Hell is an autorickshaw to Andheri

One thing I've learned about settling in to a new city, is that you gotta leg it to learn it. I mean, you can pore over guidebooks all you want, but the fact of the matter is that it's going to take about two weeks for home to feel like home (yes, only two weeks. Home is where the cats are). After that, your "territory" – the area you know and feel comfortable in – is going to remain the six square blocks around your home, unless you physically go out there and mark off new territory, like a dog running around peeing on everything.

This is particularly true of Mumbai, where the phrase "city grid" can't be said with a straight face, and where the general awfulness of India will conspire to keep you a willing prisoner within those six blocks – and, preferably, at home (but, on the bright side, if you want to live the metaphor and actually run around peeing on everything, no one will look twice).

Because there's seldom any reason to go far afield, especially when you don't know what's out there, you've got to arbitrarily pick a point on a map and commit to reaching it, no matter what, bearing in mind that the effort may be large, and the reward, small. “Let’s explore” is a great Sunday afternoon activity.

As it was a 3-day weekend, we decided to add a Monday trek (Sunday was Banganga tank). Our destination was Malad, in the far northern suburbs of the city. Our pretext reason was to visit a shopping mall, allegedly the best in Mumbai. (Pretext reasons are an adjunct part of this whole exploration project, and highly useful to motivate K, who, frankly – the yang to my yin – would prefer to spend Sunday afternoons repotting the ficus and solving the NYT puzzle online, in air-conditioned comfort. I can't actually remember whether I've shared with him the fact that I call these "pretext" reasons.)

There were a few problems out of the gate. First, we couldn't find the train station. I eventually recognized the neighborhood, and remembered that "Swati snacks," an excellent eatery, was nearby. Swati doesn't take reservations, and there's perennially an hour-plus wait to get in, so when we showed up and discovered there was a mere 15-minute wait (actual waiting time: approx half an hour), how could we resist?

Swati serves "chaat," or Indian snacks, which you order in several small plates, like Indian tapas (most culinary motifs seem to recur across cultures, even if they don't think of them in the same way). One of the joys of Swati, for me, is that the whole place is veg. The dishes tend not to be drawn from the extremely limited subset of Indian food that makes it into US/EU restaurants, and are wholly unrecognizable by name. So, the entire experience is like a birthday party I once had as a kid, where you order things by code and may end up getting your ice cream before your hamburger (this was pre-veg). Which is, in fact, more or less what happened: we got subdanna-something patties, which turned out to be made of fermented rice and served in a yogurt sauce (and were very tasty and certainly much better than I'm making them sound here); a gola, which turned out to be a cross between a popsicle and an Italian ice (tamarind flavor, I think); beda-roti-something-something, which was fried and spiced roti pieces with a thick, sweet dipping sauce and a side of spicy potatoes; and some sort of bhaji, which was like a sloppy joe – tomato-ish sauce with cheese, served with rolls dripping with ghee (I let K take the lead on this one). All very yummy – even the gola, and I usually hate tamarind.

About an hour and a half later, as we were amiably wandering through a pleasant food market (the market downtown is unbearable with touts, but this one was hassle-free and positively charming), I suddenly realized (1) it was approaching 4 PM, and (2) the rest of Mumbai did not have a holiday on this Monday. I communicated this to K, who understood my drift instantly: within half an hour – and it might be too late already – the trains to the suburbs would become a human tide no Westerner could hope to surf. Perhaps I've already spoken of "the India quota"? A little mental meter that ticks down how much time left out and about K and I have until we absolutely, positively, can't deal with India any more that day? It's a very real phenomenon for both of us: when that quota is reached, we get positively unhinged. Experiencing India is like trying to drink from a firehose. Pass the quota point, and you feel like you're drowning. It's visceral. We've been consciously trying to expand our endurance, and have had modest success, but, even after six months on the ground, just getting near a train station at rush hour would send the India meter skyrocketing into the red, like a Geiger counter near Chernobyl. Motivated by necessity and the sacred trust of the exploration project – once started, a journey must be completed, no matter what obstacles -- we managed to will the train station into existence.

If it’s possible to speak of “a murder of crows” and “an exaltation of larks,” then Mumbai train stations, even during non-peak times, contain a “horror of beggars.” K and I have differing philosophies regarding Indian beggars, which I'll elaborate some other time. Suffice it to note that, against advice, K gave a little girl 20 rupees. She grabbed it and ran away, leading K to smirk about my warning against doling out money in confined spaces like train stations. Of course – wait for it – she was back minutes later, with twenty of her imploring, swarming, sleeve-tugging, pocket-picking little friends (I know that sounds heartless. There will be a separate discussion of all this at some point.) We escaped only because a fat khaki-clad cop – there are no other kind – unintentionally created a diversion by threatening with a bamboo lathi a terrified little urchin (not part of our gang) who ran into a filthy corner, cowered, and screamed his head off. That allowed us to escape to the platform, pursued only by a nearly legless adult, who – again, sorry if this sounds callous – was, frankly, rather easy to lose.

K noted bitterly that our first class tickets cost ten times the second class fare, and the first class compartment was barely distinguishable from second. We accidentally got on a local train and were too concerned with staying ahead of rush hour to switch, so it was nearly a steamy, stinky hour to Malad.

The mall itself – a pretext, remember – was not especially remarkable. One strongly rued missed photo-op: at one point, on an escalator, I got engulfed in a horde of young women all wearing black chadors. Picture it: a sea of black, with bits of faces peeping out, and me also in black pants and a black t-shirt with hot pink lettering reading “this is what a feminist looks like.” Sadly, K and the camera were off separately in a men’s department somewhere. It would’ve made a fantastic image.

Dinner was at a mall-based Thai restaurant, which I still get excited to discover, despite it representing, at this point, the triumph of hope over experience (ditto for Mexican). No surprises here: it was Chinese food, and so-so Chinese at that.

Leaving the mall at 9 PM-ish, I was a little concerned about taking the train at night. I wanted to return to the station we came from (a 20-rupee ride), but K wanted to take the autorickshaw (an Indian tuk-tuk basically; a golf-cart-like three-wheeled vehicle) to a further station so that we could catch an express train. We didn’t know how far away it was, but, in theory, we should’ve been about equidistant from our original station.

The suburbs are really crowded. Our driver nearly sideswiped a motorcycle, and, at another point, missed rear-ending a car by millimeters. I’m not sure what was worse: weaving in and out of traffic, or sitting in the open-air cab in the middle of a six-lane highway, stuck, with fumes (and worse) not budging a fraction off the superheated pavement in the airless, soggy night, as cars all around us laid on the horn. Autorickshaw cabs, I also learned are exactly level with bus (diesel) exhaust pipes. I could feel the creeping anoxia. At another point, we passed a water buffalo pen. We smelled that one long before we saw it. I had a handful of change ready, and kept my eye on the meter, prepared to dash out for air the second we had the chance. It crept past 20. The “India quota” had long since been reached, but what can you do when you’re stuck in a rickshaw miles from home? At 40 rupees, we reached Andheri, and I was so relieved. Either Andheri turned out to be big, or we were too oxygen-deprived to notice we were driving in circles. At 60 rupees, nearly an hour after we’d left, the cab lurched to a stop, and the driver gestured down the road. We might’ve been miles away – we didn’t care; gasping for breath and choking, we fled.

At the train platform, my heart dropped. A train had just pulled in from the other direction, and the car doorways – Mumbai carriages have door openings but no doors – were nothing but walls of arms. People were riding on the roof of the train. I tried to take a picture: faces magically appeared where the arms were, and everyone (all men – it’s always all men) grinned and flashed V-signs. I consoled myself by thinking our train would be going against rush hour. When it finally pulled in, after we'd been wilting on the platform for a while, it was exactly the same. K and I ran alongside it, though we weren’t sure whether it was local or express, desperately looking for a first-class carriage, trying to weave through the pandemonium on the track, trying to avoid getting either sucked into a carriage or pushed out of the station by the surging waves of men. I knew I should just get on a second-class carriage; it was late; we were miles and miles from downtown; taking a proper cab home in that traffic would literally have taken all night. I just couldn’t. I peered through spaces in the walls of men at the carriage doors into the dark crush beyond -- the unseeable holes in these dark steel dungeons -- and I just couldn’t. I glanced back at K and mouthed “I can’t.” He looked grim. Neither of us knew when the trains stopped running or when or if the next one would come. As we kept running, the train began pulling out of the station. Suddenly I saw that the next carriage up – now moving away from me – was painted a different color. I sped up, and lunged for the pole in the doorway. Passengers very sweetly reached out to grab my arms and haul me aboard. I hoped that K was right behind me.

He was. It was first class. It was an express train. There were seats. It was lit. It was a filthy, grimy carriage, and we were covered in sweat and dirt and road fumes, but there was space. I could see the dense knot of second class through the grilles separating the cars. The “exorbitant fare” – which I would’ve paid ten times over, when on the platform – was, I realized, not intended to be a luxury ticket, a cost one bears in order to get something. It was a cost to be paid in order to avoid something.

Twenty minutes later we were back downtown. We took a wrong turn out of an unlit station on disembarking, and ended up in the middle of a slum, but the residents, who were all out lounging on the street -- I felt as though we accidentally ended up in a family's living room -- were very nice about gesturing a route through dark fields of sleeping bodies back to the main street.

It isn't difficult to find adventure in Mumbai...