Bombay Works

Sand coloured smog. Fans. Air con. Swooping kites. The thin film of humidity that coats the skin. The smell that clothes acquire when they get damp, then dry, get damp, then dry. This is Bombay, the steamy city that never sleeps and where anything is possible. For example, being offered Fifty Shades of Gray by a street vendor through the window of my taxi opposite Dhobi Ghat, where the washermen process 100,000 pieces of clothing a day, each article discreetly coded so that it reaches its correct owner. 

Last Friday I boarded the Ladies Carriage on the commuter train from Bandra Station to what used to be Victoria Terminus, now CST (return ticket = 12 rupees). The Bombay (latterly Mumbai) trains carry over 7.24 million commuters a day - the highest passenger density of any urban railway system in the world. Teenagers in salwar kameez, hijab and burkas giggle on their way to school, and sellers of tacky jewellery proffer their sparkling cargo. A transgender hijra circulates the carriage in her sari, blessing each one of us – though only about five passengers part with any coins in exchange for good luck. We pass stations with the names of empire: Sandhurst Road, Dockyard Road, Cotton Green. Other commuter trains shoot by with open doors, men hanging out.

The charming and humorous Armando awaited me on Platform 1. Having completed a Masters degree in Fine Art at Stanford, he is now negotiating the extremist bureaucracy at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay’s oldest and most prestigious art institution, where Rudyard Kipling, son of the dean, grew up in a large and picturesque wooden double-storey house. Outside are unkempt gardens where the trees and plants grow prolifically with no attention. Birds chatter and a cockerel wanders around proudly. The shade encloses this other-world, separating it from the working chaos of one of the largest cities on earth. Many important artists and architects were trained here, going away to produce some of India’s best-known buildings and public spaces. As one of the school’s only international students ever, Armando goes from office to office acquiring forms, signatures, photocopies, stamps, more signatures, more authorisations, additional forms. Paperwork will in fact be the subject of his art. 

Built by the British, the school buildings are over a century old. Their interiors are a bizarre and liminal world like Harry Potter on oriental steroids: huge stone buildings with grand staircases and ornate metalwork, acres of high ceilings with old-fashioned fans, cathedral-size windows, and a chaotic litter of sculptures, murals, paintings, easels, work stations, and antique hardwood furniture. 

In the printmaking studio are Harrild & Sons printing presses that have been in situ since their arrival from London a thousand moons ago. Harrild was an English printing pioneer in the first half of the 19th century. The life drawing studio is kept firmly out of bounds thanks to the ‘sensitive’ subject matter. We sneak in anyway and marvel at the (real) skeleton with decaying teeth in its glass case. Armando tells me that the life drawing models are apparently 3rd generation – like other professions in India, it has become an inherited occupation. 

On the other side of the school, the Crawford Market begins: street after street of fabric shops, tiffin sellers, purveyors of fine sweets, jewellers, all loosely divided into their respective sections. We do some swift business, Armando’s Hindi proving to be excellent value. At the sweet shop, our two small boxes of delicacies are selected by some of the 9 men behind the counter and then vacuum-packed by a tenth man with a hairdryer. We do our best not to laugh. 

In the tiffin shop I buy stainless steel food containers that are the kitchen hallmark of India, and Armando persuades me into buying a pressure cooker. The salesman looks on, wondering why on earth it is Armando the man, not me the woman, who knows all about the intricate workings of such a device. He gets increasingly impatient as we discuss what to engrave on the bottom of the cooker (another Indian tradition), and when we finalise on “Cooked with Love” in Hindi, he tells the inscriber to get a move on: ‘Ok, ok, your love, my love, everybody’s love!”.

On the way back to the closest station we walk through a Muslim burial ground which is one of the most beautiful inner city gardens I’ve ever seen. It’s a commuter short cut as well, so also the busiest inner city garden ever! Interesting how religion in this case promotes and protects the environment. Back in Bandra I’m supposed to meet a mystery man who speaks very fast on the phone and who’s delivering my salvaged iPod, which I handed over into the unknown tech realm before travelling to Mysore. Bandra Station is, like most Indian stations, a flurry of activity with hundreds of people on the go. Within literally 30 seconds, whilst I’m digging for my phone and stressing about landmarks and how on earth to find my ‘contact’, a man I’ve never seen before appears in front me of me and says my name. Of course. This is Bombay. It works. iPod and cash change hands, he evaporates into the crowd, and I’m gleeful to have had 8GB of data rescued by some tech whiz. 

Down the road at the printing shop, I’m having business cards made to publicise my new book. They can do the job in 9 hours, of course, despite being inundated with greeting card orders for the upcoming Diwali festival. The tiny front room is crowded with a thousand paper samples, wedding invites, personalized stationery of Bollywood actors, Muslim family photos, theatre posters. I sip a petite cup of hot chai and look at fancy invitations for Parsi socialites at the Race Course Turf Club and hotels in exclusive Juhu. Later in the day, the card designer personally delivers my cards on his motorbike to Armando’s flat by St Andrews Church, where hundreds of striking orange marigold garlands are being laid on graves for All Saints Day. 

By mid-evening Bandra is more awake than ever. I ask for the opening house of a nearby pharmacy and the attendant looks at me with some surprise. “Twenty four seven, madam”. Of course. How could I think otherwise?

[With thanks to Armando for his photo of the hallowed halls of J.J]

Coffee, Cardamom & the Forests of Coorg

The bus driver to Madikeri had a beaming smile, an immaculately maintained mustache, a steering wheel with a two-foot radius, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.  Sitting at the front of the bus, sweatily snuggled amongst mostly men, is better for the view but worse for the nerves.  Like, quite a lot worse.  The driving in this place is unreal. The bus also has a Suggestion Box though it was hard to tell if anyone ever had ever used it.

Three hours later on arrival, after arguing with a smarmy rickshaw driver who then got a commission from the hotelier, I spent the night not far from the bus stop at a characterless but clean hotel where the receptionist sleeps behind the desk so that he can be available twenty-four-seven.  There’s no getting away from the mosques and temples, so it was the usual 5am wake up call, which was also when a group of other guests decided to start making lots of noise in the corridor.  Sunday morning, god strewth.

Despite a somewhat uninspiring start, Madikeri turned out to be a true highlight of the India trip.  My randomly-found hiking guide Channappa was a local coffee farmer who’s been guiding for nine years.  He speaks six of India’s twenty-two official languages (122 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people) and wears slip-on sandals, in contrast to my full-on hiking boots.  We spent two days trekking up and down through muggy emerald forests and expanses of rice paddies, chatting with other small farmers who we met along the way in their burbling Kannada tongue.  Without wanting to romanticize these people, I was struck by how content they seemed – a light in their eyes or something in their faces that suggested the benefits of leading an outdoor rural life inscribed with agricultural labour.

I was blown away by the forests.  Several centuries of exploitation by colonisers and latter-day loggers, yet this earth is bountiful.  The monsoon brings 150 inches of rain here each year.  Many of the common crops grow happily amidst the jungle: coffee, cardamom, pepper, vanilla, ginger, lemongrass, cashew, pineapple, wild tobacco and the occasional avocado, orange and lemon trees.  There are less savoury things in the forests too: leeches which dance frantically on the forest floor and then back-bend their way up your shoes to bite through your socks; poisonous vipers lying quietly near the paths, one of which put Channappa out of commission for weeks as a teenager; nettles which will make you itch for a month; and yellow poisonous frogs.

Channappa’s grandfather purchased 14 acres of forest here in the 1920s during the British Raj, at a time when poisoning tigers was rewarded by the government.  He grew cardamom, an unassuming plant whose seeds grow in small fleshy bulbs just above the ground. India is the second largest producer in the world of this third-most-expensive spice. Nowadays farmers focus on coffee because the price has doubled in the last year or two, especially for organic coffee.  Many of the trees are already 40-80 years old. 

 Channappa’s spotless home is at the top of a steep climb, marked by roses, geraniums and hibiscus but otherwise fully ensconsed by forest.  He and his neighbours have put in their own road, their own water system and their own electricity.   These are impressive and expensive feats given the dramatic terrain.  He has two impeccably behaved children (there are government benefits for families who only have two offspring) who are fluent in English, a dutiful wife who spent hours preparing a sumptuous dinner, breakfast and packed lunch, and, importantly, a bathroom with hot water heated on a fire. 

The night brought soft rain and deep sleep.  I liked this place so much that I offered to come and help pick his coffee for free during the harvest season – though I imagine I’d be one of the most unproductive labourers.  Perhaps even the laughing stock.  In fact, almost most certainly the laughing stock.