(Feb 1)

Even though it is in Maharashtra, Bombay (Mumbai) is a not a Maharashtrian city. It is and has always been an international city. Words like 'mega' and 'maximum' are easily applied. Most introductions mention traffic, slums, diversity, food, and neighborhoods. Like New York, Bombay is probably best understood one neighborhood at a time, or for those not living here, perhaps though a variety of books. Murder mysteries set in Bombay seem like a good entree, although I haven't delved into them myself (I was thinking about mysteries because on our visit here we had the chance to meet Jerry Pinto, a versatile writer and translator).

We came to the city to meet friends and mix with students and faculty at TISS, where we are being hosted in their very comfortable guest house. As a plus, the Kala Ghoda festival is on. The Kala Ghoda neighborhood is part of the 'Fort' area of Bombay, a place of impressive colonial institutions and buildings as well as bookstores, art galleries, boutiques, and pretentious cafes serving kombucha. Its festival is a combination of literary and art performances, along with some public art installations.

When we left Pune for Bombay, I had the thought that we were moving another step further away from Lee's village, but now I am reconsidering. Pune has a conservative culture, dominated by academics, intellectuals and engineers, with strong traces of Peshwa culture and Brahmanism. Because of this, Pune does not have as many family or religious ties to villages beyond its margins as does Bombay. While many Bombay people know nothing of villages, because of the industrial heritage, more of it is knit into villages in wide swathes of Maharashtra, Gujarat and all the rest of India. Perhaps the comparison could be: Pune:Cambridge (MA) :: Bombay:Chicago. Lee's village has a long-standing connection to Bombay. Even before independence, villagers took the train to Bombay to join the military or to work in the huge textile mills. So many men came to Bombay that the village owned (and still owns) two rooms in the Dadar area chawls where village men could sleep. At the height of the mill work, they slept in shifts. Now that the mills are gone, the men are working as police and bus drivers, and whatever else they can find.

The Fort area of Bombay is the colonial heart of the city, home to the (now renamed) Victoria Terminus rail station, built by the British in an elaborate orientalized neo-gothic style. Walking around the area, I was again surprised by the clear sidewalks and clean gutters. As in Pune, apparently the authorities have rigorously cleared out of unsanctioned dwellers, encroachers, beggars, sales people, etc. Of course I enjoy not having to worry about stepping in filth or tripping on a crippled beggar winding through the crowds, but at the same time, the sterility does feel alien. Meanwhile, they are extending the Metro, so quite a few streets are closed off or dug up. Lee and I wandered from VT through some of these streets, past the Maidan full of cricket players and over to the Back Bay and a view of the glittering sea. The sights in this area are so well documented online that I won't even bother to offer links. Marine Drive had been cleared of poor people even before the rest of Bombay, so with the exception of a few strolling vendors, it was unremittingly middle class. Because the tide was in, we didn't even see much of the unavoidable trash. We walked back into the city for a mid-day meal in one of the remaining Irani restaurants. When asked, the server reported that it had been running for 100 years and 6 months. It was late morning on a Saturday, though, so we had the place to ourselves until another pair of tourists came in.

We made our way to the National Gallery of Modern Art for a large retrospective exhibit of Sudhir Patwardhan's paintings and drawings. Observing people, one of the many pleasures of visiting art museums, was easy in this building with a curving central staircase opening onto crescent-shaped galleries. Patwardhan himself happened to be in one of the galleries recording an interview, but he presents himself so simply that most people passing through did not even notice. A comfortable, shady tea stall is attached to the museum, which is where we sat while we waited for an old friend to arrive from a Kala Ghoda event she'd helped organize. This friend, like many in India's left wing, has roots in communist organizing (to reassure Americans: communism and various communist parties are part of the political fabric here, not the bogey-man we were brought up with). As she entered the tea stall patio, Patwardhan himself stood up and eagerly greeted her. They were friends: he and her (still mourned) poet husband had collaborated on artworks back in the good old days. It is something to enjoy about Bombay, that in this huge city there are cozy literary and artistic corners such as these.

After tea we moved on down the street to another such meeting place for the literati: the David Sassoon Library. Yes, Sassoon as in the shampoo. Bombay is home to a variety of interesting groups, such as the Parsis and Iranis already briefly mentioned, and the Sassoons represent another such group: Baghdadi Jews who settled in India starting in the 18th century. The Sassoon Library is usually open only to members, so it was a pleasure to be able to go into the back garden for one of the Kala Ghoda events, a talk by Jerry Pinto already mentioned above. After the talk, a mutual friend took Jerry and us for a quick chat over tea in one of those upscale places that offers gluten-free organic pizza, something that feels grotesque in such close proximity to people who make their living picking garbage (I know - just because garbage-pickers are not in proximity in Ann Arbor does not make our starbucks any less troublesome - this is a constant niggling puzzle for me).

The whirl of Kala Ghoda then swung us back to the Library where our friend introduced us to Sudharak Olwe and two young men, striving journalists, also poet and photographer. Sudharak took us all off to his club where we sat on a rooftop enjoying a view of the illuminated Maidan with drinks and meandering multi-lingual conversation. This is where I wish I were one of those people who could hang around Bombay and write novels, maybe in the style of Dos Passos, about the beautiful, courageous people of this city. We spoke of labor and housing, how regional newspapers differ from the urban ones, the ethical tensions journalists face, photography and power, stray cats, food, transportation, and secularism.

Eventually we all went out onto the street for taxis and busses home in various directions. Three of us ordered an Uber for the ride back to TISS. The route took us on a long elevated highway known as a flyover. Flowing smoothly over the curdled traffic, slums and docklands below, it did feel as if we were flying. I knew that not too far away some villagers we might know were sleeping, 5-8 men rolled in blankets on the floor of a room, hoping to bring something more back to the village than what they left with.

no photos (Feb 4)

I looked through all Lee's Bombay photos but have now put them aside, dissatisfied. It's not the quality of the pictures, but only that I keep looking for one that conveys more than just the image in the frame: the stinging smog, the distracted feeling of not being able to stop fully because of all the movement in all directions, and above all, the noise. It's almost tedious to write about, on the edge of becoming another cliché, and yet at the moment I cannot attend to anything else. Outside this window two men talk very loudly to a high-pitched toddler who is squawking back; several crows are croaking, someone is pounding Indian pop music at top volume from an outdoor speaker, and of course there is the traffic. A vendor at some distance away is shouting whatever it is he's selling in a long nasal whine.

Long ago when I lived in Indonesia, people told me that they hated and feared quiet, especially at night. They preferred things to be lively and lit up. I don't know if, at base, a similar aesthetic was at work here, but by now it is far, far out of hand. There is not been a moment's quiet here for months, perhaps years. People talk loudly to be heard and perhaps also because many must have hearing loss from the years of noise (I can attest that a motorbike horn when passing close causes real pain). Even the birds have had to increase the volume of their calls. All through the night there is traffic, music, amplified events in temples, amplified cricket matches and various shouting people and stray dogs sorting out their problems.

The TISS guesthouse kindly gave us a free newspaper every morning, in which I read the story about the police experimenting with a signal that punishes drivers who use their horns. Unlike the light tone of the NYT, the story I read pointed out some concerns: emergency vehicles for one; but also the fear that "unsocial elements" might decide to make a statement and shut down traffic for a while simply by blowing their horns.

I could go on at great length about noise levels here, traffic being only a part of the astonishing barrage. Like the trash problem, though, the police are going at it the wrong way around. No one wants piles of garbage. It happens because the city has not arranged systems to handle it. But the city blames the victims rather than addressing design problems. Similarly, people navigate with audio because the streets are poorly designed and in terrible condition. Horns are a kind of sonar system that says, 'hey, I am here, yep, gonna move into that space, nope, not giving way, arg, oh alright, you go on then you bully, but I don't like it' and so forth. On a few avenues the traffic police have managed to maintain order with stoplights, but they are too much of an exception to have an effect on how people drive. It is really just unfair to set up a system that requires people to be creative in impossible traffic, and then punish them for it.

It's true that people do get inured to using horns. On the long, smooth Eastern Freeway from central Bombay up to TISS, the lanes are divided, trucks and non-motorized transit are banned, and everything floats along nicely at ~50mph. I watched our taxi driver as he transitioned from the hectic city streets to this free-flowing space. Even though all the cars were nicely spaced along a multi-lane stretch, he couldn't help tapping his horn now and then as he passed, as if reassuring himself that he was still moving along.

in lieu of photos, here are some more agreeable soundscapes: https://soundsofmumbai.in/

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