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.