Cherry Bombs in Bombay, a Night Train to Goa

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Let me cut to the curry. I have never held a strong desire to visit India. Where some are drawn to India’s rich history and spirituality, I was repelled by its poverty, its backwardness, its challenges for solo travel. Where others see nirvana and human warmth, I imagined being swamped by cold desperation, poked and prodded by relentless thieving touts. Beautiful villages? I predicted heaving my way through mountains of sewerage to find a beach littered with coke bottles. “India, stands for ‘I’ll Never Do It Again,’” says DJ, a fellow round-the-worlder I met in Prague. It would not be if I got seriously sick, it would be when. “I was in a hospital for five days,” one guy tells me. “I had to carry a waterproof vomit bag for a week,” says another. I looked at a couple of travel forums online and the negative advice was overwhelming. Watch for thieves! Watch for peepholes! Be careful at night! Don’t trust anyone! Don’t eat anything! Can you see how India held little appeal for a spiritually cynical gastro-coward? When the Indian consulate in Dubai yo-yo’d me back and forth, causing me to postpone one flight and possibly miss another, I felt a sense of relief, thinking I could skip over the sub-continent altogether. The visa came through shortly before my flight, and a frantic rush later, I was sitting on a crowded flight to Bombay, telling myself to get a grip. “Bring it on!” I psyched myself up, imagining a mob at the airport, having to punch and kick my way through like Batman through zombies. The plane landed. And then a funny thing happened on the way to my Expectations.

At the airport, the passport control lady, decked out in a stunning turquoise sari, smiled. This immediately unnerved me, because smiles and passport control go like cheese and gorillas. A few meters away, there’s a tourist booth and a polite guy (who kept calling me “Sir”) recommended a hotel in the Colaba strip downtown. My baggage arrived without incident; I got a pre-paid taxi receipt and took a deep breath before stepping out the airport. People were everywhere, but nobody was touching me, calling me, poking me. I dodged one half-hearted beggar, found my designated taxi and hopped in. The driver had a severe tic and kept shaking and snapping his head. He didn’t try ripping me off or taking me somewhere else, in fact, he didn’t speak English. He just shakes, rattles, and rolls. The taxi, a Morris Minor-like Indian dinky toy designed to run on gas or diesel, was small and rusted and narrowly avoided slamming into a cow, a bus, three children, a dog, a motorbike, a rickshaw and a one-legged beggar - at the first intersection. There was so much to look at, everywhere, in every direction, a complete bombardment of my senses. In one cognitive moment I could smell delicious curry and the unmistakable rot of feces; hear horns, screams of agony and barreling laughter; taste thick exhaust fumes and look at absolute squalor alongside an official Levis store. Everywhere I saw a sepia picture - a moment in time that somehow illustrated not just what life is like in India, but what life is like in general. A fine balance, as Rohinton Mistry wrote, between joy and misery.

For two hours through traffic of the most unbelievable chaos, the driver shook with his rigor mortis twitch, somehow avoiding an increasing list of obstacles. Potholes, police, magazine sellers, scooters carting a family of five, trucks with butane tanks hanging out the back, flea markets with real fleas, holy men, bicycles, random trees in the tarmac, garbage, babies. Everyone sounded their horn every few seconds, and not even the madness of the drivers in Lima could come close to this mobile form of anarchy. Small children crossed the road unaccompanied and somehow made it alive.

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