Mumbai – “Mayanagri” or “The City of Dreams”
Mumbai, also known as Bombay (Good Bay), is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the most populace city of India with an estimated population of 27 million people, making it the 6th most populated city in the world.
It was first settled in 1507 and is dedicated to the goddess Mumba, the local incarnation of the Devi (Mother Goddess) and the patron goddess of the Koli fishermen, its oldest inhabitants. It lies on the Konkan coast of the west of India and is made up of seven islands which earlier were the home of the Marathi language-speaking Koli people. It is the financial, commercial and entertainment capital of India and known as the “city of dreams” because it offers limitless opportunities for the Indian citizens.
Thursday 27 April - I arrived first at 7.30am and after an hour getting through the admin and covid testing of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj airport, was met by two gentleman, one the driver, and the other, Siddharth, from the Travel Agency who has arranged all of our tours in Mumbai. A very chaotic hour’s drive through the morning traffic then ensued, I thought the driving in Italy was bad enough, but this is on another level, at one point with seven lanes of bumper traffic converging into three, talk about every man for himself!!! It was great having a guide en route as Siddharth pointed out all sorts of points of interest along the way, including the home of the richest man in India, an odd looking building which resembled more an apartment block of 27 floors, 6 of which house his fleet of over a 100 cars, and he has a staff of 450 servants. Unbelievable when you witness some of the abject poverty outside on the streets.
We are staying in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the most beautiful building which opened in 1903 and overlooks the majestic Gateway of India (more of that in a later blog!). Our room overlooks the Arabian Sea and this Gateway, and is absolutely the epitome of nostalgic elegance. Geoff arrived a few hours later and it took us no time at all to grab a bite to eat in the hotel (we are being mindful of where and what we eat and drink as we do not have time to catch Delhi belly!).
We were keen to have a walk around and explore the area around us. We are in a great location, near the Colaba Causeway, museums, art galleries, churches and synagogues. So off we ventured into the heat, around 30+ degrees, and map in hand and walked all the way to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, also known as Victoria Train Terminus, designed in an Italian Gothic style by English architect Frederic William Stevens, whilst passing many iconic heritage buildings along the way……the Brihanmumbai Municipal Building Corporation, St Thomas Cathedral, the Bombay High Court, the Army and Navy Building, the Jehangir Art Gallery to name just a few. Mumbai is overwhelming, and an assault on the senses, it is crowded, very noisy, traffic is manic with everyone honking their horns constantly (2 honks for I’m coming, 3 honks for I’m coming fast!), hawkers are everywhere and it is very hot, and quite dirty, just as you imagine - and you take your life in your hands when you cross a street.
After negotiating all of this we arrived at Victoria Train Station – imagine this, 5 million people pass through this station every day – that is almost the population of New Zealand! Think of that film “Lion” and it looked a little like that, but as we were there in the middle of the afternoon, we did manage to avoid the main throng of commuters. They call it an automated station as when it gets so crowded, people are just pushed, almost lifted onto the trains as the station and platforms are so crammed full.
It was so hot and we were both exhausted after our long flights so we decided to make our way back, along a far different and cooler route via the side streets, with some trees and shade and interesting too, with all the little shops selling everything you can possibly imagine, including one street just full of old-fashioned Xerox and printing machines and supplies. We have two different tours booked for tomorrow so we called it a day, had a lovely swim, a G&T by the pool, room service and a well-earned early night!
Friday 28 April – Our first Tour required a 4.30am morning alarm and us to be in the Reception by 5.15am to meet Namrata, our guide for our Mumbai by Dawn Tour. What a great time to venture out….no traffic, but slightly sad to see so many people with no homes and sleeping rough on the streets. First stop was the Sassoon dock, the first commercial wet dock in Western India which was built in 1875 and headed by the son of David Sassoon, the Jewish Community Leader in Bombay. Before we got out of the car we were handed plastic covers for our shoes (thank goodness, I have only one pair of trainers and they are white!). Geoff and I have been wearing our masks, (we can’t risk getting Covid before we get on our cruise next week) – I was happy we were because as we walked towards Navy Nagar the overpowering smell of fish, stale fish, humidity and sewage hit us (I had a couple of retches into mine, especially as I don’t eat/like fish!).
Oh gosh, I can’t think of a more overwhelming word than overwhelming, but by golly it was full on. 1500 trawlers operate here bringing in around 20 tonnes of fish every day. Hundreds of people are packed on the partially covered jetty, men are pushing loaded, extremely long, handcarts through the crowds as they yell for people to get out of the way, fisherwomen (they mainly do the selling and the buying) weave through the crowds holding very full plastic tubs of fish on their heads. I was slightly concerned that I was going to get separated in all the pushing and shuvving so at various points was grabbing the back of Geoff’s shirt!
Chaos overhead too as hundreds of birds circled looking for their breakfast. So many stalls laden with fish, women sitting on the ground shelling tiny pink prawns, pomfret, Bombay duck with their funny beak-like mouths, baby sharks, crabs, lobster, sting rays, eels, sailfish (yes, with fins like a sail), blood, guts, ice melting on the dirty ground - thank goodness for the shoe covers! The fish auction is open only to wholesalers and most of the bidding is done by women who buy for restaurants or to on-sell themselves to restaurants and private clients, everyone has to make a rupee somewhere along the line. All auctions over and done with in a matter of seconds. It seems incredible that this amount of fish is sold every day here.
The fishing boats go out for 15 days and they have the absolute minimum of facilities on them, we watched a guy in the bowels of one hoisting up bowls of fish and passing them to two fishermen, the first dunking it in water, the second deftly throwing it to a third person on the quayside and immediately on to a stall. It was pandemonium with a capital P! Sadly dear readers, no photographs were allowed, this is the Government’s call due to terrorism – so you’ll just have to take my word for it all!
Safely back into the car and some fresher air, we passed a local supermarket (see photo below) basically a wooden hut on the side of the road which sells bread, milk, eggs etc and these are located in all the neighbourhoods – hardly Metro New World! Our next stop was Mumbai’s answer to Fleet Street, well not quite! In the middle of the road, men sort out the morning’s newspapers printed in 7 different languages, the most popular being “The Times of India”, inserting the supplements and packing them all up in stacks on to the back of their bicycles to deliver to the vendors, by 9.00am the street is cleared of it all and the city is ready for the day.
It was great to be up so early to see all of the action that takes place in a city before most of us roll out of bed. Milkmen with canisters, the bread delivery men who were packing the bread into their carts to sell to the vendors. Off to the markets next, firstly the vegetable market with every vegetable, and some we don’t even recognise, for sale, next door the fruit market and finally, my favourite, the Davar flower market – oh the fragrance of the jasmine and roses!
Lots of marigolds for sale, the reason being is that they are good insect repellents which is why there is a lot of them in the temples, and fragrant bowls of rose petals. Geoff bought two metres of strung jasmine petals which are now deliciously scenting our room. Overlooking all of these markets were buildings called chawls which are rooted in the history of Mumbai’s colonial past. Because of the lack of housing these tiny one room tenement style buildings sprung up to house the working class, normally ten to a floor with ten people in each and all 100 of them sharing one bathroom . A lot of the vendors from these markets sell on the bridges which is illegal and apparently visited by the police daily when they set to and temporarily whip everything away out of sight.
The cow, and everything that comes out of it – milk, butter, urine (for medicine and dental powder) and dung mixed with water for insulation in huts and for flooring, is sacred in the Hindu religion. We passed numerous people selling cow food – grasses and some kind of wheat rolled into balls which Hindus buy and feed to the cows. Feeding a cow is equivalent to feeding 330 million Gods of Hinduism and Hindus see if as a remedy for their problems in life and that it will cleanse the body and purify the soul, and that the Goddess Mahalakshmi, the wealth Goddess, will shower her blessings upon people who feed the cows regularly. It was also a bit of a money maker for one “landlord” – he had rented two cows to a vendor we saw on the side of the road and the vendor sold the feed to his customers to give to the cows, he made the money from the feed, but the Landlord got the rent and his cows fed for free!
All of this and we were back in the Hotel at 8.15am in time for breakfast!!!
3.00pm and we’re back down in the Reception waiting for our driver, Dipak, to take us on our second tour of the day, our Entrepreneur’s Entourage Tour – the Store of the $1bn Economy of Dharavi.
One of the largest slum clusters in Asia, Dharavi became world famous as one of the locations where the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire was shot. We met our guide Waris, who lives in Dharavi, on site. Locals do not call Dharavi a slum, it is an informal community full of hope and aspirations and very industrious people who work together to create this economy of $1bn. Despite the grunginess and a fair amount of squalor there are about 5,000 thousand small-scale industries that are thriving here and it is home to one million people.
Dharavi had been a marshy fishing village, but the creek dried up when a neighbouring dam was built. A migration of potters from Surashtra, Tanners from Tamil Nadu and Artisans from Uttar Pradesh moved in to practise their art and businesses. Economically the communities thrived which made way for even more businesses. From leather goods, embroiderers, fabric dyeing, garments, a wealth of various recycling businesses from cardboard, aluminium melting (to make the base for food processors), plastic bottles and all manner of other plastics – chopped down into tiny pieces, washed, dried on the roofs of buildings and then taken to be melted down and reused, to the machines that were used for the crushing which were made on site using recycled wheels from railway carriages and iron plates from ships.
So impressive and so enterprising, nothing goes to waste here and around 250,000 people are employed in the recycling business.
From what we saw, the residents live in harmony and follow the Hindu way of being kind and caring with their neighbours. The residential areas, some houses only 10 metres square was clean and tidy and nearly all have electricity, running water and toilets. The kids seemed happy and playful and it was a friendly place to walk through. However we did stop by the Mahim Creek, a local river (photo below, this bridge features in the Slumdog Millionaire movie) which is used as a public toilet by some local residents and I must say it did smell rather foul. Another problem is also the diseases caught by residents due to the air pollutants. It is possibly the only slum in the world where people come in vast numbers to make a living.
It was quite the day – we learned so much about this incredible city we feel like we have been here for a week already! After all of this walking and learning we arrived back at the hotel feeling somewhat weary. You won’t believe this, our Butler knew that we had been on two tours and would be fatigued and when we opened the door to our room what did we see……a beautiful rose petalled floor leading to the bathroom with a hot bubble bath showered in rose petals and by the end of the bed, two exquisite brass pots containing jasmine and rose petals and fragranced bath salts to soak our tired (somewhat fishy) feet! Oh the luxury of it all and a very thoughtful touch. The perfect end to a perfect day.
