First impressions

I arrived in Mumbai late Friday night after several delays, so I've been here about a day and a half. I seem to have succeeded in not having too many expectations, because I'm just wandering around fascinated, even by the things that would normally be really disappointing. India is ... unbelievable and it defies definition. I'd read somewhere that it's a country of contrasts and that much is very true. It's so rich, and so poor. So colorful, but so dirty. I've been slow to start taking photos because it seemed prudent to get the lay of the land first. An upside surprise is the lack of attention I receive as a young, pasty-white foreign girl in jeans and a baseball cap. In fact, I feel really safe and anonymous here. I've wandered the streets and half the passers by don't even look at me. (I know because I look at them ... damn awkward curiosity.)

Very few women wear western clothes -- instead, they are decked out in colorful saris and salwar kameez. Even the women picking through the ubiquitous piles of trash for recyclables are dressed in bright, gorgeous fabrics. The men are more subdued, mostly sporting slacks (no jeans really) and button-up shirts. India is fantastically diverse -- multiple religions (most notably Hindu and Islam) live side by side and Indians come in a wide range of colors, sizes, and facial features. One of the "upsides" of being conquered by several empires over its long history, I suppose.

I have yet to see anything I would consider completely modern, even downtown, where I am now in an internet cafe that I think could safely be described, literally, as a hole in the wall, but the internet connection is great and there are flat-panel monitors! It costs 40 rupee an hour, which is less than a dollar. Sold! I haven't found any internet cafes near the company "guest house" where I'm staying until I find my own place, which is really quite far from downtown and has very few tourists. (If any company in the U.S. put me up in a place like the one I'm staying, I would quit, but here it seems about average. We'll see as I start looking at places.)

I start work tomorrow and will probably take a rickshaw (a three-wheeled taxi with canvass roof) even though it's only about a 10-minute walk. I went this morning to check out the building and was sweating bullets by the time I arrived. It's the monsoon season in Mumbai, so it's insanely humid. The temperatures aren't bad, but my clothes are clinging to me for dear life. Fortunately, the guest house has a water filter and I brought my Nalgene bottle, so I've been drinking water by the liter. Also, my bedroom has a big, old dinosaur of a window AC unit that pumps out obscene quantities of freezing-cold air.

The side benefit of the aforementioned dinosaur is that the racket it makes drowns out the noise from outside, which is mostly honking. Honking. Lots of honking. I have yet to figure out what it all means, but I have never heard so much honking in my life -- even in Lima, Peru, where multiple-lane avenues intersected without stop lights in a herky-jerky, every-man-for-himself chaos. I don't plan to drive here, but I DO need to get used to cars driving on the opposite side of the road. I nearly got creamed this morning by a truck hurtling at me after I had carefully made sure no one was coming (from the wrong direction)!

While it's been mostly fun and games in terms of figuring out how everything works here, I did nearly cry this morning. I was riding the train toward downtown and got on the women-only car (brilliant invention, that). A woman got on with her five kids. They were so cute. But then one of the boys, maybe about four years old, pulled up his pant leg to reveal gaping open sores about the size of quarters on his shins and knees. His mom told him to cover them back up. I looked out the window and saw several naked butts of men relieving themselves along the tracks. Seemed awfully public to me, but, then again, Mumbai is so densely populated that the railroad tracks might be the privatest place around. Then ...

A little boy came into my section. He was probably about six years old and wasn't wearing any shoes or shirt. He crouched down and started cleaning garbage and debris from the floor, sweeping it into a pile with his t-shirt. I could see his ribs through the filthy skin of his back. (I don't know why, but I thought of my little niece Petra right then, and how unthinkable it would be for her to be on her hands and knees, cleaning up the floor beneath my feet.) He finished and asked for money, which no one gave him. Not even me. I remembered the dirty street children in Ecuador who were watched over by adults who took whatever money they managed to collect and refrained. After he left our area, one of the girls in that five-kid family asked her mom for some money to give him. Her mom handed over a two-rupee coin (50 rupee = 1 dollar), which the girl (maybe 10 years old) gave to him.

If there's one thing that smacks you in the face in India, it's that we Americans are so fucking lucky. Sure, we study and work to earn what we have. But we had so much from the day we were born, and have such a high rate of return on the studying and work that we do.

So. Fucking. Lucky.