We drink and breathe in Mumbai.

nature, science, travel, water, , ,

Nine of us sat down one day in a very popular restaurant where everything looked clean and spiffy, even the classy uniforms of these waiters who were in abundance to meet our needs. Kate’s (American) Indian friend who was visiting from Saudi Arabia brought us to this place because they had the wonderful South Indian food, different from the Punjabi fare you typically get in the U.S., they say.

While we began to look at the menus, glasses of water arrived on our tables — but were sent back to the kitchen immediately by our host with instructions to bring us bottled water. The glasses were removed, and a couple of liter bottles were brought. The same glasses came back, having been emptied but with drops of water clinging to the insides.

So all our party without comment grabbed paper napkins and began drying the glasses thoroughly, after which we filled them with the good water. Maybe the restaurant water was good, too, but who knows? Water quality is one of the things critical to health that is not reliable in India.

In this household we have a large distiller with a tap from which we take all of our water that is used for cooking, drinking, and teeth brushing. For a month I have been practicing not doing the thing I’ve done once or twice a day my whole life through, to the point where I don’t think about it at all: Turn on the faucet in the bathroom and wet my toothbrush. Now I have to think about it with all my power, and be methodical and slow. So far I don’t think I’ve forgotten, in the bathroom. Then there is the kitchen. Even though the distiller is right there, I have once or twice begun to rinse vegetables in tap water at the sink.

Talking about washing things, we do wash dishes in the sink with that common water, and use them again when they are dry. The kitchen here has one of those handy drying cupboards above the sink.

Breathing is a human activity even more fundamental than drinking, and I have always had a generally healthy respiratory system, and have not stopped breathing without thinking, or comfortably. But if you have asthma, it would be best not to live in Mumbai or Delhi.

For most of my stay the air quality has been typical for wintertime when there are no monsoons to wash the air — that is, the worst. My first week here we took a little trip to the Bandra Fort area where you can look across Mahim Bay to see South Mumbai on the other side of the causeway. Sometimes, but not that day. Tom found an old photo to show the contrast with last June.

Tom and AQI contrast

I got my own view of South Mumbai across the bay last week, and it was middling.

I’d guess the air pollution is the worst thing about living in Mumbai. Heat and humidity are forces to be dealt with, but they are not unhealthy in themselves. The particulates in the air cause respiratory illness and worse. Most days when I see it the Air Quality Index is between 100-200, but a few times it’s been under 100. This site www.aqicn.org starts you in India, but has a search tab that makes it possible to compare various cities of the world that use that particular formula and guide. Here is one of the pages pertaining to Mumbai showing real time information this afternoon when I am writing.

If you haven’t had to be aware of the AQI where you live, you can be thankful! Many Indians who live in Mumbai have their head in the sand about the situation and call the white skies “fog” — because what can they do? In Delhi, where children have been seen throwing up out of school bus windows and schools must close on the worst days, they can’t so easily ignore the realities. I haven’t seen anyone wear a mask, and I haven’t worn the cute one that Kate provided for me as a good expat host must do here. But then, I am not out and about for more than a few hours at a time. When I am, I notice my eyes burning.

In the apartment we have several air purifiers, so we don’t suffer while we’re home. Air conditioners keep the temperature down, and dehumidifiers reduce the moisture  in the air that would cause everything to get moldy during the monsoon especially. Even in this dry season, the one in my bedroom sometimes collects a gallon of water in less than a week. These helpful machines collectively emit plenty of white noise, which people living in cities usually count a good thing.

The difficulties of air and water were some of the stresses I was anticipating coming here, but I have suffered little, for which I am very thankful. Water and air — what simple and delicious blessings they are!

Book Bits of India

books, quotes, travel, , , , , , , , ,

A couple of friends asked me last fall if I were reading about India in preparation for traveling here, and I had to admit that I wasn’t. I’ve always been like this, before school field trips or grownup camping trips, unable to focus in an academic way on a future and therefore theoretical event with its vast possibilities. It seems to me to be putting the answers ahead of the questions that I haven’t yet been stimulated to ask; the likelihood is high that I would have wasted my time reading material that would turn out to be irrelevant to my personal experience.

I did try a little. First I started in on Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie, but I couldn’t get interested. And through Great Courses I listened to a professor of Indian history lecture tediously for some hours, until I couldn’t bear him any longer. Just before my trip, I began to listen to Michael Wood’s The Story of India, and he was very engaging and promising.

But once I arrived and had several days’ worth of experiences under my belt, I started reading lots of articles online, and delving into the many books on the subject of India that are in this house. I’m sure I won’t finish reading any of them, but they have all contributed to my understanding and made my stay here richer. I’ll share somewhat random quotes from a few of them in my list below.

Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower edited by McKinsey & Company     This collection of essays by dozens of writers, mostly Indian, ranges from hard-core economic and trade issues to a discussion of how India became the world leader in the game of cricket. I will probably refer to some of the articles in future posts.

Eyewitness Travel: India     “Consisting of seven swampy islands when the Portuguese acquired it in 1534, Bombay (from the Portuguese Bom Bahia or ‘Good Bay’) came to the British Crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married Charles II. Finding little use for the islands, the British leased them to the East India Company, which quickly realized their potential as an excellent natural harbour in the Arabian Sea. The rise of Bombay began in the late 1600’s, when the company relocated its headquarters here. By the 18th century, Bombay had become the major city and shipbuilding yard on the western coast, and by the 19th century, land reclamations had joined the islands into the narrow promontory that it is today.”

Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad c. 1994    “You may meet with the invitation to ‘drop by anytime.’ In E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Mrs. Moore meets with a situation where she tries to pin down a specific time with a Mrs. Bhattacharya, who is gracious but vague. In the end Mrs. Moore settles with her on the coming Thursday, only to find that the Bhattacharyas are leaving for Calcutta the following morning.

“Mrs. Moore is bewildered by the exchange, but one Indian friend to whom I told the story understood the situation perfectly. She said, ‘The guest is blessing you, doing you a great honor by visiting you. How can you be so rude as to try to restrict them to a certain time?'”

The Story of India by Michael Wood (frontispiece above)     Quoting Sir William Jones: “‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing on both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philosopher could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.'”

“The question is very complex, but there is one thing on which all competent linguists agree: Jones was right — the languages are connected; and the time depth of the ‘family tree’ of the Indo-European languages precludes the idea of India as the place of origin. The Sanskrit language must have originated outside India. But how far back? And from where? Was it brought by invaders or travelers, by elites or mass migration?

“This is now one of the hottest arguments in modern India, where the battle over history that began under the British in the nineteenth century is now at the heart of politics and education because it bears on central questions of identity.”

India: The Cultural Companion by Richard Waterston     This book focuses on the history and tradition of India’s many indigenous religions.

“[It is] common to read in Hindu texts of attempts to ‘cheat’ or ‘vanquish’ time. A verse from the Mahabharata advises that ‘time “cooks” all beings’ and ‘destroys all creatures;’ when everything else sleeps ‘time is awake, time is hard to overcome.'”…. “The present age (Kali Yuga) is the last in the cycle and marks the point at which spiritual intelligence and morality have reached their lowest ebb.”

“The most striking aspect of Jain karma is that it is perceived as a material entity, like a subtle dust that clogs the soul, binding it to the body. Many lifetimes are required to rid the soul of karmic dust and so liberate it.”

Indian Nationalism: A History by Jim Masselos     I enjoyed this book for its thorough overview of the people and events by which the first stirrings of the will to independence multiplied in various places around the subcontinent and overcame the many differences of culture and religion to become a unified force strong enough to oust the British.

Indian Breads by G. Padma Vijay     This was a Christmas present from Kate and Tom. How did they know I would love the Indian flatbreads of which there are enough varieties to fill a book? Just last night we ate garlic or lassoon paratha, one of many paratha recipes that are joined by instructions for naan, chapattis, rotis and many breads you’ve probably never heard of even if you love to eat Indian food. The smoke alarm always goes off here when Kareena makes her wonderful chapattis, so when I go home I may have to limit my experiments to days of open windows.

Flowers of India by Helmut Wolf      A board book on this subject is just about my speed. I found it in a fancy shop that sells children’s clothes, and I will put it in my suitcase as one concrete item among all the intangible smidgens of knowledge I have collected from books.

Walking in an Indian neighborhood.

shopping, travel, , , , ,

When we drive anywhere in the city, I glue my eyes to the window to watch the thousands of people and motorcycles, street vendors and fruit stands, human life and business energies streaming past. But I like best just walking here and there in the neighborhood, where I can stop at least my own motion for a moment and take a picture of the little things  I notice.

On a stretch of road a block away, we passed the man who always sits on the pavement at the corner sorting greens. Passing so close beside him at work, not pausing enough to know for sure if some part of me is encroaching on the airspace above his small piles of spinach, I feel a kind of intimacy that forbids my becoming an outsider and looking on him as a curiosity.

You probably noticed that most of my pictures of women in their lovely saris and kurtas are from behind, because I am too shy to stop everything and everyone and ask to take their pictures. Last week I felt the boldness to ask rise up in me, and then quickly fade, when we passed three middle-aged women sitting and chatting in a row on chairs in front of a shop, facing the street, each in a different and brilliant sari.

Many of the streets and sidewalks are constructed of the same sort of interlocking pavers, which are often broken, but sometimes they all look intact, even if one or another is a little wonky. Twice I walked carefully around a puddle of water on the sidewalk only to step on a dry paver that turned out to have water seeping under it, which squirted out all over my sandal and foot. Who knows where that water came from? This is not the monsoon season, and it hasn’t rained in the month I’ve been here. Ick.

One has to watch out for and walk around dog poop, and the dogs themselves that often sleep in the middle of the sidewalk or street… and the woman collecting trash, whose bag might spill right in front of you.

In the heat of the summer I’m sure more businesses close for a spell midday, but this is winter,  and about noon we all four went walking to the nearby market area where you can buy nearly anything you want from one of the shops tucked in next to each other, often in the tiniest spaces, such as the place where Kate bought eggs, which were packed loose and uncushioned by anything in a packet that might be called a bag, taped together from the newspaper ad page.

When we were having a pani puri snack at a stand on one side of the street, Kate pointed out to me the man sharpening scissors by means of bicycle power on the other side. I caught his picture from a distance, squeezed in between street and sidewalk traffic on his stationary vehicle.

Tom was looking for some charcoal to use in grilling kebabs, and was directed down an alley to “the first place on the right.” So we went down there but there were no shops, and we turned back, only to realize that the charcoal seller had only a very vague and trashy area from which to do his business, but it worked fine. We teased Tom that he bought really a bit more charcoal than he needed just so he could get that most beautiful 5-kilo bag.

Tom was wearing Raj in the sling, and my, my, did he get stared at! Maybe some people didn’t know what bulgy thing he was carrying? But more likely they were disturbed at the example he was setting, in this land where fathers do not generally do child care.

I went shopping with Kate for a sari that she will wear to an Indian wedding in a few weeks. The shop was in the pretty yellow building shown in my last post, with scaffolding around it, also down an alley but not so sketchy looking. So elegant inside, with the beautiful fabrics and dresses and evening bags… But technologically lacking; their credit card machine would not take any of three cards we tried.

This gave me the opportunity to see some sights, as we walked a couple of blocks to an ATM for cash. While we waited for something else, we enjoyed visiting with the soft-spoken and articulate owner of the shop who told us that she would love to visit her relatives in California but her business prevented her. She asked Kate to clarify her response to the offer of a glass of water: “I’m okay.” We Americans are used to this phrase now, that means, “I’m okay as I am, I don’t want _____ that you are offering me.” But ”okay” is an affirmative answer in itself, so it’s confusing to people who aren’t familiar with the current manner of speaking. This led to a discussion of phrases I don’t think I’ve even heard, “Yeah, no,” and “No, yeah.” Really?

School kids in uniforms! We are likely to see lots of handsome children looking sharp in their various styles and colors of uniforms as they leave the school grounds or pile into rickshaws. Khaki, blue, plaid… The girls of one school wear deep purple dresses.

Walking home from church the other night we stopped at a flower stand to buy large white dahlias for about 30 cents each, and as we were standing there I looked up to see something unexpected: the moon! We aren’t often out at night, and the city lights and high-rises hide much of the sky… But there he was, my dear friend.