Eyes Wide Open

It was back in October of last year when it was set in stone that I would be flying into the city of Mumbai, on the Western central coast of India. A close friend was to host his wedding in that city, and what better reason was I ever going to get to visit the country?

I have to admit, on the very long list of places-to-travel-to-before-I-die, Mumbai, let alone India, had not been anywhere near the top of that list. Not for any particular objection really, it just happened that there was a strong list of potential other-places for Mumbai to be competing with.

After booking the outbound flight from Australia to India, I came to realise very quickly that the country has a not-so-appealing reputation when both friends and family started to react to the idea of someone travelling solo to Mumbai. A substantial segment of the voices held sentiments of fear and concern — personal safety, food hygiene, air pollution, chaotic traffic, being alone as a stranger in a strange land. It even got to the point where various group chats were being populated by infamous reels of Indian street vendors behaving in seemingly unsavoury ways, or other such shock and awe content.

The voices were… sensible enough. And it was curious to realise that much of the external feedback that I was receiving from others were simply amplifying the fears and concerns that I had already been implicitly holding onto within my own mind. As curious as I was at the prospect of visiting the country of origin for a cuisine that I hold very close and dear (having been born in downtown Kuala Lumpur and ready access to endless streams of nostalgia associated with eating South Indian inspired food), the negativity was an overriding force. The saving grace that had turned the tide from a reasons-to-not-go mindset to a reason-to was in receiving the wedding invitation from that close friend.

Before I knew it, the month of January had swung around and I found myself on the long awaited outbound flight for the city of Mumbai, with my only possessions contained in a 70L traveller's pack and one other daypack — this made for a beautiful setup that was free of wheels and completely hands free. By that point of time, any kind of residual (unproven) fears that I had were subdued to the point where curiosity itself had a chance to raise its voice and speak for itself. A new country, a new city, an adventure to come!

Having arrived into Chhatrapati Shivaji International Terminal 2 late in the morning, I still vividly remember my first real interaction with a Mumbai local. The original plan of relying on Uber as primary transport for getting to the Airbnb was foiled by the unclear designations of where the pick up zones were meant to be. My backup course of action after that was to seek out a pre-booked taxi, to avoid any possible headache of being scammed by the meter. I approached the attendant who was manning this official looking taxi counter and stated the suburb I had wanted to arrive in.

'Taxi to… Bandra West?' I asked.

'AC or no AC?' came the near instant response.

'No AC.' I replied, without really thinking about the consequences.

'350 rupees, can I book?'

'OK.' I replied, already feeling elated that the course of transit was becoming clearer by the minute.

In return, I received a paper ticket and was directed to a waiting zone to meet my yet-to-be-determined driver. Once at the waiting zone, I approached the very first person standing beside a black-and-yellow vehicle who had made eye contact with me. After showing him my paper ticket, we then set off onto the roads of Mumbai. True to its original promises, the taxi itself was a four door Hyundai Santro that had all four of its windows down and was not air conditioned. As uncomfortable as the prospect of sitting in bumper to bumper Mumbai traffic for 45 minutes, it actually turned out to be a worthwhile decision as the wound-down windows not only allowed the tropical smog to enter the cabin, but also the various other senses of what life on the streets was like. Truck exhaust fumes, a relatively cool flowing breeze, sounds of the incessant honking chiming from every single vehicle stuck on the same road and the conversations in Hindi caught in passing all combined into a great introduction to place.

Now, I can totally understand it if you read that previous sentence and feel your gut roil in fear. That'd be a perfectly reasonable response. And perhaps, my own personal response in that moment, one of curiosity mixed in with hints of wander, is what's irrational. And I think this is in large part thanks to the mentality I had pre-set for myself well in advance of the day I had set foot on that departing flight bound for India. I had determined that the two weeks of overseas time that I was going to have would be spent on wearing the eyes (and shoes and backpack and clothes) of a traveller. As distinct from going on a holiday, travelling is an open-hearted adventure of sorts, where one is drawn towards the prospect of witnessing versions of reality that exist in parallel to one's own. In other words, I was determined to travel to be able to open my eyes, not to seek comfort or what is extravagant, as one might do with the alternative agenda of going on a holiday.

On my first full day in the new city, after sorting out all the mundane necessities, came the missions of a) figuring out what I could eat and b) how best to spend my time. I decided that a two-birds-with-one-stone approach to this was… to walk anywhere I wanted to reach and to discover places along the way.

One might say, 'Walking in Mumbai? In the heat? That's crazy!' That would be another perfectly reasonable response, all things considered. But one of the pleasant discoveries that emerged from this approach was to find that the Bandra West neighbourhood was actually quite friendly to walkers. Points of interest were in close enough proximity such that I could comfortably bet on being able to survive whatever heat stress that was inevitably going to happen. And the pace of walking was a much welcome contrast to the rapid fire velocity of change that was the previous day's adventure in that Hyundai Santro. I was able to start paying attention to the kinds of buildings that dwellings were made from, the kaleidoscope of colours that were the traditional saris worn by women, to gain a sense of what sort of routines people got up to with their time. Walking to get where I had wanted to go was not a chore or a burden but an insightful adventure in and of itself.

Having gathered enough of a familiarity with my immediate surroundings, then came the next adventure of travelling from the Bandra West suburb to a section of the city known as Colaba, further South. The distance to travel was fifteen kilometres, much too far to walk and much too stressful to be stuck in traffic for an hour. Having such options, I came up with a third alternative which was to travel to Colaba by the metro rail network. The time required was estimated to be roughly equivalent and I'd finally get to see with my own eyes what the Indian trains were actually like.

10 Indian rupees was the price of a one-way ticket into, what eventually turned out to be, the best AU$0.20 that I have ever spent in my life. To set the scene a little, you should first know that the metro carriages in Mumbai operate a little… differently to how they operate in Australia. One curious point of difference is that the doors are permanently wide open, as if they had never gotten the chance to actuate since manufacture date. What this means is that it becomes totally normal to see passengers hanging out the side of the carriages (I was to discovery very quickly that hanging out the sides was 'prime seating', and deemed highly desirable by the locals for how they provided the best ventilation available — never mind the risk!) Another point of difference was in the ingress and egress approaches that people would adopt when dealing with the carriages — no matter how empty or how full a particular carriage may be, it was extremely common for someone to assertively push their way forward towards the path they were aimed for, whether they were exiting or entering the train. To the point where I'd almost describe it as 'fighting', that people would force a path regardless of what else may have been happening. Another observation that stands out in my mind was in seeing people nonchalantly crossing directly over the tracks, to either get from one train to another or to hop between platforms completely. Such actions would carry heavy penalties in Australia, the rules were flexible in this strange land!

Having eventually arrived into Colaba, there were plenty of inspiring architecture and points of interest to discover, yet it is much more so the everyday, seemingly mundane moments like riding passenger in a local cab, using my own two feet as primary transport to walk the streets or catching the metro that have been particularly memorable from these earliest days in the city of Mumbai — a pointer to the idea that you can be changed by what you see and how you see as much as where you get to go.

To me, one of the beautiful facets of travelling is that it reveals how often I fool myself into certainty by thinking that I 'know' through the construction of fragile preconceived notions that I would never enjoy such and such activity. Busying myself in all sorts of convoluted intellectualisation without first making the slightest effort (commitment) of doing the thing itself which, more often than not, is the only real way to get any sort of understanding of what the said thing is like.

To travel is to take on risk, sure, but not in physical risk as much as the vulnerability it demands from opening your self to being changed. There are times when we choose to holiday instead of travel, keeping our inner most selves closed, protected, comforted, certain and that's perfectly okay. But it is worth an effort to distinguish the approach for such activity as different to travelling.

'The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbour. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:

'Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?'

'You are right,' he replied. 'I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were just as ignorant as my old neighbour; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.'

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.' — Voltaire (1933)