Mumbai Mush

Hello.

Finally out of a haze of end of year funk and new year geographical dyspraxia. The Christmas break was made up of “Vienna”, “Berlin”, Istanbul, old people, tedium and two phucking long coach journeys.

There is very little else to say beyond:
• I attended the WORST new years party ever I’ve ever been to
• Vienna in December is too cold for romantic solitary walks
• Shit clubs are no more nor less awful whether you’re 17 or 27, but when you’re 27 you can leave
• People change as they shift past 60/65, they get slower and can’t take their drink
• You CAN convert to Judaism, but you need to hang out with a rabbi for two years first
• An old friend Richard has become a maths genius, batting away job offers from MIT, Cambridge and that one with all the letters in France. He’s also wealthy, charming and not a little good-looking, yet still immensely likeable.
• My mum made friends with this Welsh woman who’s married to a ‘gyptian and whose son went to the same school as me in Canada and apparently I hit him. So, thirteen years after having mildly teased this short, swarthy, be-speckled chap with a funny accent, I meet up with Ashraf for a coffee. Dude looks EXACTLY like me and is nice, funny and doing a PhD into the maths of face recognition. I plan to apologise as soon as it’s appropriate but instead we talk over each other for the best part of an hour, not once mentioning the past. As we’re parting. Ashraf says ‘You know that fight we had? Let’s tell people it was about a girl or something, yeah?’

Tangentially, coffee with Ashraf was not my first such encounter. There was an AWFUL boy in my house at school that I made a point of letting know quite how highly I thought of him whenever the opportunity arose.

Last year, he contacted me out of the blue and suggested we meet up for a drink. I put him off a few times until his leaving do, when I decided to risk it for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was its coinciding with having phuck-all else to do.

I arrived to be treated like the guest of honour at an Indian wedding: introduced to family and friends with accolades I don’t even secretly ascribe to myself. I kept expecting some kind of attack, but none came, just hand shakes, accommodating people and glass after glass of some clear Greek liqueur. When it was time to go, he walked me out and I attempted to say something conciliatory about the past, only for it to be brushed aside and be told that he “was AWFUL at school “and that my actions towards him had played “a big part in making me who I am”, a state with which he had evidently made peace.

He then hugged me and blundered off back to his party. Nice, but quite weird.

Anyway.

Arrived in Istanbul in early January knackered, depressed, sick and confused.

None of this was assisted by various liaisons that served to make my desire to get the hell out of Istanbul junior partner to my outright need. Managed to squeeze in a bit of Stamboulian delights I`d previously missed including Dolmenbahce (the last home of the Ottoman sultans – crap), Top Kapi (the historical residence of the sultans – excellent) and finally got to use the boats that define the city to many.

It was a brilliantly sunny day and the view of Istanbul from the boat was like that on a resting giant. It almost looked cuddly. That said, I simply do not like the place.

It’s bloody expensive for sod all return, the food’s generally schit (whatever Turks loudly and wrongly insist to the contrary) and Turks are not, as a rule, scrupulously honest or helpful in their dealings with foreigners.

Still, Top Kai’s reasonably flash. Brilliant view of Bosphorous, beautifully laid out and ornate structure and packed to the gills with all kinds of trinkets from bejewelled medals such as the order of the garter and the cross of St. Nicholas to scraps of the prophet’s (pbuh) hair, teeth, etc.

All genuine, mind. They’ve also got Abraham’s rod, Moses’ footprint and Jesus’ Sega Master System 2.

But it’s been India for the last 3 and a half weeks and the place utterly, utterly, utterly pisses all over any other place I’ve been in terms of the pure pleasure one gets from simply being there.

The sensation of total well-being has been strongest in Mumbai, and stronger still in the northern suburb of Bandra, where we’ve been for the most part staying for the most part.

The most succinct way to describe Mumbai would be to point to the satisfied smile of someone who has had fantastic sex with someone they love and has just remembered that there is a left over osso bucco in the fridge and an unwatched Alan Partridge dvd in the player.

You exert yourself, but it feels like a mutual effort on the part of all those around you, and when you’ve finished there are endless brilliant things to do next that seem to have been designed around your own particular tastes.

I lived in India as a child, albeit a young one, and so was especially interested to do some ‘compare and contrast’ between present and past and, at least superficially, nothing seems that different. But as the days pass, one realises that in fact EVERYTHING has changed only relatively subtly and, crucially, rather holistically.

By ‘holistically’, I mean that things seem to have altered in a way that has maintained the balance between the extremely diverse elements that constitute India’s incredibly sophisticated and hugely disparate society.

Examples:
- the beggars are still here, but they’ve got flip flops now;
- mobile phones are everywhere, but you buy your credit from a rickety shack that also sells samosas;
- there are big successful companies with nice shiny offices, but the MDs speak to their staff like they’re errant domestics; and so on.

My happiest place in the world is now the back of a Mumbai taxi.

M

~ by julian2000 on 16 February, 2008.