SX Magazine December 2002
“Ed, you’re meant to look at the women.” Instead I was looking at the water jug, the concrete floor, the brieze-block walls, the ragged filthy curtain hanging in the doorway, the fat, bloated drunk man on the chair opposite; anything but the women.
“Come on, come,” chimed a very drunken Richi, “which one do you like man?” What? Between the 45-year-old mother-India figure, the 13 year-old Nepali girl, the sari-clad giggling twins or the shiny-black-plastic wearing Bollywood hooker? I took a breath and reached for the water jug.
Mumbai – Bombay changed its name in 1996 – is not a good example of urban expansion. Instead it is urban decay. The way rot sets into a house or a tooth slowly blackens, this is what Mumbai is like.
And in 24 hours I’d found a very rotten part of it: a Juhu brothel at 3am on a Saturday night is no place for the squeamish, and I was being squeamish.
I was Rajesh’s guest for the night after we’d travelled down from the hills that morning. A 12 hour journey in his VW Beetle – one of only three in Mumbai – that took us from the pristine heights of the Maharashtran highlands to this, Mumbai's dark underbelly of poverty and prostitution.
Rajesh is a ship’s engineer and sails all over the world, hence the VW that he’d picked up in LA. We were out with his friends who were home for Christmas and New Year. There were maybe 25 of us at the start of the night, all male, all 20-30 years old, all drinking Bagpiper whisky and glasses of Cobra beer.
As the night developed, the group thinned until there were just six of us, five in Akash’s new Ford Mondeo, and Richi, speeding helmetless and drunk on an old Enfield bike between the rickshaws and sleeping cows. He had led the charge to Juhu Beach and it was he who was begging me to pick a girl now.
Juhu is a suburb of Mumbai, way north of the Mumbai highlights of Chowpatty Beach and India Gate. There, in the centre of town around the enormous Churchgate train station or in the broad streets around Hutatma Chowk, the new India is in-your-face obvious.
Sexy, urbane girls in backless tops stride out into the traffic, chatting on mobile phones. New jeeps, Fords and Maruttis beep their way forward, music from the latest Bollywood hit thumping out of quadrophonic stereos. Meanwhile, old Marathi men, turbaned and dhotied, sit in the shade of Churchgate Station. They move only occasionally. They stretch, get up and walk between the lines of traffic as if still crossing the furrows of their long sold fields.
This of course is what Mumbai has always been. Bright lights for the hungry, ambitious or dispossessed. A place where movie-makers peddle dreams, businessmen build empires and the poor scratch a living from the leftovers.
Initially just a collection of islands, the area was developed in the late 1600s as a trading port. The British colonisers promised religious freedom and land grants, which attracted immigrants from across India, leading to Mumbai’s celebrated multi-faith society. This still holds true today. There are more public holidays here – Christian, Hindu, Parsi and Muslim festivals are all honoured – than anywhere else in India.
Its wealth, glamour and opportunity attract thousands every day, many selling everything they have, swapping rural poverty for urban slum living on the city fringes. Between them and the churning inner-city core are the suburbs. Home to the millions of Mumbai’s middle classes. Here the traffic grinds to a halt and black diesel smog swallows the city whole. It is here that the hip-to-it finance and IT guys I’m out with live with their parents, in concrete apartment blocks with air-con, CNN and daily power outages. Many will live at home until they marry, even after they marry; Mumbai real-estate can be some of the most expensive in the world.
And while parents may still plan marriage matches for their children, their children are busy matching east with west, mixing up a masala of MTV, family values, national pride and piercing ambition. Graduates work for Citibank before Dubai, Europe or the States. They earn more in a year than their fathers did in a lifetime, leading to a generation gulf, not mere gap. If the centre of Mumbai is the heart of India’s cultural revolution, then these suburbs are the spiritual home of India’s cultural confusion.
I buy a two-rupee coffee from a gas-lit stall and drag on my cigarette. The Arabian Sea must be clean somewhere, but here, standing on Juhu Beach, it smells dirty, like sewer water. I see Akash and Rajesh, both had waited outside while Richi took me inside the brothel, through a small, guarded door right next to Juhu’s 24-hour police station.
“Where’s Richi?” they ask.
“Still inside,” I say.
“I’ll call him,” Says Akash, a San Diego-based software engineer home for the holidays.
“What’s up man? We wanna go home.”
“Ten minutes!” Richi shouts down the phone, “ten minutes I’m coming!”
“Let’s go,” says Akash, a cool guy who was once asked by a US colleague if he went to school on an elephant, “He’s got business to finish”.
We leave him to it and go home, back to Rajesh’s, travelling through the blacked out streets in this giant black American car. We pass white rags, people, asleep in the street and half a dozen bicycle-rickshaw wallahs, lounging head back, mouths open, sleeping in the back seat of their chain-driven vehicles.
Rajesh and I creep back up the concrete stairs of his block and make our way soundlessly to sleep in the lounge, treading carefully so as not to wake his parents. India sleeps it seems, while Bombay dreams.
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