The monsoons in Mumbai are in their final stages and so is my second internship this summer. Blatantly oblivious to the bloodbath in the financial markets and with ruminations on a delayed graduation, I have been on an experiential journey to find glee and cheer in Mumbai.
(Pardon the anachronism in this para) Right from the time I land in Mumbai, the drive home promises to be memorable. The monsoons are supposed to end, but it has been raining heavily for the last few days. As I come out of the airport, I can sense the certainly dusky yet earthy smell in the air. Everywhere, I see lush green because of the rains. Its as if Mumbai is attempting to show its botoxed bliss. As my parents drive me home from the airport, I adapt myself quickly to the constant honking, to the small cars adeptly whizzing past mine missing it by inches. I cringe a bit in my car seat. I become indifferent to stopping our car midway allowing the bovine crowd to cross the street. I breathe the seemingly sinister air as we drive by the Dharavi hutments (Mumbai’s version of Cabrini Green) . Soon after, I am on the highway and after awe-ing at a million things, commenting how they still have/have-not changed in Mumbai, we arrive at our apartment complex. The doorman opens the apartment gate and willfully carries my luggage four floors up to my apartment knowing that I will hand him a fat tip that will cater to his tippling needs for the week.
Labor, it seems, has a flat supply curve in India. There is a maid that comes in to do our household chores, but she won’t clean the bathrooms for which there is another maid that comes in during an allotted time. My parents hired a car driver for me who will drive me to my workplace, but he will not wash the car every morning. Those rights are simply reserved for the building watchman/doorman (there are at least three doormen and they have divided the cars of the apartment complex amongst themselves). The garbage collector is yet another entity who gives her attendance just about when we have our morning cup of tea. The local grocery store, at a stone’s throw from the apartment, has a few helpers who will get our (limited) groceries all the way delivered to the apartment at the behest of a phone call – free of charge. Wonder what Keynes would have to say about such a ‘labor’ market.
From day one of my arrival, I have indulged in tons of junk food. If you are in Mumbai, you are in the mecca of junk food. If you haven’t eaten either the bhelpuri, vadapav or the frankie, then you haven’t experienced the Mumbai culture. Usually the market for such foods has low barriers to entry, and the owners have full pricing power. Junk-onomics apart, you will be drawn to whichever place makes the best dish, regardless of the price you have to pay. If you are a liberal germo-phobe like me, then the irresistibly sweet and tangy, ironically therapeutic, yet outright unhygienic pani-puri is strictly off-limits unless your body has been granted auto-immunity after about a months stay or so. The bhel-puri is the motherlode within the junk food trinity. The puri’s are made from semolina and flour. The complementary ingredients are chillies, coriander and mint, and sauces made from tamarind, jaggery, cumin powder and dried ginger powder. Then there are shards of raw mango with coriander, raw onions, green chillies with a whiff of lime. (Some say that this dish is actually a metaphor for the cultural diversity of Mumbai, what with all those ingredients). Much of the pleasure of eating bhel comes from the sapid crackling noise made by the puri inside the mouth and from the gush of saliva trying to further stoke the contents inside. As you manipulate and destroy the bhel-puri helping inside your mouth, you have to simultaneously cast an eye at the visual texture, appearance and color of the dish to get a hedonistic thrill.
That… ladies and gentlemen, that… is the moment, if you were ever in search of one, to denounce all your worldly and carnal pleasures alike and become one with this so-called trigeminal truth; thats when you know that the dish has hit THE spot.
Of course, apart from the monsoons and the bhelpuri-like fast-food, a visit to Mumbai is not complete without traveling in the local trains. But that is a treatise in itself and deserves a creative mention another time, another day.
Care to differ ..Mumbaikar’s ?
References: Maximum City by Suketu Mehta
