In an internet cafe a storey above a street in Mumbai, above sidealks crowded with sellers and buyers and the legless and skinny and fat and sequined and torn, cluttered with sleeping nursing-nippled bitches and sugar-filled silver leaf pan sellers and all the same Indian (tm) pretty things you can find pretty much everywhere else in the world, including some of the wall hangings I bought in Cappadocia a few years back. It smells like old cooking oil, pee, fused and smoking electrical outlets, and exhaust. It sounds like car horns. All different pitches and timbres and personal rhythms of honking.
The roads and sidewalks have sudden craters- much like Turkey. Crosswalks flash the green walking man just as it becomes most unsafe for one to walk. Skinny men in cotton ring huge bells in a sidewalk side temple as another man drums and another man waves a chunk of burning something around and shoeless crowds gather and recite whatever it is that one must recite in such situation. The buildings are crumbly old colonial, with brilliant windows and balconies and maybe 10% of the original paint job. The air is warm and thick and heavy but nowt compared to Ghana. It is, after all, winter. Maybe 30 degrees, nothing oppressive. Overall, nowhere near as scary, overwhelming, difficult, or frantic as I had been warned. It's actually quite...easy. (wood being knocked on as we speak)
On Elephanta Island today, an hour away by open sided, life jacketless, little ferry boat, a macaque with good aim tried to tackle me and steal my water bottle. Luckily I was 700% bigger than he was and so emerged with water intact. I saw Siva's linga(m), in an abandoned temple room in a cave on the island. It was about a metre tall and half a metre in diameter and crowned with a garland of flowers. Flowers for the phallii. Very romantic. I dared not sit near it lest I become inadvertantly fertile.
The food is lovely and I walk around in a constant state of stuffedness. All veggie, all the time, with forty million course thalis with endless roti and a mountain of rice and a big tall glass of fresh lime juice and sugarcane juice mixed with fizzy water for about two bucks. Breakfast at the hotel consisting of homemade yogurt, aloo parathas, potato bhajees, many random dhal'y goops and spuddy concoctions full of turmeric and popped black mustard seeds, and instant coffee that's as cloyingly sweet as those annoying 3 in 1 packets in Istanbul (but free!), and dainty little white crustless sandwiches filled with spicy, yellow mashed potato and a few stray leaves of an unidentified green leaf. Finger bowls full of lemon wedges and warm water to wash the roti dust from your finger tips. Pistachio kulfi to ensure the immediate weight gain that even 5 hours of walking doesn't seem to be able to keep at bay. Chai so spiced as to be brown and sturdy even with condensed milk.
Tomorrow we do more things. I believe one of the things involves and aircraft carrier and the other the Prince of Wales. Monday morning at 6am we board a train to Aurangabad. We bought our tickets today, even though they were sold out. The ticket man at the absurdly beautiful train station ended up selling us Emergency Tickets, which are for, well, emergencies. On every train, they set aside a few seats for people who must go to see dying family members or who must go to a hospital far away or any other occasion which may be classified as Emergency. Our desire to go to Aurangabad on Monday morning has officially been declared an Emergency.
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