Getting Gastro
I think by now JJ Hospital has attained more than its fifteen minutes of fame. However, its repercussions on my body remained for longer than I spent in it. After having boasted to all who would listen that I was the first tourist in India not to get the runs, that I was actually constipated, the universe showed me up.
I had one sandwich. Count it. One. One cucumber and tomato sandwich from the doctor’s canteen at JJ. With a thimbleful of chai thrown in. That was enough to floor me for three days. Even after relocating to my friend Divya’s house, a paragon of hygiene and cleanliness, I suffered the indignities of flatulence, diarrhoea and kidney pains.
After the first day of a strict diet of nimbu pani and toast, I decided to take antibiotics. I neglected however, to continue my light diet and had mango. Stomach did not like that. Neither did the colon. So Divya’s mum took matters in hand and made her whole family go on a bland diet. It still tasted delicious though.
She made rice with peas and friend onions on top. This was to be mixed with yoghurt, home made, of course. In fact, were it not for her mum, I would have dehydrated on the spot. However, both Divya and her mum ensured I kept up my fluids and ate properly.
Enough of bodily fluids, I think.
Sleeping at JJ Hospital
How do I know so much about JJ Hospital you ask? I had to sleep there.
Had is a hard word, but true. This trip to India has been quite draining, especially on the wallet. After hiring a crew to do my documentary, I was left with precious little to spend. So, post-shoot, I was on a very limited budget. As a result, I was offered an alternative to the astronomical accommodation prices I was paying on my first few nights back from Gujarat.
Healthy, the groom, one of the subjects of my documentary, offered me the use of his room in the resident doctors’ quarters. He no longer had a use for it, because he was living with Nirzari, my friend and his new wife. He spent eleven years living in that room.
So I, thinking I’d already seen squalor in India, in the form of a house in Yari Road, accepted his offer. Mind you, the house I had seen was just messy, but flooded. The ubiquitous odour of cow dung merged with tobacco and weed smoke, turning the walls of the house a heady yellow. Every time you woke up, you stank of weed and cow dung.
The residents were two siblings, on in her early twenties and one in his late teens. Their parents worked in England and came to Mumbai only occasionally. So, they made hay while the sun shone. Clayton, the seventeen year old, raced around the streets of Yari Road on motorbikes with his friends til 7 in the morning. He would generally hit the sack around 8 am and wake up at 8 pm.
Roxane, his elder sister, led a similar nightowl lifestyle. She hung out with her friends til four in the morning and woke up around eleven, for breakfast and one gola.
My next experience in accommodation was in the town of Navsari, Gujurat, where the wedding was to take place. Sheba and I stayed with Esha, a close friend of Nirzari. Esha’s house was an immaculate mansion, built out of marble, granite, brass and carved teak. It was magnificent. She had a swing in the living room the size of a three seater couch. Her entire kitchen was built in granite. Her four floor staircase was decked out in marble and brass.
Following that, I stayed with the Survesh’s cousins in Ahmedabad. Survesh is one of Nirzari’s close friends. His cousins put me up overnight in a simple home they were renting in the suburbs while they renovated their house. It was rustic, but clean and comfortable.
On my return from Ahmedabad, I landed on Ana’s doorstep, who was offering room rental for 800 Rupees a day. One week would have been equivalent to my three week’s rent in Brisbane. Crippling if you ask me. Although she had a clean, comfortable flat in the middle of Juhu, I cast about for alternatives.
This is when Healthy came to the rescue. Or so he thought. He handed me the key on Friday afternoon and I took possession on Sunday evening. Little did I know….
On Sunday evening, I prepared to move to JJ when Ana asked me to stay until 9 pm, when her friends were coming over. She said that she’d help me get a taxi with all my things [backpack, carryon suitcase, camera and daypack] after they left. She then offered to take me for dinner with her boyfriend and his best friend. I accepted, not really realising what I was in for.
Once her friends finally left at 10:30 pm, we headed off to meet up with Kabil, her boyfriend’s sidekick. He was waiting in Bandra, at an “in” restaurant. So, once we’d eaten, on the stroke of midnite, I told him about having to go to JJ. He wouldn’t hear of me taking a cab and offered to drive me.
So, off we went. When we finally arrived at the gates of JJ, I realised why he’d been adamant to see me all the way to the door of my room. The area was dark and lonely. The gate was closed and they only let you in if you spoke Hindi. We found the building in question and walked in.
The floors were grimy and gray. The walls were covered in brown spit and perhaps other unthinkable fluids. The hallways had puddles and cobwebs. The walls and doors seemed about to cave in. He manfully carried my backpack on his shoulder up five flights of stairs, while Ana and his friend lugged my carryon up. At the door of the room, we attempted to open the door, but to no avail. Somebody was in there. After much playing with the lock, the person inside opened the door.
He was surprised to see me there. He didn’t expect me til the day after. However, he politely vacated the room. At this juncture, I was so exhausted I just washed myself and tumbled into bed. First, though, I had to take out my own bedding until I figured out where his was. I hoped that when I woke up in the morning, the place would look better. It didn’t.
The Real Mumbai
Careening through the streets at night, Sheba and SP showed me the Queen’s Necklace, a bay formation in a semi circle. At three in the morning, the lanterns gave it a heart wrenching quality, reminiscent of Southend or Brighton. The only difference was the amount of garbage and the distinct lack of fun rides. Other than that, it was all there, palm trees, posh apartment buildings, vendors and cabbies.
However, at three in the morning, everything looked bleary and dilapidated. It was only once I’d seen the Queen’s Necklace during the day that I realised how fabulously wealthy the residents were.
In the bright harsh sunlight, Mercs and Beamers glinted their way through the streets, encasing their occupants in an air-conditioned cocoon. Outside, the real Mumbai perspired, breathing in fumes, smog and pulverised cow dung.
Ah, the sweet aroma of cow dung! I am still in awe of a herd of cows traipsing through the main roads of Mumbai, alongside auto-rickshaws, buses, scooters, motorbikes and pedestrians. Only small amounts of cow dung reach the air in this millionaires’ domain. No cows venture this far into town. It’s the dust, mixed in with the crap (literally) which travels with the wind, that reaches your nostrils and embeds itself into your lungs.
Bombayites don’t seem to notice it. They also do not seem to notice that there is tobacco spit covering all surfaces, horizontal or vertical, indoor and outdoor, across Mumbai.
Mumbai’s residents still call it Bombay, despite the official name change. Most of them seem to thrive in the chaos and melee that characterises India’s largest metropolis.
On every footpath there seems to be some kind of market. Clothing, shoes, produce, statues, art, furniture, you name it, it’s there for the lowest prices you can find. Take an Indian friend, though. I managed to get completely ripped off because I travelled alone to the airport.
You need a certain amount of energy to haggle with a taxi driver and a luggage carrier. Everyone wants a piece out of the firangi, who’s really fresh meat for the taking in this dog eat dog city.
Speaking of dogs, it’s their paradise here. Packs of dogs terrorise the suburbs, biting children and adults, plundering roadside stalls. The few lone dogs you see are runts, bullied by the alpha dogs into isolation. All are infected with rabies, among other diseases.
They roam with such impunity that even JJ Hospital, one of the state run hospitals in Mumbai, is riddled with them. The hospital is another eye-opener. The staircases and lifts are covered in brown spit marks. The floor is grey with dust and dog shit. The rubbish bins overflow with visitors’ waste. Cats and dogs roam the hallways at will. Emergency patients wait for days to be seen. Overnight patients sleep in the hallway seats when there are no beds for them.
My host, Healthy, a registrar with the hospital, tells me that doctors have to clean up the patient, the operating theatre, the utensils and the beds themselves. There are no orderlies and the nurses don’t do any triage or cleaning work. In fact, the nurses don’t look after the patients. The doctors teach the patients’ relatives how to look after them. Without their relatives, the patients die.
This is a side of Mumbai the middle and upper classes don’t know about or don’t want to know about. The middle class is preoccupied with making money or emigrating to Canada. They are looking for a quality lifestyle. The conditions eighty per cent of the population in Mumbai endures does not concern them.
This is evident if you visit any suburban café. Inside the air-conditioned bubble of a Barista, Cuppa Café, or Mocha, young men and women dressed in the latest trends sip on a frappe, imagining themselves as embodying the Hollywood ideal.
As they alight from their auto-rickshaws or their cars, they step over men sleeping on the footpath. They brush away beggar kids’ hands. They bypass the chai wallah with his cart. They are on a mission: to fulfil an image in their head. Beware all who wish to deter them from this path. Their eyes are starry and can only see the cast of Friends waiting for them on a couch.
Shiny stores stocked to the rafters with goods entice the young and recently employed. All that matters in this brave new world of this new young workforce is buying power. The hundreds of call centres that are transferring to India have created a new generation of late teens and twentysomethings who are financially independent. Seventeen year olds can afford Nikes and Reeboks. Twenty one year olds are team leaders. Thirty year olds like Kabil own call centres themselves.
This wild wild East is out of control economically. A few hundred million are graduating from high school and going straight to IBM, Dell, 3, Vodafone or Sprint for their start in life. Vani, a twenty seven year old, has just put a deposit on an apartment in trendy Bandra. This would have been unthinkable a five years ago.
being in Bombay
Where do I start? Bombay is so massive, I should really give you my first impression if I want to do justice to it.
I arrived at 12:50 a.m. on a Monday morning. Sheba, who was meant to pick me up, got the times wrong, so yours truly rang her from a grubby public phone, manned by an attendant who couldn't speak English. Two very kind men helped me find out the charges for the public phone, which I paid to the attendant directly. No such thing as coin slots here.
Bombay airport was nowhere near the nightmare others paint it to be. It was very low key, reminiscent of Ilopango Airport in El Salvador twenty odd years ago, but in a larger scale.
Thankfully, I had nothing to declare, so I could just wander out into the arrivals lounge, which deposited you straight onto the street. As soon as I walked out, taxi drivers accosted me.
My dear sister Lucrecia's advice came in handy here. With a brisk "friends are picking me up" I deflected all taxi drivers and touts, hardly even looking at them. This technique was, of course, developed and perfected in San Chamba, home of the
guanaco capitalino, able to survive in all circumstances.
I pushed my trolley around purposefully looking for Sheba, to no avail. After 5 minutes, I decided she wasn't there, so I approached the public phone guy I described earlier.
The lounge was covered in that well worn layer of dust, oil, car fumes, and soot peculiar to all developing countries. The difference was, there were only few women sitting there. The majority of the people waiting were men, dressed alternatively in salwar kameez or button up shirts with trousers. Some of these men stared, some ignored me.
The first sense assaulted by Bombay was smell. I recognised that peculiar aroma of urine, faeces, and garbage, instantly.
This was definitely E. S. on steroids, as Lucrecia had described it, with a few differences. In E.S., my cousins would be there to pick me up and I would understand every word of the language. Also, I would not stand out. I would most definitely belong.
Here, in India, I am white. That is most definitely news to me. In Australia, I have often been "Other" in the tick boxes, before the Aussie government discovered that particular monniker the U.S. invented: Hispanic. A wonderful catch-all that describes all Latin Americans, it overlooks issues of race, or ethnic origin and looks only at geography.
In India, however, I am resolutely Australian. So, this little Aussie battler waited sitting on her luggage, after speaking to Sheba, to be picked up.
After 10 or 15 minutes, the confident figure of Sheba made itself present. Tagging along was her trusty sidekick, S.P. Till this day, I haven't found out his real name. Everyone calls him S.P. A portly, tall lad, he drove Sheba's mom's car with elan and attitude.
They both decided right there and then, that as I had just arrived in India, I should see the Gateway to India. So off we went, at approximately 2 in the morning, to see the first monument to colonialism in this country.
Bombay by night is a quiet place, with almost no traffic. The side of the road is littered with bodies. Fear not, they are only sleeping. The taxis also served as bedding for taxi drivers. Rickshaw drivers use their vehicles as homes as well. Quite a confronting sight at 2 a.m.
We drove past the Queen's Necklace, a semi-circular arrangement of lamposts on a peninsula jutting out near Chowpatty beach. S.P. held forth at this point on the huge value of the real estate around the beach. Alas, the exteriors were so lowkey, it was impossible to imagine millionaires residing here. Especially since all buildings in India over 30 years of age are covered in faeces, soot, pollution and some urine. The ironwork on all the balconies is intricate, but rusty.
It all has the look of Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur circa 1995. The architecture is as hodgepodge as you can get. Italianate, mock Victorian, modernist 70s, and this Islamic influence mixed with Hindu temple look on the cupolas is enough to confuse the eye. At first sight, Bombay is almost impossible to digest.
