Kanheri Caves Celebrities

We never imagined when we went to India that we would, however briefly, become celebrities there.

On our last day in Mumbai we visited the Kanheri Caves in the Sanjay Ghandi National Park, at 64 square miles, the largest park in the world within a city limits. The caves are not natural caves, but, like the Elephanta Island Caves (which we also visited early in our trip, an hour’s ferry ride off the coast from Mumbai), were chiseled out of the volcanic rock at the top of a mountain by Buddhist monks from the 1^st century BCE through the 7^th century AD. Most of the 109 caves (we didn’t begin to see them all) were “houses” for the monks, small chambers, most no larger than about ten-by-fifteen feet, some with side rooms about six-feet square. Others served as small shrines for meditation, and other larger and deeper caves with elaborate columns and statues were used for communal gathering and worship. The hike up the mountain, mostly on carved stone stairways, is arduous but interrupted regularly by various caves, dark and relatively cool inside. And outside an occasional breeze helps to stem the sweat. But it’s hard to imagine, and easy to admire, the effort, dedication, and, yes, faith that must have gone into this ancient monument. In its own modest way, it’s as grand as the Anasazi pueblos or Mayan temples or much later European cathedrals – awe inspiring, inspiring awe.

But that has nothing to do with our becoming celebrities.

After buying our tickets and entering the site, as we stopped to get our bearings and a sense of the place (monkeys dashing about, fighting, scrapping for bits of food), a group of fifty or so Indian students (“college,” our driver with limited English speaking ability told us, though they looked more like secondary students) passed us noisily with the enthusiasm of any school group out on a field trip. We didn’t think much of them, except for the elegant, brightly colored clothes – I almost want to say costumes – that they wore, indeed that we had seen worn just about everywhere we’d been in India.

They went on ahead of us, and we didn’t see or hear anything of them until a couple of hours later. We were at the base of the carved steps that went up to the top of the mountain, and they were just beginning their descent. We considered whether we should pass through the large group of teens on such a precarious path – perhaps they would barrel into us, sending us rolling down the rock to an accidental Buddhist sacrifice into the next life. But our driver assured us that it would be fine, and we began our climb, single file, our driver in the lead, followed by me, followed by Jac. We met the throng of students about halfway up the stairs. They parted for our driver to pass, but when they saw me and Jac, they excitedly pulled out their cameras and cellphones and began wildly taking pictures, fascinated by these strangers in their strange land. They asked us (by gesture, not language) to pose with them, the boys with me, the girls with Jac. We were clearly an unexpected bonus to their field trip.

I’m not sure what fascinated them so. I would think that they had seen plenty of Caucasians on a regular basis, as this was for some time a British colony, and there are still a lot of British tourists (though most seem to go to the beaches of Goa rather than the streets of Mumbai). But maybe these teens don’t see that many westerners, with our strange skin and hair and clothes. We’d noticed throughout our trip the interest taken in us by mostly younger children, sitting next to us, staring at us on a boat ride, curious as we waited for a light to change on the street. Perhaps they don’t come into contact with that many westerners. Most tourists and business people probably don’t intersect with the majority of Mumbai-ites, particularly not the children. So we were something surprising, unusual for these kids, not so much celebrities as curiosities, maybe even freaks.

Discomforting Mumbai

I’d seen poverty before. I’d seen it in New York, I’d seen it in Rome, I’d seen it in Chicago, I’d seen it in Belize, I’d seen it in Wichita and Denver and Atlanta and Santa Fe and Minneapolis and Memphis and San Francisco and just about every place I’d ever been. I’ve used the adjectives “destitute” and “abject” and “squalid” to modify the poverty I’ve seen. But there are no adjectives to adequately describe the poverty in Mumbai (Bombay). Indeed, “poverty” is hardly an adequate term. Drive along the Western Express Highway, and as you rise up onto a flyover you’ll look out over a checkerboard of crowded tin-roofed rusted shacks, inches separating them. Take an off-ramp and you’ll pass uncomfortably close to rows of tarp lean-tos against the gray concrete walls, the clog of traffic forcing you to see, dogs and cats and rag pickers foraging through the garbage. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph it – poverty porn – and I’m somewhat uncomfortable putting up here a couple of photos I got from the Internet. But I can’t describe the squalor that these people live in, and somehow survive in, without visual evidence:

But what is most discomforting about the poverty in Mumbai is the vast spectrum of wealth that the country’s caste system still exerts, from those in the poorest of slums to those in the most lavish of grandeur to the many scattered somewhere along the axis. On our first day in Mumbai, our driver (yes, we had a driver, putting us somewhere toward the lavish end of the spectrum, though nowhere near the grandeur end) pointed out the $1.8 billion, 27-story “home” of the wealthiest person in India (and the fourth wealthiest in the world). Our own accommodations, the ITC Maratha Hotel (which we weren’t paying for, and couldn’t pay for), forced the disparity uneasily home for us:

We wouldn’t have even been in Mumbai, of course, if we couldn’t have afforded it (helped immensely by company funding), and so wouldn’t have felt the embarrassment or sympathy, at least as much as we could manage to wring out of our shock (the guidebooks call it “cultural shock,” but the shock doesn’t really need modification). We very much enjoyed our time in Mumbai, the sightseeing, the food, the art, the history, even the elegant chaos of traffic congestion. But there is in the city always the undercurrent of inequality that lines and spreads out from the Western Express Highway, a dingy gray carpet of uneasy inhumanity.

Here, There, and Everywhere

I sit in a hotel room in Mumbai, the sun setting, the evening BBC World News muted on the TV, listening online to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” reading tonight this morning’s New York Times and Washington Post. I just happened this afternoon to have bought a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, in which he muses on the relativity of time and space, as I experience it in real time and real space.

Mumbai Traffic

Mumbai (Bombay), India, is a city of elegant chaos, 18 million people, most of whom seemingly at any one time in traffic – in cars, trucks, taxis, buses, motored rickshaws; on scooters, motorcycles, bikes, foot – all moving in all directions, slow and stop and start (quick, sudden), a constant weaving between lanes, marked or not, ignored, accompanied by the incessant beeping of horns, some warning of coming through, some signal of allowed merging, some anger at attempted forced entry, none with a clear indication of intention (at least to the frightened initiate who marvels in wonder at the uneasy ballet) – the whole a mechanistic mess that in an odd way probably best smacks of the human circulatory system, with the constant shove for corpuscular position, not so much competing for any individual advantage but rather cooperating in a muddle of mass motion forward, however hesitant.