Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws

by Laura Pedersen

  In this metropolis of 20 million, which is larger than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined, almost two-thirds of the residents survive in teeming slums or overcrowded streets. Thousands of children work from dawn until dusk, seven days a week, as pickers, climbing through piles of rubbish in search of anything saleable. Unfortunately, this is a fact of life in all Indian cities, but it’s most prevalent here in the poverty-stricken northeast. Street children are usually malnourished and experience high rates of cancer from exposure to hazardous materials. In effect, they are society’s refuse.

  There are laws about compulsory schooling, but they lack enforcement. Private charities, such as the Hope Kolkata Foundation and the Akshar Gyan Charitable Trust, in Mumbai, are dedicated to getting slum children education, healthcare, and employment. The Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program works to secure human rights along with social and economic justice for those marginalized on the basis of gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Otherwise, government programs operate so that the poor can receive staple items such as milk and wheat, but a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy often prevents them from receiving their rations. Recent estimates cite two-thirds of government grain allotments as being stolen or contaminated.

  Bureaucracy is the biggest legacy left by the British, goes the joke in India, where bribes, kickbacks, reams of red tape, and incompetence on a massive scale are part of daily life. Each year, more than 2 million people take the exam for about eighty entry-level Indian Administrative Service positions. It is said that if you are accepted, your family will have enough to eat for seven generations. However, it’s rumored that to even get the job in the first place, a bribe is required.

  As a result, bribery has become a way of life. For instance, if you build a house and want water, it’s necessary to see a local revenue officer for land details, go to another office for verification, submit an application for a water connection, wait for approval, take the approval to the lower court, get an affidavit that you won’t be using the water for agricultural purposes, submit all the documents, await verification, petition the water authority, and make an appointment for installation. This process takes from six months to a year and costs from two hundred to four hundred dollars. Alternatively, you could get the affidavit that you won’t be farming and pay a bribe of about five hundred dollars to a water authority officer, and in two hours you’ll be happily taking a hot shower while a pot of mulligatawny soup simmers in the kitchen.

  Many police officers are not there to protect citizens, but for the purpose of extortion. If you’re in a car accident, there’s oftentimes a bidding war in which both sides attempt to coerce the police to report their version of events. The officers may even go to your home a few days after the accident to continue the shakedown. Meantime, truckers trying to go from one Indian state to another might as well be attempting to cross into another country. Checkpoints are so numerous, slow, and rife with payoffs that several days’ time and about 30 percent in corruption costs must be added to the transport schedule. Perhaps this is why almost all truckers from India and Pakistan turn out to be frustrated abstract expressionists operating vehicles decorated with flamboyant colors, psychedelic patterns, and a profusion of bling, with no inch remaining unadorned. Jackson Pollock would have been right at home with a paintbrush in one hand and a cigarette in the other on the Grand Trunk Road.

  It transpires that the most popular Indian curry of all is to curry favor with a well-placed bribe. One story has a South Mumbai restaurateur listing a large expenditure under the heading Dog Food. The income tax officer wouldn’t pass the accounts without questioning the entrepreneur, who explained, “It’s for the two-legged dogs from your department who come begging and whom I need to pay off every once in a while.” The accounts were then approved. Still, this anecdote isn’t much different than the many I’ve heard over the years about building, bridge, and health inspectors being bribed in New York.

  It can be enormously difficult to obtain documents such as a passport or birth certificate. An American woman working for the State Department in India said, “In the United States, when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles for your license you expect to come out with your license. Not here. Not unless your uncle knows somebody.” Imagine putting the DMV forward as an example of the best America has to offer when it comes to service with a smile!

  The closest I came to a scam was in Calcutta, when a thirtysomething man with slicked-back hair and wearing a worn white suit walked over and complimented me on my necklace. I was immediately suspicious, because the beaded necklace was inexpensive and far from what would be considered good jewelry. It transpired that his uncle was a highly talented jewelry manufacturer, but the government had prohibitively high export fees and taxes, so he couldn’t sell his goods overseas. If I were willing to take some items home with me (he didn’t inquire where home was) and hand them off to another party, then I’d get a healthy cut of the profits upon delivery. I immediately assumed that drugs were involved and envisioned a German shepherd alerting customs agents to my hash stash, followed by a life sentence in a Thai prison with a sadistic warden and no HBO. However, the con here is to give the traveler a bag of worthless glass stones or paste jewelry in exchange for putting up some security, such as money or a real gold watch, and no one ever meets you at your destination. But I was much too clever to fall for that, and besides, I’m about to reap rich rewards by helping a wealthy Nigerian government official with an embarrassing legal problem to transfer millions of dollars, out of which I’ll be entitled to keep a very large percentage of the total.

  Salaam Mumbai!

  In 1985, a catchy song called “We Built This City” (on rock and roll) was recorded by the group Starship (part of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship after a lawsuit) and made its way to number one on the US Billboard Hot 100. The lyrics included the Golden Gate Bridge and The City by the Bay, both references to San Francisco, a metropolis I was under the impression had been built on the Gold Rush of 1849 rather than rock and roll. Meantime, lead female vocalist Grace Slick said the song was actually written about early 1970s Los Angeles, which I was under the impression had been built largely on the movie industry. So I’m thinking of writing a pop song called “Ain’t Manhattan Grande” describing how New York City was developed atop the world’s largest coffee bean. It will explain the ways in which caffeine has leached into the water table, causing millions of hyperactive residents to pinwheel from subway to pharmacy among teams of java speculators trying to buy up all the fountains. Central Park may actually be the lid on the world’s largest espresso.

  Nevertheless, I can tell you with a degree of certainty that the city of Bombay was built on opium. (I can also tell you with assurance that Mumbai was known as Bombay until 1996, when many Indian cities were shedding their colonial names for something more Indian. However, most people still call it Bombay.) Starting around 1800, Bombay went from being a minor British outpost to the leading exporter of opium and raw cotton, mostly to China. The East India Company had local peasants grow opium, which was then smuggled to China and sold in return for tea and silk, while the profits went back to England. (The only problem with this triangle was that it depended on the Chinese being addicted to opium for it to work.) In fact, Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, the first Indian to be knighted (1842) and win a baronetcy (1857), was part of the world’s largest opium trading network, one of the six directors of the Bank of Bombay, and currently has a famous art school and a hospital named after him. The capital accumulated during this time period successfully laid the groundwork for the modern and industrial port city we now call Mumbai.

  So, because of its drug cartel history, you don’t see any historic monuments, forts, palaces, temples, or mosques from the distant past around the immense metropolis that is now Mumbai. Furthermore, a large statue of an opium poppy might not convey the desired effect. This island city was and is all about commerce.

  That said, Mumbai
has a spiritual side, like all of India, and is home to the Hindu holy sect called the Standing Babas, also known as Khareshwari. These men, usually former military, police, or civil servants, take a vow to never sit or lie down again (or at least for twelve years) in order to burn off bad karma through physical deprivation and gain spiritual enlightenment. They eat, work, pray, and go to the toilet standing up and use a swing to keep from toppling over while asleep. This is a painful lifestyle choice that causes their legs and feet to permanently swell and develop ulcers. I didn’t see any Standing Babas during my stay in Mumbai, but other tourists reported spotting them at the Kumbh Mela festival in Varanasi, and it’s possible to view some arresting photos on the Internet of men with painted faces and wild hair who appear to be one lab accident away from becoming comic book supervillains. So next time you’re stuck waiting in a long line, hanging onto a pole in a subway car, or standing over the sink washing the Thanksgiving dishes, imagine what it’d be like to never sit down again. That said, Standing Baba does not appear to be an occupation currently open to women and children—but don’t get me wrong, I’m not lodging a complaint.

  Today, Mumbai is the financial and entertainment capital of India, home to the stock exchange and Bollywood, and the richest and most populous city in India. In fact, it was just added to the list of the world’s wealthiest cities, albeit one distinctly lacking a metro system. On the bright side, Mumbai has enclosed bus shelters with seats for its many tired commuters. Wake up, NYC.

  Even more than New York and Los Angeles, Mumbai is a twenty-four-hour city, its streets packed at midnight with people out shopping, eating, and getting haircuts. The city is so cosmopolitan that not only are there no longer cows in the roads, but they’ve done away with human-pulled and human-pedaled rickshaws. It’s officially the automobile age on the highways and byways of Mumbai, which has unfortunately resulted in a cloud of pollution that sits atop the city and refuses to blow out to sea. There’s also a tremendous amount of traffic congestion, and rush hour is basically all the time. However, this cuts way down on accidents, since it’s hard to move fast enough to have anything other than a fender bender, even if you’re texting at the wheel.

  The seven islands that make up Mumbai are a wild hodgepodge of gleaming new glass and granite office towers, floodlit fountains, construction sites, open latrines, neon lights, potholed roads, highways in the making, crumbling relics of the British Empire, sagging storefronts, food stalls, and apartment buildings in various stages of rising up and falling down. The air is filled with traffic noise, diesel fuel, unfiltered exhaust, cooking smells, and strands of music. Dotting the horizon are lights from hundreds of ships anchored along the coastline and the gigantic flames that leap from the towers of offshore oil rigs.

  In November 2008, a series of ten coordinated shootings and bombings across the city killed at least 173 people and wounded more than 308. Behind the commando-style terrorist attacks was the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose goal is to make South Asia into an Islamic theocracy and free the Muslims in Kashmir who are living under Indian governance. Such incidents make it easy to understand India’s current love/hate relationship with us, since we send billions of American tax dollars to Pakistan that are supposed be used to fight the Taliban, but more often than not this exercise ends the same way as sending a teenager to the grocery store with a credit card and expecting them to make healthy choices.

  Although usually referred to as Kashmir, the northwest state of Jammu and Kashmir consists of two major parts—Jammu, which is predominantly Hindu, and the valley of Kashmir, which is mostly Muslim. A third part, Ladakh, is largely Buddhist. Kashmir shares a boundary with both India and Pakistan, so following Partition, this predominantly Muslim area with a Hindu maharaja, after some unpleasant noise by Pakistani guerrillas, opted to go with India. This has resulted in an ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan, which erupted into two full-out wars, in 1965 and 1999. Nowadays, various areas are controlled by Pakistan, India, and China, and basically no one is happy. Kashmir is the disputed summer house in a really long, ugly divorce between rich people who both want the place to spite the other. (China appears to favor Pakistan, in addition to its own interests.) The only light at the end of this tunnel is that the locals are getting worn down by fighting, curfews, and not being able to send their children to school. Having grown up in Buffalo, New York, I know how close to a nervous breakdown mothers can get on the fifth snow day in a row, so my bet is on a peace agreement sometime soon.

  Still, tourists can visit Kashmir, and authorities insist that the state is relatively safe. It’s possible to rent houseboats, buy famed Kashmiri carpets and handicrafts, and see Asia’s largest tulip garden in the Zabarwan foothills. In fact, Kashmir recently inaugurated its first five-star hotel, the Taj Vivanta, located on a hilltop overlooking scenic Dal Lake, which also goes by the nickname Srinagar’s Jewel. Just try and ignore the fact that the place known as Paradise on Earth has soldiers and security guards armed with automatic weapons stationed pretty much everywhere.

  About twenty of India’s twenty-eight states are also dealing with a Maoist insurgency called the Naxalite movement. A May 2010 train wreck ninety miles west of Calcutta that killed 115 and injured more than 140 is believed to be the result of their sabotaging the tracks. The rebels, who have somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand fighters, according to the Home Ministry, believe in extreme violence and protracted struggle and claim to be fighting on behalf of the rural poor, who have supposedly been left out of the country’s economic progress. Others insist that this isn’t so much a homegrown Communist party as a Chinese-backed terrorist organization looking to destabilize all of India.

  As a result of recent terror attacks, many hotels, shopping malls, cinemas, and points of interest now have metal detectors and bag inspectors. Sadly, it’s probably the direction in which we’re all headed, and entering T.G.I. Friday’s at happy hour will soon require a full body-cavity search. (Is it my imagination, or do these types of chain restaurants have a penchant for naming blender drinks after natural disasters, a strategy they may want to rethink if operating in mudslide-, earthquake-, and tsunami-scarred South Asia?) When I was a kid, people used to brag about how little security they had, and now people brag about how much security they have. We splurged on one of those faux gray rocks that held a house key and cleverly placed it among the pachysandra, fooling no one, since all the neighbors had the same faux gray rock somewhere within a few feet of their front door.

  In all large Indian cities, it’s possible for tourists to go on slum tours, and there are arguments for and against these that, in my opinion, are about equal, so it’s up to the individual. Opponents say that there’s a loss of dignity for the slum dwellers, as they perform many of their daily activities in full view of passersby throughout the acres of shacks that are no more than patchworks of rags, plastic, scrap metal, bamboo, and cardboard attached to one another, with narrow lanes winding between them. Advocates of these tours claim that viewing such grim poverty firsthand brings a greater level of awareness or a hot flush of shame and hopefully some help. Perhaps the worst of it is to find out that certain slums have waiting lists to get in! Every day, more people are moving to the cities from their villages, while those on the streets are trying to find shelter, a stove, and a ration of water.

  Of course, slums are not an Indian invention. When I first moved to Manhattan in the early 1980s, Tompkins Square Park was a Hooverville and the Bowery not unlike the streets of Calcutta. Meantime, the United States has impoverished areas in all of its cities and rural places such as Appalachia, accompanied by all of the poverty-related social problems. Likewise, there are urban neighborhoods and entire towns that have been devastated by crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine, while families are without teeth as a result of addiction to sugar-infested soft drinks.

  In addition to being the headquarters for many national and international corporations, Mumbai is a showcase for t
he entrepreneurial spirit of India, much like Bangalore (now officially known as Bengaluru, but no one seems willing to call it that) is considered the Indian Silicon Valley. Call centers in particular have hired thousands of women workers and drastically improved their standard of living. There, Haimavati from Himatnagar is miraculously transformed into Debbie from Duluth, although nowadays call centers are more likely to be phoning us to ask when we expect to make a payment on that big old credit card bill than helping with our airline reservations. And with the way India’s economy is growing, Americans may soon be jockeying for jobs as the cabbies who drive them to and from their new office buildings. Or when a cardiologist in New Delhi calls to make a booking on Air India, Bob from Buffalo is going to answer the phone and pretend to be Siddhartha from Sangareddy.

  With a fast-growing middle and upper class, the city has become the capital of mom-and-pop cosmetic surgery shops, which often feature underqualified doctors and cheap, uncertified, or reconditioned equipment. With little or no regulation on who can practice, there’s little opportunity to sue for mishaps. But people are lined up for all sorts of procedures, since they feel it provides better jobs and marriage prospects. This is thought to be a direct result of overexposure to movies, models, and advertising, which, in addition to a desire for plastic surgery, has likewise led to higher rates of depression. Sound familiar?

  Mumbai also serves as a major hub for India’s reproductive tourism industry, which brings in more than half a billion dollars a year. Whereas surrogacy can cost $100,000 in the United States, in India it’s one-quarter of that, with few questions asked. Almost all applicants are accepted—gay couples, older couples, single parents, and those who just can’t find the time. Made in India is a recent feature-length documentary that takes an unvarnished look at this as-yet unregulated market.