Our first day in Mumbai opened with nervous/eager anticipation. We’d heard so many praises—and warnings—about Mumbai that we didn’t really know what to expect.
We were fortunate to have Silpa, a middle-aged Indian woman with a fantastic sense of humor, as our guide for the day. We started with a brief drive-by of some of old Bombay’s classic Victorian buildings (the University, the train station, etc.).
We then headed to Crawford Market, a fruit and vegetable marketplace that has been here since the late 1800s.
Porters stand near the entrance with baskets balanced on their heads. Shoppers hire a porter to carry their purchases as they shop. Silpa explained that with the heat and humidity of Mumbai, food spoils rather quickly, so it’s not unusual for a housewife to go to the market at least once a day for fresh produce. She showed us her mother’s favorite grocer.
Photos can’t do justice to the feeling of walking among the very narrow paths in the maze of stalls. Scents of freshly-picked garlic, curry leaves, lemon grass, and countless other spices wafted out from everywhere, as shoppers, wholesale buyers, suppliers.
There was a constant clamor of voices porters squeezed around each other and negotiated for purchases.
From Crawford, we went to the Bhuleshwar market area. Our bus let us out by two cows in the street.
Cows don’t wander around freely; they’re often tethered to a ring in the pavement. Someone who is tending them (a woman, in every case we saw) sells bundles of grass for you to feed the cows. Silpa said that it’s good karma to feed a cow on the way to work every morning. Cows are mother goddesses—providers and nourishers. They provide milk for food and dung for fuel.
The busy streets of the market area were a riot of activities, colors, sounds, and smells. Pedestrians shared the streets with taxis, cars, bicycles, motorbikes, and hand-pulled wagons and carts.
A gated fountain area in the middle of one street was full of pigeons—“Pigeons are our ancestors,” Silpa explained.
This shopping district specializes in costume jewelry and accessories for saris.
It’s also an important place for the locals to buy incense, fabric, and flower garlands for idols in their home shrines.
The annual festival for Ganesha is coming up in the next two weeks, and the town is busy preparing. Silpa purchased some fabric to decorate her Ganesha idol at home. At the climax of the festival, people will take their Ganesha idols and their decorations down to the beach and immerse them in the sea.
Interspersed between the storefronts, and down the many side alleyways, are small temples to various gods and goddesses. The smell of incense and the chants of worshippers somehow overpowered the din of the nearby streets.
Flower stalls sold flower petals by the bag full for making garlands.
There was a Jain temple in this area as well. Our visit coincided with an important Jain week of fasting. Jain men wore white and walked barefoot through the streets, so that their footfalls would not kill any insects.
Slipa took us to a small courtyard off the main thoroughfare. This was the place where her parents were married.
She said that modern Indian weddings are getting out of hand with one-upmanship, as people throw bigger and bigger weddings. Her cousin recently got married, and there were 15,000 attendees. They had to rent a sports field for the weeklong party.
Unexpectedly in the middle of this market area was a cow orphanage! Several hundred rescued cows and bulls were housed and cared for here. We weren’t permitted to take photos, unfortunately. But these cows had such serene looks on their faces and such beautiful eyes. It truly felt like an honor to give them some grass and say hello to them.
On the subject of cows: You can also find vendors selling dried cow patties on the street, good for fuel.
On the way back to the ship, Silpa had the driver stop us to witness another unique tradition, that of the “lunchbox sorting.” Mumbai’s commuter trains are packed to three times their official capacity during rush hour. There’s no room for businessmen to carry their lunches with them. So their wives prepare lunch boxes and have them sent into the city. There’s a complex system in which these boxes are collected from the houses, taken by train to the central stations in Mumbai, and then sorted on the sidewalk in front of the station by special codes.
Then the deliverymen takes them to the businessmen in their offices. It’s apparently such an efficient system that only one or two mistakes are made per year out of the millions of deliveries.
Our final stop was at the Colaba Causeway, which is a more upscale shopping area. Jane purchased a sari!
We really enjoyed spending the day experiencing local life at the street level, rather than seeing it from a bus. We’re grateful to Silpa for making it such a personally engaging and vibrant day.