Sketch of Lower Parel, Mumbai
Unfortunately I still can't activate my phone so no pictures yet, but I figured DU could use a good story. Once my phone is back among the living I'll let y'all see what this place is like.
I just moved to Lower Parel in Mumbai. My wife and I live in a new (actually a not-yet-finished) apartment building that used to be a cotton mill. We are between the two main railroad tracks of south Mumbai, the Western and Central lines, and right next to the allegedly-soon-to-be-finished monorail. An average of 10 people a day die on the tracks of these trains.
Our view to the east is the neighborhood of Chinchpokli, formerly where the millworkers lived and now a shantytown after the collapse of the textile industry in Mumbai. The neighborhood nestles against the slope of a hill. At day you can distinguish it from the more middle-class Meghwadi to the north by the bright blue tarps people use to insulate their shanties. At night you can tell because all the lights are yellow kerosene rather than white incandescent.
Our view to the west is wonderful: the Mahalaxmi racetrack, the Haji Ali mosque (accessible only by a causeway that is covered at high tide), and the Arabian sea. Or at least it will be for a few more months, until the next highrise being built passes our floor. Between the new developments are the skeletons of old cotton mills: Shanti, Ramdev, Dagdi, written in Marathi, Hindi, and English in white paint on crumbling brick smokestacks.
Mumbai is something like New York and LA in one city (and actually twice as populous as both of them put together). One advantage is that you can get anything delivered. Or almost anything. One of my worst vices is using smokeless tobacco ("dip"
; I picked it up in the military and can't seem to shake it. However, the state of Maharashtra banned all forms of smokeless tobacco last year (except for a certain type of paan -- tobacco and betel leaf/seed -- used in religious rituals). So, I was looking for a pharmacy ("chemist", here) to deliver some Nicorette. This they won't deliver because the state is also cracking down on Nicorette on the grounds that replacing one addiction with a slightly healthier one isn't a good idea (interesting POV, at any rate).
So anyways, now that I can safely be away from the bathroom for more than 5 minutes at a time (ah, India) I thought I would try out the neighborhood chemist and see what he could do. I go down to the main building exit and step outside. How to describe stepping outside in Mumbai? If you've lived in the US deep south you have some idea of that "wall" of heat and humidity that suddenly drops on you. But there's also the sounds, the colors, and the smells. The sounds are, well, India: cars honking, constantly. Kids playing cricket in the alley. Pumps, generators, and DIY transformers delivering such power, water, and sewage as they can to the shantytown. The colors are also India. Independence day was less than a week ago so there are still bits of orange, green, and white bunting everywhere. The smells are wet. It's the tail end of monsoon season here; it smells like the gulf coast after a hurricane: water, rotting stuff, and lots and lots of excrement. The people in Parel often have organized latrine areas, but the poorer slums to the east don't, and if the wind isn't coming off the sea that smell will hit you in the face.
I see the first animals in the building's courtyard and driveway: feral dogs, and ravens. The dogs are beautiful but definitely wild: they walk with their tails and ears down. The ravens actually run the city, my neighbor told me yesterday.
My building's driveway fronts to Arthur Road (of the infamous jail). Arthur Road is lined with shop stalls. I turn right (having already searched for where chemists are) and walked towards the Mahalaxmi junction. I see my first Mumbai cow. She is by US standards pitifully thin, and so is her keeper. There are, apparently, a fixed number of cow licenses given out by the city government for each neighborhood. Maintaining a cow is considered a righteous dharma by Hindus (and Sikhs, I think), so people passing by give him money; I give five rupees (10 cents or so). The policeman holding an AK nearby warns me against the danger of unlicensed cowkeepers. I am to demand to see the license for the cow, like this man has properly displayed, before I give any money.
I've never been somewhere with as strong a sense of the holy. Not just the religious; the holy specifically. Seeds are left for the birds. Tubs of water are left out for the dogs (people know perfectly well about malaria and dengue). Every block has a shrine, around here mostly to Ganesh (this neighborhood is Ganesh central, apparently). But there is also a mosque (I salaam the muezzin as he starts to walk to the microphone, and he salaams me back) and a Catholic church. Oddly enough, the islands of Mumbai were first settled by the Portuguese, and the oldest religious buildings in the city are Catholic. I pass the St. Ignatius church (early 1800s) on the left. And then a still-operating Jewish cemetary that dates back to the 1700s.
Some of the stalls are what you might expect. Produce (the green coconuts look wonderful), samosas (I'll give my digestion a couple more weeks, I think), religious chachka (lots of Ganesh's, some crosses and saints). But there's also jewelers. Very very nice jewelers with amazing goldwork and rubies. And there are machine shops. One guy has a machine tooler, a generator, and a transformer/PDU system that makes me (an electrical engineer) whistle in admiration at his ballsiness. He can probably power 40 or so families with that setup.
Anyways, I find the chemist and he digs around in his drawers for the Nicorette. He asks for my prescription and I say "Dr. Puchahsah has it" ("puchahsah" being Hindi for "fifty" -- note to self: learn Marathi if I want to continue bribing people), which seems to work for him, so I pay 70 rupees for a 20 rupee tray of gum (they open the boxes and sell it by the tray). Anyways, that should set me up for a couple of days.
The cow guy has moved on by the time I come back. I nod at the police officer (still there, still holding an AK); he seems confident I won't be taken in by a purveyor of fake cow dharma now.