In early 2007, owing to a personal problem that seemed like a massive disaster at the time, but would prove to be a temporary setback, I made a hasty decision, packed up everything I owned and moved to Mumbai. As much as I loved the city, I found the arrangement not quite working for me. I was desperately homesick, work seemed sparse, and I had finally found the courage to face up to the massive disaster back in Delhi. So I made another hasty decision (the right one this time), re-packed everything I owned, and moved back.

I spent about a month in Mumbai. Despite the setbacks and indecision, it was a fabulous month, full of exploration, meeting new people and being intrigued by a city that I’ll always remember fondly.

I’m sharing here a few notes from my Mumbai journal.

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Mumbai is movement. A transition. A place where people come to follow their dreams, mend their broken hearts, escape from orthodox families. It promises freedom, new beginnings, and another chance at life. It’s a city that never sits still. Like the people, it’s constantly changing, constantly shifting, taking on new roles. As the business city. The entertainment city. The sin city.

If you’re on a boat in the sea one day and see no warm bodies around you for miles, you might begin to wonder where all the people are. What is this huge population that writers and poets speak of, you may think. Head over to the Andheri local train station. They’re there. All twelve million of them. You can smell their sweaty underarms, feel their wet shirts pressing against your skin, inhale the air they’ve breathed out. The trains are packed to every inch of their capacity. Watching people disembark is like watching someone stick their hand into a beehive and a swarm of bees rushing out. I become one of those bees each morning on my visits around the city.

One morning, I head over to a magazine stall to get the latest issue of my favorite magazine. “Khallas!” the guy says somewhat over-enthusiastically. “Khallas?” I ask confused, and he explains that he means he’s out of stock. “You’re not from Mumbai, are you?” he laughs. “You speak such pure Hindi. No one talks like that here.” Of course, this very pure Hindi is what gets me robbed blind by the cab driver at the airport as soon as I’ve set foot in the city. I hand him a Rs. 500 note, which he slickly slides under his hand and says, “Madummm…. You only give me Rs. 100.” I’m not dumb, but after making quite the scene, I’m forced to give in and pay him more.

Within days, I have successfully managed to forget the rules of grammar and learn the localized Hindi. Like everything else in Mumbai, the language is meant to save time and communicate fast.

My friend Siddharth explains this to me. “Let’s say you have to travel to Bandra by train and you go to the ticket counter and say Bandra. The person at the ticket counter will then ask you whether you want a return (two-way) or single (one-way) and you’ll tell him your preference. This wastes a lot of time. So seasoned travelers, when they want to travel both ways say ‘Bandra return.’ However, if you only want to go one way, you’d only say Bandra, and the whole dialogue would ensue again. So, instead, for a one-way ticket, you say ‘Bandra half-return.’ This saves several precious moments.”

Similarly, a half glass of tea from a friendly roadside vendor is called a “cutting chai.” But if you’re fond of the stuff enough to want a full glass, you won’t just ask for a full glass of tea and waste everyone’s time. You ask for a “double cutting chai.” A friend later says a three-fourth glass of tea is a cutting chai. I play it safe. I say “ek chai.”

By the time I’ve completed my month in the city, I manage to get the hang of the local slang and have blended in quite nicely. My butt isn’t pinched. Cabbies don’t rob me blind. The waiter at the restaurant where I dine no longer asks me if someone will be joining me. With my newly-learned bad Hindi, I become one of them. I am no longer the foreigner in this fast-paced city of foreigners.

Alone in the crowd

Every time I feel the need to lose myself in a crowd, I head over to a café on Colaba Causeway, the Juhu beach, or the Lokhandwala market. In the moments I crave solitude, the rocky stretch of the Marine Drive is my favorite spot to sit, observe and write.

I realize I’m in Mumbai, a city of tall buildings that are as close to each other as is physically possible, and hence cannot expect any shred of privacy, even in my home. I dutifully draw the curtains before I change my clothes or practice dance moves to loud music.

My neighbors though, have no such qualms. Through my open windows, I spot a young woman stitching clothes on a sewing machine, a middle-aged man sprawled on the floor in front of his television, and an elderly couple who, every evening between four and five p.m., pull back the shades, look outside, and talk to each other over steaming cups of tea.

As I lie in my bed and read at night, I can hear the sounds of the paan chewer spitting out the red seeds on to the street, the overflowing of water from someone’s tank, children arguing with each other, and the noises of buses, cars and motorbikes on the road. They’re a constant reminder that even in my solitude, I’m never truly alone.

I wander around the docks one evening, the smell of fish enveloping me, aware of the curious gazes of fishermen and women that last much longer than they should. Boats are scattered across the waters, and act as homes for many fishermen who go out for days at a time to catch fish from the deep waters.

On one such boat, a fisherman bathes. A bucket of water sits in front of him, and he pours the water with a tumbler over himself. In the split second that I spot him and he catches me looking, we share an embarrassed laugh. It’s not everyday that his bathing is interrupted by a chick with a camera. I wave a quick sorry and goodbye to him pretending I don’t see that he’s standing in nothing but wet trunks and soap running all over his body.

Space is a precious commodity in Mumbai, as renters who pay India’s highest rates will tell you. But more than anywhere, here I find a sense of personal boundaries, a wanting of privacy and space to claim as your own. We may draw our curtains when we want to get intimate, we may pretend the couple who drinks tea each evening can’t see us cooking in our own kitchen, we may even bathe in public. But that one meter of space around us is our own. And when invaded and embarrassed, we do what we best know how: we laugh.

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To be continued…