Mumbai or Bombay?

We left Varikatt Homestay on a Sunday and hopped a flight up to Mumbai. Or Bombay. But really Mumbai. Or whatever you want to call it seeing as everyone still calls it Bombay! It gets really annoying actually. You’ll be talking to someone and they’ll say: “Oh. Where are you going?” You say, “Mumbai for a few days.” They say, “Bombay is a great city.” It doesn’t matter where you are or who you’re talking to. I even had that same conversation in Doha on the flight home. I have yet to meet someone who hasn’t dropped Bombay into the conversation after I’ve said Mumbai.

Anyway. We were staying with Kate’s mom’s friend’s sister (complicated enough?) and her family is full of the nicest people you will ever meet. We arrived late in the evening before Pinkey (the sister) got home and so her husband and son sat with us for a while, chatting and making sure that we were settled in all right. Almost immediately after we got our tea, her husband started peppering us with questions about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go during our stay in Bombay. Then he said, “What do you want to do tonight?” To which we had no real reply since we’d just gotten to their house a good twenty minutes ago. So he says, “You could go shopping. Or you could see a movie. Yeah, why don’t you go see a movie?” He turns to his son, “Get the paper to see what movies are out. Then take them to a movie.” We tried to protest that the son really didn’t have to go with us because we were big girls and could totally do it on our own and he just shook his head, “No. He’ll take you to a movie.” Then he made his son go wake one of the cousins up. So she comes up and he says, “Meet [insert name]. She’ll take you shopping if you want. And she’ll go to the movie with you tonight.” I’m usually not overwhelmed, but I’ve never seen so many avenues of escape cut off like that. So we went to a movie and ran into several other members of the family. A side note so that this exchange makes more sense. In India, if the families can afford it, they’ll buy a whole building and the entire family—husbands, wives, cousins, grandparents—will live there. So when we went to the movies with the cousin, we went downstairs to collect her.

The movie we saw was Little Zizou. It’s the cutest movie ever. It’s set in Bombay and is told from the point of view of Xerxes, Little Zizou, a soccer-crazy Parsi boy. The movie follows the feud between Zizou’s family, headed by his religious fanatical father, and their rival family who owns a newspaper that prints dissenting opinions. If it comes out in the US near you, you should definitely check it out. I usually don’t have the attention span for movies told by children, but it moves really quickly and isn’t childish. It’s a really entertaining film and is an interesting look at the Parsis in India. Especially since it manages to look at religious extremism in a funny way.

When we got back, Pinkey was there and she sent us upstairs to chat with her husband and his friend. The husband and friend have a tradition where they meet on the terrace for a beer and snacks every Sunday. We were invited up to their domain and sat outside enjoying the company and the stars. The beer wasn’t bad either, Kingfisher is a good brand. We had a really interesting conversation about the status of women in India and the whole public sphere vs. private sphere thing that we’d been noticing. The two men said that in India, in general women are respected and that as a woman traveling alone (even a foreigner) people will take better care of you because they’ll worry. What stood out for me the most about this conversation was the fact that the implication was that women were respected as long as they acted a certain way, i.e., modest. What gets me about the word ‘modest’ is how it’s full of moral judgments and that there is no one definition. For me, most Indian clothing is actually immodest. People wear see-through kurtas and the sari blouses are like bustier tops. But for India, jeans and a t-shirt are immodest because you see a clear outline of the body. It was a good time and good company.

The next day was our first full day in Bombay and we were thwarted from the start. We had planned to go to the Elephanta Caves and the Prince Albert Museum, but it turns out that both of them were closed on Monday. So instead, Pinkey’s husband took us on a driving tour of Bombay. It’s actually a very small city, about 16 miles I think he said. We traveled back uptown to go to Pinkey’s office and see what she does. We hung out for a bit, ate lunch, and then headed out to FabIndia to do some quality shopping. I love FabIndia. Seriously. It’s the most amazing store ever. You can get kurtas for like 5 USD. It’s incredible. I can get silk there for about 20 USD. I love it. I was in heaven. Although I didn’t buy nearly as much as I wanted. After that it was off on an odyssey to find Cottons. The odyssey failed. Miserably. But we got to wander around Northern Bombay and check out the stores so it was fun. The nice think about Bombay is that there are so many people that you don’t get hassled to buy things nearly as much.

We left Pinkey’s again and went down to visit her mom at her apartment. There we met more of her family; a sister-in-law and a niece. They were really nice. The niece is sixteen and quite possibly the cutest girl you’ll ever meet. We bonded over Twilight and how cute Rob Pattinson is. Yes, I am occasionally a silly teenage girl, but Rob Pattinson is gorgeous and worth a small loss of dignity. And then we got fed again. Samosas and some kind of rice cake. It was good. And I know that complaining about being fed is bad, but it does get really tiring after a while.

Dinner was delicious. It was all different varieties of local seafood and curries. My favorite has to be this really spicy sauce that tasted almost like eating pure hot sauce. Made all the more potent by the fact that we were drinking beer with dinner and there was not a drop of water in sight. We followed dinner with a bottle of wine. Holy crap we had so much to drink that night. I had the biggest headache that night. But it was well worth it.

Next time: my last day in Mumbai!