Ramblings from Bombay

By John Briggs

North from Carnac Bunder, Bombay, November 20, 2015:

I walked west  today across Carnac Bunder, the bridge over the many tracks from teeming Victoria Train Station (three million commuters pass through every day) just to the south, and, with no clear intent, took the battered stairs down and wandered north and west in the crowded lanes that make up most of Bombay, far beyond any tourist stop.

Along Tokaram Lane, the warehouses are fronted by bustees, the tiny slum huts made of tarpaulins and scrap wood, with cooking fires on the pavement in front, little children playing in the road, an occasional bone-thin day sleeper.

I read that India’s GNP is rising, that the middle class is expanding, that prosperity is beckoning millions, but on Bombay’s flat narrow streets, little of substance seems to have changed since I was first here in 1976: many more cars, the streets impassable with traffic, much more inedible trash (the cows and goats used to take care of every scrap of garbage), filthy air, even the bustee dwellers with a cell phone, but the people on the street are as thin now as then, and prices are high.

Just beside my hotel as I finished my breakfast, an ancient woman, nearly naked, sat near a spreading pile of her own diarrhea, her head down, her hand out.

Worrisome. Throughout the non-tourist city, clusters of young men sit with nothing to do, smoking, waiting, idle, unable to find work. They see now what they don’t have, see it on the TVs they watch, in the stores and restaurants they can’t enter, in the pretty women to whom they are invisible.

They have no clear resentment of me, and if I see a glare, I usually smile and tip my head, which more often than not brings me a smile. I am not their obstacle, and unlike many of us they have no instinctive racial animosity.

It’s a remorseless world, but for reasons I don’t understand, I can pass through with immunity.

It’s not wise, but I interject myself occasionally.

At a littered phone stall/snack shop up in the Mahd District, a tiny boy beside me, a street boy, was fluttering a Rs 10 (about eight cents) note at the indifferent clerk, trying to buy candy.

The clerk was busy cheating me and had no time for the boy. I reached down and picked him up, slowly lifting him so that his head reached my waist, then my chest. He’d stiffened at first but quickly understood and giggled. Whoever, whatever I was, I knew the clerk was a jerk. I was on his side.

I kept lifting him and began to hear chuckles from the people crowded at the front of the stall, and then I began moving the boy in front of me like a two-legged pendulum. He giggled louder, holding out the bill. The clerk’s assistant took it, looking nervously at his boss, and handed over the candy. I lifted the boy as high as I could, tipped him forward in a bow and put him down. He scampered, grinning at me over his shoulder.

The little episode maybe contributed to the clerk’ decision not to return my money for the SIM card he had sold me that wouldn’t work in my phone. “Take that, Meddler,” he probably said to himself.

I muttered a few things myself.

John Briggs is the former investigative reporter for the Free Press. He lives now in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is traveling slowly through central India for the next six months. He’s agreed to write occasional columns for Wind Ridge Publishing. His travel blog is jbriggs926.com.