Mumbai

I feel as though I just got thrown out of the spin cycle of an existential washing machine. I do not know how to begin to describe Mumbai (formerly called Bombay). Everything about it is overwhelming, especially the contradictions.

We started to notice the contradictions when we went in the morning to the Elephanta Caves. Carved by hand in the sixth century out of the inside of a mountain, they contain the oldest and purest Hindu iconography in the world. As you enter, on your right side stands a twenty-foot-tall sculpture of Shiva doing the frantically active Dance of Creation. To show his activity and motion, the sculptor had to give him eight arms, twisting like serpents, like a series of strobe-light photographs. Limitless activity. On your left hand side is a carving of Shiva as the King of Yoga, floating on a lotus leaf, all his powers directed inward, sitting in quiet meditation, in perfect inactivity. The other carvings show Shiva as both creator and destroyer, both joyful and angry, both male and female. We see Shiva containing these extreme contradictions, just like Mumbai, and it is overwhelming.

In Mumbai screeching poverty lives side-by-side with dripping opulence. In neighborhoods where some individual family homes are 27 stories tall and cost $2 billion each, workers collect, clean, iron and deliver untold millions of pieces of laundry every day with no errors. None. The launderers do not know how to read nor write. Nor do they feel abused. It is their karma. They genuinely believe that they did some evil in a previous life that has made this drudgery their fate, and they accept it. We see a city that contains such extreme contradictions and it is overwhelming.

The frenetic traffic is overwhelming. So is the densely packed queue of people that flows unbroken down the sidewalk on the way to the train station for the two-hour ride back home at the end of every work day. The senses are overwhelmed by smells of curry cooked by a sidewalk vendor, mixed with the sickly sweet smell of jasmine, and the smell of mangoes on a tree in a peaceful park surrounded by diesel fumes and garbage. The sound of traditional Indian music comes from a vendor’s stall, competing with the hardest metallic rock coming from the next stall, both being drowned out by the cacophony of honking bus, car and motorbike horns. It is overwhelming.

The contradictions of Mumbai overwhelm not only the senses, but also one’s emotions. Children, old women, fathers trying to make a living—all are trying to sell a necklace or bracelet or purse or carving. They are standing outside of bus windows and in the middle of insane traffic, holding up their wares and asking for a buck or two. You want to buy everything just to help them, and when you say “no” they smile and show you something else. And amid all of this activity emaciated dogs wag their tails, and cows wander in and out of wild traffic. Every block or so you see carts drawn by an ox, horse, woman or man right in the middle of the chaos called Mumbai. The people here live harder and work harder and laugh harder than in any place I have ever seen. India is not a holiday spot, it is a lesson in survival. India is not a vacation; it is an education. If you have a speck of a soul, you cannot come to India and leave unchanged. It is overwhelming.

The emotional overload continues in the home of Mahatma Ghandi. You see letters he wrote to Einstein, Hitler and Roosevelt trying to avert World War II. You are reminded that although his only two weapons were non-violence and the truth, he defeated his world’s strongest superpower by expelling the British from India. Non-violence: is this weakness? Or strength? Or both? Is this contradiction? Is it wisdom? Is it Shiva?

You read the newspaper article about his assassination, how he saw the deranged man in front of him holding the gun, how he folded his hands in the typical greeting, how he smiled and greeted the man knowing what was coming, and then how he willingly took the bullets. While still smiling. Such contradiction!

Mumbai’s contradictions are more than the emotions can contain, wider than the mind can resolve. This city is utterly overwhelming.Read more