Inside Crow City

22 May 2011

Mumbai is covered in crows. I want to compare it to pigeons in New York, but it’s even more so – so much that they’ve erected a statue to the crows in one of their small parks that is, appropriately, covered in actual crows. They join the cattle, cats, dogs and the lone rooster I’ve seen among the animals walking the street unaccompanied.


(We stayed in both India Guest House and the Sea Shore Hotel)

Some combination of the heat and the time difference is still sapping our energy a bit. Multiple cold showers a day is clutch. We’re still staying in the cheapest hotel we could find, but we’ve got some better ideas about how to conduct our apartment search now, and we should have phones this afternoon.

Yesterday we wanted to sail out to elephant island, a small island maybe 9 km off the coast of Mumbai that houses ruins and caves. The “deluxe” English-speaking tour would cost $3/person, so that seemed worth it, but the sea was too rough, and they shut down the boats for the day. Now we probably won’t be able to get out there until the weekend.

Instead we walked city center a bit. Shira noted that nothing in this town looks legitimate. There’re a handful of mansion-style architectural marvels (the central train station has a beautiful façade), and the police headquarters all look good, but everything else looks like you could drop it in North America and call it urban blight. Even the Mumbai stock exchange, which the cops prohibited us from taking pictures of, looks pretty shady and beat down aside from the crawling ticker on the outside.

My work, which I’ll officially start tomorrow, looks like it’s run out of an abandoned building – except that the dirty sign on the unlit first floor names 50 lawyers and other white collar professionals in the building and it’s a couple blocks from the main government offices of the city.

But this is what it means, I suppose, to live in a city of 8 million or so with high poverty. I would’ve thought, maybe, that there would be a higher gloss on the professional city center, but it seems swallowed up in the pattern of the rest of the city. As we get out into the suburbs, I suspect we’re going to see more high class areas, but we haven’t gone there yet, and we’re going to have to see the real slums on the way.

EDIT: In the next few days, we did wander into the real epicenter of the city, which is actually quite nice, and I take back what I said about nothing seeming legit. It's still surprising, however, how fast that loveliness disappears a few blocks away.

A couple notes: Dudes hold hands here all the time. I thought this was pretty neat until Shira pointed out that it’s just symptomatic of the greater social evil – an overwhelming presumption against homosexuality.

There’re a lot of folks lighting little fires to heat what looks like tar in oil drums on the sidewalk. We’re both wondering what this is.

An army of guys selling giant balloons and what look like happy meal toys on the sidewalk plague us every day. They join the sticky-note-scale-guy as our favorite characters so far. Sticky-note-scale-guy sits on the sidewalk outside police headquarters with a scale and a packet of sticky notes. For a fee, he will let you step on the scale. The real crux of the service, though, is that he will then write down your weight on a sticky note, which you may keep, and feel free to put on your fridge, bulletin board, or even frame for your office.

Europeans here outnumber Americans by far. Which is to say, I don’t think we’ve seen any other Americans.