Mumbai

Mumbai (Days 40-44)

Since before we arrived in India, Mumbai has always been a place that I have been anxious of, with depictions in Slumdog Millionaire showing a very dirty, hectic area with thieves and criminals at every corner. I had imagined we would have to wear our backpacks on our front and keep money securely zipped up within the bags whilst holding our noses to block out the smells. I know that just like in any cosmopolitan city there will be good areas and bad, but from our experience, to see the bad areas you literally have to search for them. Mumbai for us was beautiful and settled any previous fear I had to the point I would love to go back. It was incredibly easy to navigate and everyone there was so helpful. It felt like we were in India, Barcelona and London all at the same time.

The only negative I can think of about Mumbai is the price, with all the rooms in the city costing more than quadruple anything we had previously paid in India. However, we kept searching and managed to stumble across the cheapest hotel in the southern end of Mumbai in a town called Colaba – although it was still three times what we were used to paying. It was hidden at the top of four flights of stairs and had a lovely view of the docks and you could even see the Gateway to India from the window at reception (the photo below is from our room so you cannot see the gateway but this was our view in the evening).

Colaba was also the most popular area for backpackers, with plenty of restaurants and sights to see. It’s also where the book Shantaram is set. I don’t know how much Mumbai has changed since 1980 but it made me question the authors descriptions of Mumbai because he painted it with so much poverty when Colaba felt cleaner than everywhere we have previously been in India. One of the highlights of Colaba mentioned in Shantaram was Leopold’s Cafe which is on the Causeway, the busiest street in Colaba and was a frequent hangout for the main character in the book. Katie and I decided we should at least go for a drink there to see if it resembled what we had imagined whilst reading the book. It looked nothing like how I had envisaged and then when I looked at the menu, it was even more contrary to how I had imagined. For a 330ml Kingfisher which in Goa for example was 50 rupees (55p), in Leopold’s Cafe it was 330 rupees! £3.65 for a small bottle of Kingfisher beer! Therefore, on principle we decided to not feed the greedy owners and left Leopold’s without spending a single rupee. Instead, we decided to walk around Colaba and take in the beautiful architecture. I’ve never been to Barcelona but Katie said that, with the buildings and coastline along the edge, it was very reminiscent of the scenery there.

 

Colaba also has a good reputation for food and therefore having arrived in the late afternoon we set out in search of somewhere to eat. Evan had recommended we try the chicken tikka rolls at the Bademiya Restaurant. They are famous for their street food which would be the best place to eat it if there was seating arrangements outside. However, you could only stand and therefore we ate at the restaurant which simply serves the food which is prepared in the street. The food was delicious, albeit a little pricy. It made a nice change from the curries having some Tandoori style chicken. After our meal we both simultaneously said we would like some kind of dessert and so did a quick Google for a patisserie and found Le 15 Café just around the corner. They had a huge selection of mini cakes and macaroons all made in the restaurant, all of which looked delicious but with our budget we limited ourselves to two each. All of them were wonderful and we decided to head back the following day for some Valentines cakes. They also gave Katie a red rose when we left so they saved me having to find one inconspicuously.

One of the main tasks I had in Mumbai was to sort out my water damaged passport. Therefore, with the misconception of how hectic Mumbai would be, I had printed and scanned all the relevant documents I would require in order to submit an application, in Goa. This meant on our first full day we were able to set off in search of the building where the applications took place. The previous day I had also rang up the VFS Global office (the company which takes care of passport/visa issues), and confirmed on the phone where the building was. However, upon arriving and having our bags searched we were then told the office had moved, so we ordered our second Uber and made our way to the next building. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the second location we were told again that we were at the wrong place. The third Uber was booked and two hours after starting our journey to the passport office, we finally arrived at the correct place. Despite being in the right location, the email address that the HM Passport Office has on it’s website for the Mumbai office is incorrect and therefore my email requesting an appointment that day was never received so we had to send another email and luckily they said we could be seen at 10am the following morning. We returned to Colaba after three hours of Ubers around Mumbai and a slight frustration at the lack of clarity offered by the HM Passport Office and VFS Global. On the bright side we did get to see a lot more of Mumbai than we had previously planned.

The following morning we set off with all the correct documentation for our fourth Uber, having spent over four hours in the back of numerous cars in the past 24 hours at a cost of £20 in total. I’ll admit, when we did get through the security checks, we were treated like royalty, skipping all the queues of people applying for VISA’s which was nice. There was a little confusion as the lady helping us didn’t understand that we don’t have a permanent address in India but either way after about 20 minutes we had a signed receipt and I was allowed to keep my damaged passport which was a relief as you are required to show it on all trains and at hostels. We left the building and a wave of relief came over me, having had a worry in the back of my mind for the past 6 weeks about the fate of my passport it was finally out of my hands – luckily only figuratively.

Seeing as we were in the middle of Mumbai I suggested we go to a Bazaar on the way back to Colaba. I had seen a YouTube video of this huge Bazaar and for some reason assumed it was in Mumbai and it was only after showing Katie the video in the taxi to the bazaar that she said that was actually in Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta). After googling ‘bazaar’ it came up with the Chor Bazaar. I asked a rickshaw driver how much it would be but he laughed and said he wouldn’t take us there, so we ended up getting an Uber – this was the first strange sign. Then, as we got closer, the Uber driver turned and told us to be very careful! It was the first time where a local had warned us about a place we were going so we took his advice with a pinch of salt and walked out into the bazaar. I think it helped that we didn’t know what the name of the Bazaar was and it was only after we got home that we googled it and found it translates to Thieves Market. Except for a few dodgy alleys that I made us go down before quickly turning back as the occupants of said alley became more and more shifty, the Bazaar was a cool experience and gave us a different taste of Mumbai but again, nothing close to what I had expected from the depictions in Slumdog Millionaire. Having had such a different experience of Mumbai to the film I decided to Google it and found some interesting articles relating to how it wasn’t an accurate portrayal of India. Here’s a little extract:

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of the most acclaimed film makers in India during the 1980s and 1990s, a five time Best Director award winner of the Indian National Film Awards—the highest film awards in India—lambasted Slumdog Millionaire, calling it in an interview to NDTV: “A very anti-Indian film. All the bad elements of Mumbai commercial cinema are put together and in a very a slick way. And it underlines and endorses what the West thinks about us. It is falsehood built upon falsehood. And at every turn is fabricated. At every turn it is built on falsehood.”

On the topic of films, we decided what better place to go see a Bollywood film than in Mumbai. So we bought two tickets at the Regal Cinema in Colaba for the newest blockbuster ‘Pad Man’. The film was in Hindi but had English subtitles, so after standing for the Indian national anthem we settled down to watch the film. I’m not sure if this is the case for every Bollywood film, but this film had an interval which was strange. The film itself turned out to be amazing. The plot was the biggest contrast to what I had expected of a Bollywood film. In short, it tells the story of a man who doesn’t want his wife to use traditional Indian methods for female sanitary towels (simply using a rag) because of the huge health risks associated with using such an unsanitary method. Yet when confronted with the steep prices for Western pads, he decided to make his own by simplifying the production method and ended up creating a method which gave thousands of women across India not only job’s in creating the pads but also raised the percentage of Indian women using clean sanitary towels. One thing I did notice was that there were slight anti-Islamic references throughout which I thought was strange, then when I Googled the reception of the film because it was quite a taboo subject, it turns out the film is banned in Pakistan! So it’s weird to see an ongoing rivalry between the two countries 70 years after the partition – in no way am I belittling the partition, it was just a side of it I wasn’t aware of.

On the final day we went in search of some cheap Casio watches, having sprayed mosquito repellent on ours a week or so before the chemicals had eroded the water resistance and after swimming in Goa both of our watches had died. Unfortunately, the shops only had the G-Shock Casio range which cost £50+ so we decided to order two £8 Casio watches on Amazon India to the hostel we were staying at next in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Despite the unsuccessful watch shopping trip, our search led us to the craziest shopping mall both of us had ever been to. It was huge, and felt like Westfield’s or what I imagine Dubai to be like, just rows and rows of shops and floors. It definitely felt the furthest from India we have been whilst still in India but it didn’t make me miss the Western world enough to return home so it was nice to leave the mall and head to the bus stop for the 16 hour bus to Udaipur, our first stop in Rajasthan – the state I’ve been looking forward to the most.