Mumbai, The Place Where Paradise and Hell Stay Together

Two women, two worlds: and old beggar and a young getting off the car: Mumbay is a city of heavens and hells. Interesting is that the rich guys perceive the paradise of Mumbay like hell (they dream to escape to New York or London) while the poor people perceive the hell of Mumbay like paradise (they moved to Mumbay to escape from the extreme poverty of their Indian villages). Anand Giridharadas has some fine observations in today's NY Times:

This city, before it was a city, was a dusting of seven islands in the choppy brine off India’s western coast. Beginning nearly three centuries ago, it was gradually reclaimed from the sea, seven masses forging one, and claimed by the teeming country at its back. Dangling in the Arabian Sea, it has become Mumbai, India’s stock-trading and film-making capital and its window to the world.

But if the reclaiming was complete, the claiming never was. The city was tethered to the subcontinent by a land bridge in the northern suburbs, 20 miles from the upper-crust stronghold of South Mumbai, where mainland India felt remote. The rich were in India but not of it. When news arrived of distant floods and famines, malfeasance and malnutrition, they told themselves that theirs was a world apart.

Escapism was constant. In the 1960s, young elites observed the Western music hour on All India Radio like a religion. In the 1980s, wealthy women flew to London to avoid the steamy bazaars. Recent years have brought diversions like gelato, sushi, fashion shows with Russian models, velvet-rope nightclubs, restaurants that cook the ever-less-sacred cow medium-rare.

Here the highest social boast is that you “just got back” from abroad; the loftiest praise for a restaurant is, “It’s like you’re not in India.” Mumbai’s globalized class hungers for it to be a world city, and its leaders pledge to make it Shanghai-like by 2020; the plan is, to put it gently, behind schedule. The rich blush when Madonna dines at Salt Water Grill and Angelina Jolie drinks at Indigo: portents, they say, that Mumbai will join New York, London, Paris in that coterie of names emblazoned on the epidermis of boutiques everywhere.

Arriving from overseas, one encounters first this outward-looking city. But in the layers below, a strange truth is buried. If the elite live in virtual exile, seeing Mumbai as a port of departure, the city teems with millions of migrants who see it as the opposite — a mesmeric port of arrival, offering what the mainland doesn’t: a chance to invent oneself, to break destiny.

For the writer, the Dickensian lens offers an easy view of Mumbai: wealthy and poor, apartment-dwelling and slum-dwelling, bulbous and malnourished. In office elevators, the bankers and lawyers are a foot taller, on average, than the less-fed delivery men.

Luscious skyscrapers sprout beside mosquito-prone shantytowns. This is at once a city of paradise and of hell. But Mumbai’s paradox is that it is often the dwellers of paradise who feel themselves in hell and the dwellers of hell who feel themselves in paradise.

What you see in Mumbai depends on what else you have seen. For those who grew up in Westernized homes, the standard is New York. That comparison is hard on Mumbai.

To be sure, in my five years here, which are now ending, the city has inched toward world-city status. Restaurants began to serve miso-encrusted sea bass. Indian-Western fashion boutiques started to attract global jet-setters. The air kiss became as Indian as not kissing once was.

But it takes a muscular suspension of disbelief to pretend that Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay, is what its elite wishes it were. Residents will tell you that Mumbai is “just like New York,” before launching a tirade about why it isn’t: nowhere nice to eat, same incestuous social scene, no offbeat films, no privacy. There is a sense in this crowd of a city forever striving to be what it isn’t.

Still, minute after minute, migrants pour in with starkly different pasts and starkly different ideas of Mumbai.

They arrive from India’s 660,000 villages. Perhaps the monsoon failed and crops perished. Perhaps their mother is ill and needs money for surgery. Perhaps they took a loan whose mushrooming interest cannot be repaid from cow-milking and wheat-sheafing. Perhaps they are tired of waiting for the future to come to them.

They arrive by train and locate relatives or friends to help get them on their feet. They walk the streets asking building security guards if the tenants inside need a servant. They live in cramped rooms or huts in a vast slum like Dharavi, where one million people pack one square mile.

In these labyrinthine hives, spaces and lives are shared, card games last all night and rivers of sludge navigate the gullies. And the slums ever metastasize.

These dueling claims on Mumbai explain its mongrel look: like a duty-free mall in parts, in parts like a refugee camp. The wealthy complain that the surge in migration has strained public services, turned 15-minute drives into two-hour odysseys, rendered real estate into slum estates. They say migrants spit, steal electricity, commit crime, harass women, drain the public dole.

Perhaps this is why the affluent dream of New York.

But the migrants relish Mumbai, for they know other places. Places where tradition tells you to die where you were born and live as your parents lived. Places where a son of the leather-working caste with a scientific mind must let it atrophy. Places where unapproved love can bring murder.

And in these squalid acres they savor what the wealthy take for granted: the ability to get a job without “knowing somebody”; the lightness of being without roots; the possibility of reinvention; the dignity of anonymity.

Yet it is a strange, absentee dignity. They suffer the indignities of sleeping in shanties, on sidewalks, on the hoods of their own taxis in order to earn respect in villages they may never revisit.

Walking amid the polychromatic chaos of Mumbai, one might ask: What other city so concentratedly distills the human predicament, in the fullness of its tragedy, its comedy, its absurdity and its promise?

Mumbaikars, as they are known, cannot resist one another, cannot resist Mumbai. Those who crave departure could depart if they wanted. They are still here. The newly arrived could have stayed in the villages, basking in their certainties. They too, choose to invest themselves here.

Neither investment is total, unreserved. But Mumbai works on the agglomeration of these hopes: Because so many cast their lots here, it becomes a place worth casting lots. The longer you remain, the less you notice what Mumbai looks, smells, sounds like. You think instead of what it could be. You become addicted to the companionship of 19 million other beings. Surrounded by hells, you glimpse paradise.


(Zoon Politikon)