Mumbai

Mumbai is a city to love. It was our fourth major Indian city after Calcutta, Chennai, and Bangalore, and by far my favorite. It’s actually walkable with wide roads and, in some parts of the city, not that much traffic – a statement I could never say about the other cities. There are towering colonial buildings everywhere, parks to play cricket in, city landscaping, and the trash is actually controlled in some parts (the latter being, again, something I could never say about the other cities).

Mumbai is a city I could find myself living in. Of course, Scott would say we didn’t see the “real” Mumbai, a city where half the population lives in slums, or hutments. We were in the Churchgate, Fort, and Coloba districts, which make up the peninsula – a tiny fraction of the city that houses the museums, the Gateway of India arch, the Taj Mahal Hotel. We wandered around Marine Drive and Malabar Hill district as well, but still, Scott said, “The real Mumbai doesn’t have advertisements about going to Switzerland.” 

My rebuttal was that while we were not in the slums, what we were seeing, what we were walking through, which included Sunday roads empty enough to play street cricket on, was still the “real” Mumbai – real people walking, real people shopping, real people working, and yes, real people sitting at the New York Café drinking pitchers of Kingfisher beer, listening to ACDC, and watching cricket on TV. What we were experiencing may not have been the harsh Mumbai, the tragic Mumbai, the gut-wrenching Mumbai, but it was still the real Mumbai.