Mumbai

Mumbai does not welcome its visitors with an embrace, but first gives them a sock to the belly. Impressions from Stuttgart’s dissimilar sister, Mumbai – or is it Bombay?

My first steps out to the street are timid. Into the chaos I go. You can recognize tourists here immediately, not just by their looks, but by the way they apathetically slalom through the crossings. Changing traffic lights? Street signs? No one seems to care about them here.

That doesn’t matter though since the maximum traffic speed is perhaps 20 kilometres per hour. Mumbai stalls. Mumbai sweats. One of my first stops is the city’s landmark: the Gateway of India at its southern tip. Children are jumping into the water, which is so filthy that it’s really not fit for bathing. The loitering pack of men claps their hands.

India’s triumphal arch, which like so many other magnificent buildings here was designed by the British architect George Wittet, was constructed to honour King George V. Today, it is more a symbol of the parting of the British, since in 1948 this is where the last British ship left India. Behind it is the hotel Taj Mahal Palace, which today again looks like a far too elaborately frosted cake. A terrorist attack took the lives of 174 people here in November 2008.

The British left behind visible traces, as well as some linguistic ones. The city has been called Mumbai since 1995 when the right-wing Hindu party Shiv Sena came to power. They decreed that Bombay should from now on be called Mumbai after the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi, the city’s guardian, and all of the official institutions and the newspapers went along with the name change. A European in the oh-so foreign city wishes to be politically correct, of course, and always says Mumbai. But only for the first few days.
For almost all of the population call their city Bombay. Some say it’s out of habit, others that it is a statement against the nationalist party that renamed Bombay as they continue to rename many places, buildings and streets. The Prince of Wales Museum was renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Vastu Sangrahalaya, Victoria Terminus railway station is now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. That is far too complicated even for the Mumbaikar, so they prefer to use the old names. They cannot even decipher city maps because they contain the new names, which mean nothing to them.

For many, Mumbai is the city of their dreams. Every day many, many people move here; estimates lie between 500 and 1,000. Naturally, there are no exact figures. My new friend Aneesh, who greets and bids me farewell every day, is one of them. “Bombay, I like,” he says. His family lives somewhere in Kerala, in the south of India. His dreams are here in Mumbai. For newcomers this city of millions is a gigantic picture hunt that you can only begin to explore bit by bit. The problem is that the closer you get to it, the more confusing it becomes. In his novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta calls the city “paradise and hell.”

As a visitor, even after a few days you are not accustomed to the misery: to the little girls peering into the taxi window with their big eyes, begging to make your heart break, to the people living on the street, nor to the smells. In my neighbourhood of Colaba, there is the lovely smell of soap in the morning, for example. The family on the corner is getting ready for their day and the children are being washed. Their grandmother chops onions and coriander while behind her the washing hangs on a wall to dry. Two metres further along it smells of grease and garlic. Then it smells like shit.

It is impossible to get used to the noise of this city, or to the ceaselessly spitting men, to the stray dogs and emaciated cats. You also can’t get used to the fact that Mumbai is a service-rendering city where the chai wallahs bring tea to your desk and where you can have your ears cleaned on the street.

Mumbai is everything at once: poverty and wealth – everywhere – tradition and modernity, east and west. The city does not welcome you with a fond embrace, but with a sock to the belly. It is a city that constantly challenges and overwhelms you. Naturally, Mumbai cannot be measured by a western yardstick, although time and again glimpses of the west shimmer through, for instance in the air-conditioned café where you can buy frappuccino and iced tea. Indian women order a latte macchiato for the equivalent of one euro: a large sum for the family living on the kerb across the street. In the café, you can hear Cheryl Cole’s torqued pop song Fight for Love. All at once, all you hear is “We gotta fight, fight for the stuff.” Most here have got to fight, fight for everything, for survival, for a better life. The name Bombay is of Portuguese origin meaning something like “good little bay.”