XIII - Mumbai

Mumbai has the most dramatic skyline of any city I've been to.

Mumbai has the look of a city that is half-built. Everywhere high-rise buildings are half-formed. Massive brutal concrete structures stand alone awaiting connecting pieces of road and rail. Mumbai has the look of a city half torn-down. From miles out, slums crowd through the city squashed between tower-blocks, beneath flyovers, squeezed into gaps. The bones of towers stick out entombed in fabric or scaffolding awaiting birth or death. Meanwhile the jungle is everywhere. Huge trees soar improbably through the ancient and modern. Lush vines, palm trees, there is a huge stretch of wetlands in the middle of Mumbai, and birds are everywhere. Above the hotel tower where we bathe on the roof, birds of prey soar eyeing the pigeons perched on the side of our pool. If London is a forest, the world’s ninth largest city is a jungle. Cheek by jowl there is obvious poverty, there is great wealth. Huge boards promote affluent lifestyles in English, sometimes plastered on to slum-housing. It feels bigger, more chaotic, more developed, more precarious than Delhi. It sprawls everywhere with only the sea to contain it. 

We have just taken an eighteen-hour coach journey. It cost more than the train which I presume is for the taste of mortality achieved by stepping into a cabin the size of a coffin and feeling every bump on the road with an effect that may only otherwise be achieved by the shovels of sod landing on top of you six feet below. I am not immune to claustrophobia and quite sensitive to travel sickness. I felt nauseous the moment I stepped on the bus and four hours after getting out the world swayed and juddered as though I were at sea. The main advantage was that the children could be easily trapped. Mostly they were trapped in with me watching Indian folklore cartoons dubbed with irritating high-pitched voices. To my relief Apollo climbed to his mother to sleep, as he is all elbows and knees at night. My main take-away is to ensure that when a coffin is purchased for me it is long enough. I am an average height and even semi-diagonal I couldn’t quite stretch out. Between this albeit slight discomfort, the grave-ridden nausea and the continual blaring of the horn sleep was fitful. I cannot decry the use of the horn, however; not all drivers choose to use their lights at night here, while others permanently use full beam and fog lights. We arrived safely and, after all, what is sleep?

I’ve been thinking through that other soliloquy – what a piece of work is a man – made famous by Richard E. Grant in Withnail and I. On a couple of occasions in the last month we’ve hired a guide, with taxi or tuc-tuc. The last time cost us £14 for a day – and this is someone who can probably speak at least three languages, drive in very challenging circumstances and who knows what other skills. It’s somewhat staggering how inexpensive people’s time is, and it’s evident when you come to hotels – there are just so many staff. When we swim in the pool someone from the hotel hovers like an anxious parent, gesticulating wildly every time he thinks a child of mine is in danger (I’ve not seen anyone else using the pool). It feels like this is his one duty (which he takes very seriously, clearly irritated by my indifference to Oberon’s drowning-man style of swimming). Equally, we visited a strange park today with a giant boot children could climb up like a tower. It was attended by two uniformed staff, and as we left reinforcements arrived (perhaps to defend it from an exuberant and enthusiastic Apollo?). But how does cheap labour affect our attitude to the value of a human life? I remember reading a book about thinkers of a hundred years ago and how they predicted we’d be living today –one of them was John Maynard Keynes. What he suggested was that technology would free humans – that no one would work more than 4 hours a day. He couldn’t really have been more wrong. And, with that, gone is the gentleman of leisure, gone the European flaneur. We have chosen a different future.

This washing area houses and employs around 4000 people, servicing many of the hotels throughout Mumbai. It's very colourful and there are clothes hanging absolutely everywhere!

Money is one of the hardest things to manage where values are set so differently. I’ve barely had any alcohol since arriving – it’s sold here virtually at European prices. Cheaper than London so in theory I’m still getting a bargain, but given everything else it feels like a waste. Then there’s all the little transactions: buying water, short taxi rides, fruit, a cheap lunch. It’s easy to be generous. It’s easy to feel taken advantage of. And then there’s those who ask for money in the roads. When you have life-changing money at your disposal, the resources of the British tourist feel immoral. Presented with emotive scenes – young mothers, children – undeniable suffering – how do you act? The intensity of being able to do something significant in one life against a poverty that surrounds you in hundreds of thousands is paralysing, and easily brushed aside with stories of gang-running, local discouragement of begging, and other reasons to do nothing.

This is the fishermens' village, looking out onto the ocean. It's hotter in Mumbai and we're all feeling it along with missing a night's sleep!

Religiously, one of the difficulties for the Christian is the total generosity running through the heart of the faith. Jesus gave and gave to the point of the nakedness of the cross. In Acts the first Christian communities abandoned private property. The martyrs gave up everything. The desert fathers embraced poverty, followed by the religious orders that succeeded them. In Indian religions the Sadhus follow this line, giving away everything and liberating themselves from the tyranny and responsibility of possessions. But then you don’t find Sadhus with small children. 

Gandhi's house now a museum.

So instead I find myself in Mumbai trying to explain to a six year old what slums are and what assumptions not to make; how travelling can help us understand the world and what cannot be understood; how to try and think about what we can do and what we can’t do. There’s a very attractive boldness in the extreme of renunciation. If we have nothing, we are no longer compromised, no longer hypocrites. I’m not sure if that’s morally speaking the right place to be. Having to make difficult choices, to balance competing interests between various duties, in short, being involved, is at the heart of what it means to be a moral agent. I don’t need to remind anyone of Jesus response to Judas over the anointing at Bethany, perhaps he would have reacted the same if someone had challenged him buying ice-creams for his children. I also don’t think Jesus is being flippant about “the poor”. I think the point of the story is to say that morally we are always making choices, choices that define us, because they reveal our duties, our desire, our values. Acting rightly is more than pulling out a moral calculator of finding the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 

So we will continue in this jungle-city, all of us learning about our own morality and in this perhaps our own characters will face some demolition and rebuilding. Mumbai was a home to Gandhi, and the boys were uncharacteristically sweet in putting flowers around monuments of him in the house in which he lived. The occasion is that tomorrow is his anniversary of death. Gandhi is unusual in being a figure who was both saintly and had an enormous political impact. No one has done more to reinforce the value of every human, or fight for their rights and liberties. I’ve never been one for hero-worship and wouldn’t have put a visit to his house on my tourism-planner, but it was the highlight of my day today, and, at a time of low confidence in the world and its institutions, a balm against cynicism and apathy, exemplified by Oberon’s delighted cry that he’d "just done a wee in Gandhi’s toilet”.