MUMBAI (Bombay)

Well, today's been a real cracker. Ugh. I had four glasses of beer last night (small glasses, though) with a couple of travelers at Alp's restaurant, around the corner from the Salvation Army Red Shield house in the Colaba district of Mumbai, and today when I woke up I was so dehydrated (forgot to drink water before bed) that I, without thinking, filled up my bottle at the UV-Filtering tap in the hostel lobby, and quickly downed nearly a liter. Within minutes I was rushing to the bathroom. I took a train ride up to Andheri station, the area of town I'm probably going to live in for the next few months while I'm studying with a violinist named Kala Ramnath. I was supposed to meet a realtor to show me a couple of paying-guest properties (that clock in at between $60 and $110 a month), but I couldn't reach him and needed to find a bathroom too badly. I tried to drink a few sips of 7up, but started feeling worse and worse, so I went right back to the train station, trying to get back to the hostel. Going out the train (and this is a real freight-gauge train, mind you, used as public transport--just huge cars, eight lanes of tracks, and express and local trains, called "fast" and "slow", respectively) had been empty from the Churchgate terminus near Colaba, but going back there were whole crowds of people violently pushing each other into the train screaming "cello, cello, cello!" or go, go, go. I braved the mess for one express stop, during which I could not find anywhere to put my other foot down on the floor, but soon got out because I was scared I'd vomit all over people who wouldn't even be able to lift their other arm to wipe it off. I soon, however, developed a strategy: the doors to the train are left open so as to cram a few more people in, and so I waited until everyone had done their cramming and I forced myself in so that I was grabbing the handrail but was really half hanging out of the train (which is all above ground, if you hadn't guessed), a position much more confortable than as an ingredient in a sandwich.
I jumped off the train as it was slowing down and promptly ran to the other side of the platform where I vomited my breakfast and the offending liter of water onto the tracks. It was barely even a spectacle. No one even looked, much less talked to me afterwards. Which makes sense! What's so strange about some tourist spewing all over the tracks at the station when beggars with no arms and tumors the size of golfballs on their head have been pestering you for money all morning? Ha!
So I spent the rest of the day in bed, and eventually made a run to the 'chemist's' to get some rehydration salts and some aspirin. (And also to the convenience store for water and toilet paper.) Rehydration salts, a collection of the minerals your body loses under conditions like mine, are great. They taste like Alka-Seltzer (hmm...) and have aided me in keeping water down, although so far the paracetamol I bought hasn't done anything about all the muscle aches. Oh well, I just hope that I can get my place before my week is up here at the Red Shield house.
Mumbai looks very much like an American or European city, on the surface. There's even a garbage-disposal system at work, at least for the business and tourist districts. Taxis outnumber regular traffic, kind of like Manhattan, and booksellers and clothing merchants line the streets, which are wide and clean. There are very tall buildings, if not skyscrapers, and many buildings have well-dressed guards outside them, many of whom speak great English. Not so further north, though. Up in Andheri it looked just like Calcutta, and on the train ride, one could see slums that lined the tracks for miles on end. The smell of gross junk was evident even from the 45km/hr ride, and once again naked kids bathed themselves in water pumps positioned very near latrines and garbage dumps. (I should mention also that the water pumps in the poorer sections of town are not connected to the city's water network, but rather are wells drawing from filthy ground water contaminated by faecal coliform and often, arsenic.) It floors me to think that these people's bodies have to deal with my ickyness, and much worse, regularily.

And then it floors me to think that American cities, importing so much from so many places, have managed to survive without their own slums of this magnitude. It makes one wonder if India could even approach the ideal of building an infrastructure capable of supporting itself without millions and millions of destitute citizens who are constantly doing jobs no one else wants. And then the subtext: could American cities maintain their affluence without millions of citizens of third-world countries making shirts, cars, and other goods for them? I'm sure there is an answer somewhere in the bowels of Global Economics; hopefully I'll run into a knowledgeable Econ prof who has statistics. It's gotta be right in front of us, and likely such a distasteful notion that it is not taught in our schools. Hmm.
Either way, even homesick as I am, it's good to be out here and doing what I'm doing. I'll try to get some pictures of Sikkim up on Flickr over the next few days. Cheers--