Mumbai

As the two largest of India's five megacities of ten million plus, Mumbai and Delhi enjoy a rivalry somewhat reminiscent of that between New York and Los Angeles. Both are major cultural centers, but their differences are significant enough to fuel their respective claims to supremacy. Mumbai, a former colonial port spilling off the Maharashtrian coast and into the choppy Arabian Sea, is home to the massive Hindi-language film industry (Bollywood) and serves as the nerve center of Indian finance. Landlocked Delhi, the national capital, houses countless government institutions and somehow makes Mumbai, a sprawling metropolis of some twenty million souls, feel small by contrast. The New York-Los Angeles comparison breaks down pretty quickly--this is India after all. Even the largest cities in the United States can't compete with the sheer scale of either.

Before last weekend, I'd visited Mumbai just once, arriving by train from Goa in the middle of the night and making my way by cab directly into the heart South Mumbai, the oldest part of the city. I'd wandered around sightseeing for a couple days before catching a flight to Kolkata to round out my post-language program travels back in 2017. Allie, for all of her prior trips to North India and all her love of Bollywood, had never been, which provided the impetus for our weekend getaway. We each have friends who have been doing research there this year, and the quick flight down from Delhi, along with free lodging, made it a relatively easy excursion.

We flew in Friday afternoon on a Boeing 777 (two aisles, nine seats across in economy), an alarmingly large aircraft for a domestic flight. My best guess is that Air India needed the aircraft in Mumbai and figured it made more sense to fly it down well under capacity than with no cargo at all. It made for a quick flight in any case, and no sooner had I finished my lunch of chicken biryani than the pilot announced we'd begun our descent into Mumbai.

Despite my concern about making it out of the unfamiliar airport and through Friday rush hour, we easily booked a car and found our way to Andheri West, where my friend Janaki (not Indian, despite the name) has been living this summer. Janaki and I first met in an introductory Hindi class at UW-Madison in 2016, then both travelled to Jaipur to continue our studies in 2017. That summer we spent a lot of time together within a small nucleus of friends, but until this summer I hadn't seen her since. Janaki is working on a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan and had just been settling into eighteen months of field research in Shimla when covid hit in early 2020. The pandemic completely derailed her project, which she has since reinvented, and this year AIIS allowed her to resume her grant to carry out research for a new multi-site project on tarot readers and various occult divination practices that brought her to Mumbai. Although all three of us resided in Jaipur simultaneously for Hindi study in 2017,  Allie and Janaki had never met. I had a feeling they would enjoy each other's company and that proved to be the case. 

Friday evening we stayed in, chatting at length over chai and some vegetarian fare provided earlier that afternoon by Janaki's cook. Towards the end of the night, after showing off the various tarot decks she had collected in Mumbai, Janaki did readings for both of us. She's quite skilled at it, though I have little by way of comparison, and without offering any overtly predictive advice, helped us both wrestle with looming questions we had posed for the readings.

From there the weekend progressed in a pleasant stream of sleeping in, cappuccinos, and casual sightseeing. Mumbai may not be as large as Delhi, but it still takes a lot of energy to navigate--arguably more, given the absence of a functional Metro system. Yesterday afternoon, after heading south towards Colaba so Janaki could exchange the remaining rupee balance of her Indian bank account for USD (she flies home on Wednesday), we visited an impressive exhibit of Rini Dhumal's artwork at the Mumbai branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art. None of us had ever heard of her, but we were quite taken with her work and the way it was staged in the space.

We capped off the weekend by rendezvousing with Paige, a friend from Allie's Pune days, who is now living in Mumbai and happens to be part of my Fulbright cohort. She is working on a historical project that looks at women's roles in both the Black Panther Party and the Dalit Panther Party, which drew inspiration from the former in organizing for Dalit rights beginning in the 1970s. Discussing our various projects, and comparing notes on life and research in India, made for stimulating conversation over a leisurely dinner at Fatty Bao in Bandra.

Before bed we said our goodbyes to Janaki, who sleeps later than we do, and set alarms for seven to ensure we'd reach the airport with plenty of time to spare. The return trip to Delhi somehow went even more smoothly than the outbound leg, and we were back in Hauz Khas and ready for a nap by around two.

Once we were up and moving, Allie and I walked the hundred meters or so to our corner cafe, ordered sandwiches and espresso drinks, and sat for awhile settling back into the familiar surroundings. At one point Allie, who thoroughly enjoyed her first trip to Mumbai, looked up at me and said, "It feels good to be back in Delhi." I was somewhat taken aback, for until now I've always gotten the impression that Delhi's distinctive vibrational frequency was a bit too much for her, but I knew exactly what she meant. After visiting her in Lucknow, I'd said more or less the same upon my return. She acted like I was crazy every time I explained how once you adapt to Delhi something in you fundamentally changes. A love for Delhi is hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt it, but once you've felt it nothing quite compares. Nowhere else can fill or break your heart in quite the same way, for better and for worse. Not even dear Mumbai, with all its filmi glamour, its infinite skylines, and its delicious coastal breezes.