A Shantaram Pilgrimage: Mumbai
Mumbai, India - April 2010
By the time we landed in Mumbai, this leg of the trip had already been decided for us, Alicha and I had both read Shantaram more than once, and the city was always going to be filtered through Gregory David Roberts' Bombay.
We started with a visit to the Dharavi slums, led by a couple of local guides who showed us the micro-businesses tucked into the settlement, and even one guide's own home. Somewhere in there, a group of local kids pulled us into a game of street cricket.
That evening, inevitably, we headed to Leopold's Café. We started with a beer tower on the table, half-imagining Lin and Karla and the rest of the Shantaram crowd still hanging around somewhere in the room.
Our last day started with a morning city tour. One of our first stops was Mani Bhavan, the house on Laburnum Road where Gandhi stayed whenever he was in Bombay between 1917 and 1934, then the chaos of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a Victorian Gothic railway station still in daily use more than a century on..
The Jain religion is built around honoring every living thing, which came through even in the smallest details, like intricate art made from rice grains. We also drove past the promenade along the way, still seeing the city a little through Roberts' eyes.
The city tour also took in the Gateway of India, the arch on the waterfront that's basically Mumbai's postcard, and Dhobi Ghat, Mumbai's enormous open-air laundry. Row after row of concrete wash pens, clothes beaten and scrubbed by hand, then strung up on rope lines in every colour imaginable.
The real highlight of the day, though, was watching the dabbawalas at work. These men deliver Mumbai's home-cooked lunches to office workers citywide. We stood at one of their sorting points and watched them organize, sort, and load hundreds of tiffin boxes onto bicycles. Their system meant nothing to us as outsiders, but every one of them knew exactly where every box was going.
Back at the hotel, we had a henna treatment, early dinner, and late checkout before we headed to the airport, at the end of a full-on, yet unforgettable trip through India.
