Mumbai III: Religious Borders and a Glimpse of Bollywood

Pradz was still working on his drivers license, so we set out with Sunder the driver to practice on the roads of South Mumbai. It was certainly a white-knuckled ride with Sunder gripping the emergency brake and every vehicle around us honking simultaneously, but we made it home at one piece for Bilal to pick us up in the evening. Bilal is another returning character on this blog, having spent an evening in Istanbul and two weeks in Ukraine with me last summer. He lives in a suburb of Mumbai – I had pictured a private home in a quiet area, but apparently an apartment on the 27th floor counts as “suburban” in these parts.

We returned to the area near Chor Bazaar and walked east. This section specialized in religious materials and produce, and was somehow even more hectic in the evening. We walked past literal mountains of multicolored garlic that was being shelled by men in small compartments, and reached perhaps the most chaotic intersection I have ever seen. A thousand motorcycles seemed to be honking at once, swerving around the crowds of shoppers that spilled from the roadside stalls into the street as taxis let passengers on and off.

This was Mohammed Ali Road, which served as a clear boundary between working-class Muslim and Hindu districts. While on the west side we had seen Hindu wedding garb, the east side was all Muslim books, bedazzled skull caps, and various forms of conservative women’s dresses and head coverings. One block highlighted the transition particularly well, with the Bismillah Hotel two buildings down from the local Shiv Sena office. Women in black niqabs riding two-up on scooters whizzed past us as we weaved through sweet shops and restaurants selling fare from across the Muslim world.

We crossed back into the Hindu district and up a nondescript stairwell that led to an internationally-renowned thali restaurant. We each paid 600 rupees ($8) and proceeded to have our trays filled with over a dozen forms of vegetables, sauces, curries, and dals, mopped up by four kinds of flatbread all liberally doused in ghee and chased by yogurt, buttermilk, and sweets. Each of the dozen orbiting waiters focused exclusively on one type of food, and interspersed savory and sweet Maharashtran dishes made with local seasonal ingredients. It was every vegetarian’s dream, and easily one of the best meals I have ever had.

The next morning we set out to the north on the main highway leading out of the city. The drive showed the city’s evolution at its starkest, with gleaming high-rises being constructed on top of dusty shanty towns and along a beautiful new metro line. After an hour weaving our way between rickshaws and motorbikes, we finally reached the edge of the island and crossed onto the Indian mainland for the first time. We promptly arrived at our destination – a film studio complex in the town of Naigaon.

Milan, the film director from the first Mumbai post, had arranged for us to visit one of his sets during a shoot. We were greeted at the gate by Nishad, who looked like a poster boy for a young Bollywood figure in an open white shirt, white sneakers, black jeans, and oversized sunglasses. Away from the city and its smog, the sun was even more powerful as we toured an inactive set containing a café, a restaurant, and a bar. The thing that stands out most to me about Bollywood is its tendency to portray fantastic opulence that is out of the reach of all but perhaps several thousand Indians, and the sets showed this well.

We then continued to the active set, which was being used to film scenes from Sultan of Delhi, a 1960s period piece. The set was abuzz with literally hundreds of men setting up a 20-second shot of an agitated government minister speaking into a phone, which took nearly an hour to film. Nishad told us that more complex scenes – like those shot on trains – can involve up to 900 people and are rehearsed seven times to get them perfectly on the first take. We sat on a bed in a hotel room set that was later going to be used to film a sex scene and watched the takes being filmed through live monitors.

As soon as the director was satisfied with the shot, everyone burst into action again as an adjacent living room set was prepared for the next shot, this one of a femme fatale villain sending the hotel manager to investigate another character as she was being served tea. With a female character on set, the first women made an appearance, surrounding her to reapply makeup and fix her dress between shots. I can’t share the video for proprietary reasons, but we literally stood 3 feet behind the tracked camera and could practically touch the actors. This was one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had, and we were all incredibly grateful to Milan for arranging it.

We stopped at Pradz’s for some afternoon amras, a thick mango paste that we had loved the previous night. It was high mango season in India, and Sanjay’s cousin owned a farm that kept us well supplied throughout the week. For our final evening in town, we were going to dinner with Leane and Milan again, but this time at their club – the Breach Candy Swimming Bath Trust, which called for wearing pants for the first time since leaving New York. Originally constructed “for the use of the European public of Bombay” in 1876, the club was whites-only until Indian independence, did not have an ethnically Indian chairman until 2005, and maintained a foreign citizenship requirement until only a few years ago. Since India prohibits dual citizenship, that effectively made the club inaccessible to all but a very narrow slice of the South Bombay elite.

The main selling point of the club used to be its sea view from its India-shaped saltwater pool. With the land reclamation for the coastal road, this view was gone forever, as reported breathlessly in the local news. The food at dinner was certainly delicious and cheap, but it was only available to those paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership fees. The amenities were not nearly nice enough to justify the price, but in South Bombay some things are more important than comfort.

The real estate here is some of the priciest in the world, but the physical environment simply does not match the standards of the competition. What matters for elite status, then, is a set of class signals, like exorbitantly overpriced club memberships, sending one’s kids to renowned universities abroad, or a natural grasp of English. Language is an incredibly important class marker – fluency is basically a guaranteed path to a decent job and a higher standard of living, which explains why every working-class person with whom we had interacted had no more than a basic command of it at best. This was evident in the Bollywood studio, as well: the educated and highly-trained professionals, as well as the actors, all spoke English among each other, and the helping hands of the production team understood the commands but spoke Hindi with each other.

Fish and Death on the Streets of Mumbai

Richard and I were on separate flights to the same destination, so we parted ways and Pradz and I headed out for a final outing. We picked up his grandfather and drove to Sassoon Docks at the southern end of the peninsula, named after a wealthy Iraqi Jewish businessman who also constructed the beautiful synagogue we had seen the other day. This was the city’s main fish market, and everything you’d expect from it. By our arrival in the late morning, most of the fish had already been sold, but there were groups of women cleaning literal mountains of shellfish for men to cart off in styrofoam boxes. I already avoid shellfish, but after seeing a 2-foot pile of what looked like insect exoskeletons, I would never eat prawns again. Rickety wooden fishing boats draped in multicolored flags bumped into each other as they navigated the busy harbor. On the dock, several silvery fish had been laid out as they were auctioned off to a huddle of men. By the time we returned three minutes later, they had all disappeared. Fish markets everywhere are dirty, smelly places, but the sanitation at the docks was nearly enough to give me salmonella. Ajoba didn’t seem to mind though, dressed as he always was in a polo, wide linen trousers, and leather sandals.

Despite my newfound aversion to all things seafood, Bilal had invited me to have lunch at a seafood restaurant downtown with his sister Sara. I hopped in an Uber, which somewhat alarmingly had an exposed CNG tank directly behind my head, with the regulator perhaps three inches behind my left ear. To add to my squeamishness, there was an aquarium full of decorative fish right by our table. The food was good enough to make me get over myself though, especially the fried Bombay duck. This was a very ugly fish that like everything else in this city got its name by the British mishearing a Hindi word: in this case, daak (mail) became duck.

After lunch, we shopped for books next to the High Court, where they were displayed in literal mazes that rapidly became wet saunas. To cool down, we stopped at another Parsi café for chai and the sweetest raspberry soda I have ever tasted. Speaking of Parsis, we passed their Tower of Silence on our way back to Pradz’s. Zoroastrians are supposed to be consumed by nature after death, and their bodies are thus laid out in a pit on a hilltop for the vultures to ravage. After pieces of human flesh started falling on neighbors’ balconies, however, the community had to install high walls and nets for the birds, which make the hill seem more like a prison of death.

On that rather morbid note, I packed my things and said my profuse thank-yous to Prati, Sanjay, and Pradz for what was quite literally the best hospitality I have ever received. Mumbai had been an incredible place to visit, and definitely altered my perception of third-world cities, with its New York real estate prices, dusty skyscrapers, and fantastically low crime rate. To tell the truth, I had felt much safer in Mumbai than in any American city. The international terminal on the way out was simultaneously beautifully modern and horrifyingly inefficient at every stage, down to the gendered metal detectors we had to pass through. Men got padded down in the open; women got a little cubicle. Farewell, India!