years ago called ‘Maximum City: Bombay lost and found’ that focussed a bit too much, I thought, on what had been lost, due to pollution, overpopulation and unchecked development. In the UK, a conversation about whether ‘progress’ has been a good thing is normally just a pub moan about Christmas, the internet or a reminiscence from your Granny about ‘the good old days’. Change has happened slowly or in the case of the internet, largely been regarded as a good thing. Most people here live daily with the effects of some glaringly obvious and recent downsides and yet change carries on regardless. I would/do find this distressing.

I spent the next few days wandering among the backstreets, boulevards, markets and slums trying to make some sense of the most complicated place on earth. One group of people who clearly have are the Dabawallahs. Every day, an army of these guys, in little Navy style hats, courier lunchboxes from suburban housewives all over the city, to their office worker husbands. Despite being largely illiterate, they have a system that ensures that all but one lunch in 6 million arrives still warm on the right desk. They are a proud lot and are apparently now being studied by management consultancies all over the world. I hung out with them at the train station as they prepared for the return journey. One guy bet me I couldn’t carry the bench of ‘tiffin boxes’. To the complete amazement of the entire station, I donned his cap and balanced the thing (badly) on my head and made it all the way to the train. Once was enough though, I still have the bruise.

   

I was also accosted by my first ear cleaner. Among all the spectacles you can take in on the streets of India, watching an earcleaner explore the inside of a clients head while he sits, reading a newspaper has to be my favourite. At this point however, I’d never heard of such a thing. This guy just stopped me in the street and said “sir, I think you have something … there” staring purposefully at the side of my head. I ruffled my hair, assuming it would be a leaf or a twig. “Here, let me … ” he said and I caught him as he grasped at my ear and lunged for it with a dirty cotton bud. He had a little leather bag round his neck with rags and brushes too. “Eh, no thanks !” I said, pushing him away. I’ve been hustled for a few things, but ear cleaning !

I made the 2 hour trek to Juhu again, this time to meet Nell, and old friend from Glasgow who’s also working in Bollywood. She’s filming a spoof Western in Hyderabad as I write. Nell and her boyfriend live in a Koli fishing village that predates Bombay but has now been completely swallowed up by it. It’s poor, not particularly pretty but bizarrely, is completely preserved and still considers itself to be a village, independent of it’s immediate surroundings. They still worship their own koli sea gods, hold the same festivals, wear the same unique saris and in traditional boats, fish the same (now heavily polluted) sea. Yet now, coming back ashore to land their catch, they must navigate towards the particular topography of highrises looming up along their stretch of the shoreline - the city carries on a further hour’s travel north before returning to the plains.

   

Nell and her boyrfiend have made a documentary about it featuring the stories of a group of villagers. No Indian channel wants it, though BBC World are interested.

They rushed off to work the next morning and I went to explore the village. I walked along the smelly polluted beach littered with shit, dogs and rubbish. Women ferried fish in baskets on their heads. Men were dotted about, looking out to sea. Through the smog the outline of downtown looked like a spectre. It created the illusion of looking far away. That’s probably they way they like it. I can see it’s not really offering them anything.

    

That night was my last night in Bombay. I tagged along with a group of people from the Salvation Army who wanted to live it up and eat sushi. We ended up on the rooftop restaurant of the Inter Continental hotel overlooking the glittering bay, dressed like beach bums. The view of the streetlamps that arc along the beachside Marine Drive, is known as ‘the necklace’ as it drips with money. None of us particularly enjoyed the meal. The Israelis, rightly, complained that it was pretty average sushi and I couldn’t stop thinking about the slum kids I’d met that afternoon. The meal came to 25 quid ahead, by far not the most expensive place we could have gone. 2 months wages for most of the young lads I’ve met who work in the guest houses.

“I actually feel quite dirty after that” said one of the guys as we got into the taxi. I know what he meant. To witness such extremes in a day and feel comfortable with it must take some geting used to. What was worse though, was that it was average. Bad European yuppie electro playing amongst a ‘contemporary’ white interior fit-out you could find and probably avoid in Glasgow. And we are average. Who exactly were we to be swaggering into a the environs of ‘the Bombay dream’ and tucking in like it was pub food. We shouldn’t have been let in.

5 days is nowhere near enough time for me to know a thing about this city. I feel like I’ve tasted it and I’m still trying to work out what it tastes of. I know I’ll come back for more though. But if that really is the dream of New India then compared to the riches of old India it’s fools gold. Then again, as if I would ever judge Glasgow on the aspirations of the merchant city. It’s time I stopped writing.