An Indian Haircut…..

I need to do something with my hair!  While living up at Holden Village, a remote Lutheran retreat center in the North Cascades, I saw no reason to cut my hair at all.  I wasn’t going anywhere into the outside world anyway, so I let my freak flag fly and grew it out.  Then I stuffed it up under my hat and kept letting it grow.  After a year we left Holden and went up to Alaska for the rest of the summer.   I saw no reason to cut it then either because, well, it was Alaska and everyone looked like they had a part on the Duck Dynasty TV show.  After I got back to Minnesota I saw an episode and decided I didn’t really like the Duck Dynasty.  I didn’t like the look and I sure didn’t agree with their politics so the long beard and the “almost” pony tail had to go. 

By the time I landed in India my head was still looking pretty sharp.  At least I thought so until the humidity got mixed up in my head and turned curly hair into kink and frizz.  It was ok after a shower, for a few hours, but by the afternoon my head had the look of a used brillo pad.  Most men here, Indians and expats, keep their hair short, so I thought I’d step into Sony’s Hairdresser for a high and tight.

Sony is a few blocks down the road from school.  On the right side of the street is a tall fence that keeps the leopards inside of a natural refuge called Aarey.  At least that is what I hear, and rumor has it that a leopard took a ten year old child last summer, but I am on the human side of the wall so what can go wrong?

There were at least five young men sitting in the shop when I walked into Sony’s air-conditioned shop. None of them were getting a trim so one of them moved out of the barber chair so I could take my seat.  Sony asked what kind of cut I wanted, he understood English, and went to work trimming and cutting.  I watched from the mirror as more and more and more of my hair cascaded down the apron onto the floor and it began to appear as though I was getting the marine jarhead look that I have not seen on my head since the last inspection, on the last day, in the US Army, in 1974. 

The next part of Sony’s haircut routine is a hot shave.  He understands English well enough so I was not worried about losing half of my beard.  I lost half of a mustache in an Egyptian barber shop a few years ago.  The Abdul who cut my hair did not speak English, and although I thought I had mimed a trim correctly, he cut off the mustache before I had time to protest.  Mustache gone, take the beard, too.  Sony, on the other hand, got it right and the hot shave felt pretty good.  Oh… and the razor was right out of the package.  No nicks, no blood poisoning.

The best part of the one hour service was the massage.  He started with the scalp, the face, and worked his way down my neck, back, and arms all the way to the tips of my fingers.  He snapped my knuckles and moved up the way he came down.

When he got back to the scalp he stopped and put on an electronic vibrator.  This is when things got really interesting.  He started with my scalp again and started moving down.

When he got as far as my ears he stopped,  stuck a vibrating fore finger inside, and pushed until it felt like he had gotten as far as his third knuckle.  I know that this is not possible, but it felt like he had gotten pretty deep, and I swear if he had stuck his other finger into the other ear the fingertips would probably be touching each other.  None of this is a pleasant thought, but it felt great!

When my hair grows out again I will be sure to go back to Sony for another four hundred rupee full treatment.

Taking the Train….

I am ready for my first train ride to Colaba; the downtown of Old Mumbai. 

Darren and Mike, two expat veterans on their second year in Mumbai have agreed to show the first year rookies the way.  Malad, the closest rail station is not far, but isn’t within walking distance so a three wheel auto rickshaw is the first step to get downtown.  The rickshaw, a three wheel vehicle with a black body and yellow/orange stripe looks a bit like a bumble bee.  The round but narrow body is well adapted to quick maneuvers on narrow streets.  In a tight space or in heavy traffic it can turn 180 degrees on a dime and is ideally suited to the traffic on the way to Malad.

It is Saturday, the streets are busy, and the station is packed.  It looks pretty crowded to me but Darren says that, because of the Independence Day weekend, it is soft day for crowds.  I want to be able to do this myself so I will pay attention to:                                                                                                                  

Ticket line protocol….first class can go to the front of the line but doing so seems pretty rude so we pass. Ticket choices….first class is 250 rupees round trip                                                                          Platform location….downtown is on the west side of the tracks so we must use the track walkover                                     

First class location…. Roman numeral   I   not  II                                                                                         Car entry protocol… there isn’t any so fight your  way in as fast as possible!

The car is a tight pack of humans.  At first I am hanging on to the overhead handle or bars but realize it isn’t really necessary.  This package of humans is so tight I can flow with the crowd and can’t fall over into a space that does not really exist.  Early on, I see nothing but heads, but as time passes the tight crowd releases itself and I manage to become one of the men who are hanging onto a bar and leaning out the door.  The wind is refreshing, the view is authentic, and I am hanging out on an Indian train coming into Churchgate station in downtown Mumbai.

I tried really hard to pay attention to the walking route we took from the station to a downtown expat hangout called Leopold’s.  The first five blocks were a straight line from the station past the 18^th century architectural of Victoria’s station.   Each building we pass is a monolith of English architecture that was a marvel in the past.  Though crumbling from India’s monsoon climate they still exude the splendor of the times from British colonial empire.

The first right turn from this major street is important and is noted by the position of a black and white cow eating a pile of grass and chewing cud.  Will that cow be there for me next time I look for this same right turn?  Not likely, and so I will be lost.  I need a better landmark.

Leopold’s, the hang out and meeting place was a feature bar in “Shantaram”, a book by Gregory David Roberts.  It was a good read a few years ago and at the time of the reading I had no idea I would be sitting in the same bar in the future.   “Shantaram” was about the dark seedy slum and underworld of Mumbai in the 80’s.  The bar helped the book and the book helped the bar as expats from all over the world still sit and drink their beer amongst the dated murals and pictures from a 70’s retro time.  Leo’s became an expat target for terrorists in 2008 as they attacked western places like the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Oberoi Hotel, and Leopold’s bar.  The bullet holes are still in the ceiling and the walls.  The event was probably good for more tourism as expats sit and drink  their  Kingfisher beer from “towers” that hold up to two gallons in a device that looks like a gumball machine with a tap. 

The goal of an afternoon downtown is not beer consumption so we head out by cab to Crawford market.  This sprawling street market originated in a beautiful colonial mall with a tower and grand entry.  But that was the 1880’s.  Gravity, rain, and tropical humidity are not friendly to old buildings.  Mortar crumbles, mold grows, and towers eventually will fall.  Crawford needs some serious infrastructure restoration. The rusty brown tin that shelters the addition to the mall also shelter 000’s of stalls selling cheap plastic, cheap clothes, and cheap food.

This market is not my destination so we agree to meet at the gate in an hour.  Walking a main street, by myself now, away from Crawford takes me deeper into an area where I hope to find bric brak and junkshops that sell antiques at a reasonable price.  The shops I seek are always “over there” or “that way” so I hop into a rickshaw to a place the locals are calling the Chor Bazaar.

And so I find junk.  Old TV’s, radios, speakers without cases, 8 track tapes, and other junk from  the past is not what I have in mind but as the clock moves toward 3:15 the stage changes and brass and copper shops began to appear.  No time for more than a teaser though and the traffic is heavy so getting back to the façade at Crawford will not be easy before 3:30.  At 3:30  I am still stuck in gridlock so it’s time to get out in the middle of stopped traffic and walk the last two  blocks back to the expats who are waiting for me and are ready to go.

Back to downtown by cab, another bar, a chance to relax after the heat and humidity of the street. Maneuvering the streets of Mumbai is hot and thirsty work.

The walk back to the train station for the return to our suburb of Malad is much easier than the walk past the cow.  This time we followed a street parallel to a large grassy commons and soccer pitch.  Some fine old building sits on the perimeter and I can’t help but think that the architect of the commons and the building was thinking of a park in London. 

Before getting on board for an hour it seemed wise to go to the toilet.  A man in the next urinal seemed intent on watching me urinate as he had probably never seen such a pale white circumcision.  I considered moving my thumb aside so he could get a better show but, being a shy person, I hesitate to embarrass my race and uncover for the next stall’s  voyeur.  He continued to look anyway. 

The return train was quite empty at Churchgate, the first stop on the return to the Northern suburbs.  A seat next to my friends felt good, we relaxed.  Darren exits at a different stop than ours but that was ok. Getting home shouldn’t be hard, but then if things should be easy they probably won’t be.

There were at least twenty five empty rickshaws at the Malad station but every driver refused us the service of his taxi.  Drivers, in general, are not very friendly and they seemed particularly crabby tonight.  No one will explain why we can’t ride with them, and the diagonal Indian head wag gesture is neither a yes nor a no, so we are a bit confused.  Everyone knows that people with glasses speak English so we ask a young woman how we can get a ride.  She tells us that we must cross the tracks on the foot path  bridge.  We do so.  We find ourselves on a wonderful street full of street vendors selling neatly stacked piles of eggplants, okra, and other uncommon and colorful vegetables.  There are many rickshaws, but once again no one wants to give us a ride.  This is beginning to get annoying as we cannot walk home.  We need a ride.  Another person with glasses is stopped for advice and direction.  These intelligent four eyes tell us that we are on the wrong side of the tracks and that we must cross over the other side…. again.  I begin to  wonder how smart people with glasses really are.  I wear mine constantly and if glasses make me an example of intelligence than perhaps I need a new IQ measurement device.  This time we walk further afield from the original place on the west side.  The first rickshaw stops, we get in, and the journey is over.

Why was the last part of the trip so difficult?  I have no idea, but next time I will know how to take a train downtown and where to stand to find a taxi on the last leg home.

The junkshops are there, I know they are, and I will be back….. Later.

                       

Technology Glitches and Gratitude

Experience being what it is, we sometimes struggle to keep up with the rest of the world.  Now that we are in what appears to be the capital of world technology, we have to look at this as a very fortunate learning opportunity.  That is, when we aren't banging our heads against the wall.

As you can see, we have had to move Burnell's blog to a new location, as the last one was linked to our school, which is not okay, so here we go again.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and the double notifications. We are still fooling around with format, but hopefully remembering every little thing as we go, as in the many other new platforms we have been saturated with in the past three weeks. Yes, maybe a little whining here, but we'll get over it, probably feeling a little embarrassed for the current rants and techno-negativity in the long run...

It is Sunday morning, and we are sitting in bed with coffee, going through our emails and checking out the vista from our teachers' apartment in Malad West, a suburb an hour north of Old Mumbai. The tide is going out on the estuary that causes the outhouse-like aroma that comes with it every day.  Then we look below, behind the walls of the apartment complex, to see something like you might have read about in "Beyond the Beautiful Forevers" or watched in "Slumdog Millionaire."  The sun striking them from the side, probably well into a daily cycle of hard labor.  Four men load fiberglass bags filled with old bricks and rubble by hand, then toss them up into the back of an immense 1950s era truck.  The guy on top, dumps out the bricks, throws the bags back down for the men and boys down below to continue filling. It is not a dump truck so we imagine as they finally drive away, that they will be unloading the whole thing with their bare hands somewhere else.

So much for our grumbling and complaining about our work up here, floating high above the unimaginable chaos below.  Time to be humble, and get to work solving our own little problems.

     Let’s Go See a Movie

Every country has its own way of being at the cinema.  The last movie I saw in the United States was at Lakes Theatre in Moose Lake Minnesota.  Small town, small theatre…six dollars gets you into a 50’s retro place with a hundred seats that have been sat upon for as many years, but  I have never seen more than twenty people seated there at any given time.

Years ago I saw Arnold  Swartnegger and Jesse Ventura at the Odeon Cinema in downtown Cairo.  It was 1989; the movie was “The Predator”.  The projector bulb burned a hole through the haze of a theater full of cigarette smoking Egyptian men.  Women were not allowed.  They lit up and chain-smoked through two hours of Arnold’s heroic fight against the powerful hunter alien know to us as “The Predator.”   Predator liked killing humans.  Every time it smoked Jesse Ventura or another member of Arnold’s elite Seal unit the audience erupted with another enthusiastic “whoa, whoa, whoa”!  They didn’t care who bled and the alien became the American killing hero.   Until Arnold blew it away in hand to hand and a big explosion.   That event turned the audience into a brawny standing ovation.  Go Conan!

The first movie I saw in India was “Guardians of the Galaxy”.  One might be disappointed by my first choice of movies, but this is India and choices were limited to Hercules, Transformers, Godzilla, and a host of rowdy Bollywood action.  Action/Adventure is big here.

Ann and I bought our assigned seats.  They were four dollars apiece.  Look carefully in the dark and you can find Row 6, seats 10 and 11.  Take the wrong spot and expect to be unseated.  A middle aged woman with six kids paraded into our row me and politely told me we were in her seat.  I was right…. She was wrong.  She and I were both embarrassed.  I apologized for being right and she apologized twice for being wrong. That settled; we settled into “lazy boy” type chairs with a recliner but became unseated again when the first notes of the Indian national anthem were being played.  Next Friday is Independence Day, but I have a feeling this is the routine here.  The Indian flag waved on screen as a woman’s police choir sang their countries song.

“Guardians” the movie used a lot of high tech action, hand to hand, explosives,  high speed space chases ,and ultimately ploughed through space to save the universe.    The writers used a fair amount of misunderstood comic relief.  But then how would I respond to Indian metaphors, irony, and the subtleties of a Bollywood movie?  And with Hindi with subtitles?  No way. 

The ten minute intermission was an opportunity for me to go to the bathroom and for the attendants to come up our aisle with popcorn, beverages, and hot snack food.  No beer though.  I came back late because I was totally confused when I came out of the bathroom, forgot which theatre I was supposed to be in, had lost my ticket, and suffered the embarrassment of losing track of my seat.  It was a relief to see the woman with six kids again.

Guardians of the Galaxy was a nice bit of escapism from the grit of Mumbai.  The movie was fun, wasn’t a typical dark Marvel movie, had comic relief, and the heroes saved the galaxy.  The talking raccoon and the plant man were the best.

After the show I walked home on the Malad Link Road.  It is a straight shot from the Oberoi Mall to our own Elanza Tower apartment complex.  The Malad Road is wide enough to walk without watching your back for a bump from one of a mass of vehicles coming from behind.  It is only four kms, about forty five minutes, and follows a route past a small slum.  The slum is under a fly over, next to a set of tracks.  The view from the bridge isn’t revealing.  Roof tops of clay tiles, tin, and blue tarp cover the lives of thousands and hide the alleys below.  The BBC says that Mumbai is short 20,000 toilets.  This slum used to cover the sidewalk that makes the Malad road walkable.  The government pushed the shacks into a pile and threw them into the dump.  People moved to a different slum.  Walking into and seeing the slum is a bit compelling but is no business of mine today and I am not likely to become a slum tourist any time soon.  The fly over crosses the north south tracks of the Indian railway to downtown Mumbai and the heart of the beast.  No one was riding on top of any of the cars today but there were many hanging to the rail of its open doors.

Someday I will ride the rail in one of those cars but I’ll buy a ticket for first class.…. Save that story for another day.

By the way the Guardians and the talking raccoon get a weak thumbs up and only 2 stars.

Mumbai, India; First Impressions

July 2014

First impressions are like generalizations and they are usually wrong, but I am going to make them anyway, so here are a few thoughts from a first week in India.

A trip downtown in Mumbai isn’t really that much different than to downtown Cairo;  congested traffic, honking horns, pedestrians and beggars running and weaving, decayed or decaying infrastructure, crumbling concrete.

This decay is different though.  Cairo dirt is dry brown that blows off the Sahara.  Mumbai’s is wet brown with mildew and black mold growing in the monsoon humidity.  Either way the effect is similar.  Buildings become rubble, new replaces old; the entropy cycle continues. 

Arriving at the police station for registration, the six of us new expats queue up for a four hour processing.  The building is probably from the British colonial era.   We pass the crumbling façade, through the metal detectors, and onto the first of many chairs in the procession to another place to sit.  The trip to the third floor passes the apparently stalled elevator in its dark and greasy shaft.  The 1^st floor hall is full of very used furniture, the 2^nd hall is empty, but the locked doors and off white walls are not for us so we continue to the 3^rd floor and another queue of empty chairs awaiting our waiting.  A ghost pigeon glides through an open window, passing directly overhead, and exiting thru another open space in a fraction of time. No time to flinch, blink and it is gone.  My file is assigned a number six and it moves with me to another room for more of the same, but no pigeon.  This room has stacks of files that contain documents like mine, so presumably I will add mine to a collection of bound files and maybe it will become part of that pile, too.  But a section of the pile has tipped and allowed gravity to take it onto the floor.  It begs for a hand to tidy up, but I see from other places in the room that this is not likely.

Ann and I are called to another room.  Our attendant, a woman dressed in a red and blue sari wrap begins the interview.  Name, father’s name, mother’s maiden name; the same details I have processed on the other dozen documents that begs the same questions.  I am sure she is speaking English, but am unable to process her soft Hindi accent in a room filled with the noise of fans and other voices so it is often necessary to lie and say “I can’t hear very well” rather than tell her to “speak up” or “I can’t understand your English”.  Our calm and polite behavior offers us a reward when another woman hands out a yellow sweet cake to our attendant.  She breaks the yellow cake and offers us one of her halves. Briefly I wonder what her hands have touched and I already know what the bathroom sink looks like, but caution is not among my qualities when hungry so I accept the soft, sweet, tasty little morsel and thank her for her generosity. 

Finished now, we are directed to another room where we have to buy the folders our documents will be punched into.  My magenta folder is not my color and does not become me but it will become me when it will be added to another tall stack of police documents.  I am quite sure that within the week I will be just another magenta folder in a cluttered room somewhere in the Indian bureaucracy of identification.

Post Script……This piece may not sound positive, but remember that I am reasonably comfortable in this kind of environment and find it exiting.  By the way, our school is a state of the art international school and our apartment building is very new and enjoys an 11^th floor view of an estuary to the Indian Ocean.