For Condenast Traveler US on Mumbai

Today, the city’s train system is as complex as New York’s except that each day it transports about a million more people—dreams and sweat intact. The trains aren’t for the faint of heart, but the ladies’ compartment is tolerable.

As the local leaves Virar, in the northern suburbs, early one morning, women congregate in small groups, dissing their mothers-in-law, singing bhajans, hemming saris, playing cards, and buying everything from bindis to beedis (a thin cigarette) from itinerant vendors. That evening, I watch a woman climb in at Byculla station laden with bags of fragrant farm-fresh vegetables that her cohorts fall on with cries of delight. Together, the women begin chopping beans, shelling peas, cleaning fish, and bagging everything so that by the time the train reaches Virar at 8:30 P.M., each woman has prepped her dinner and indulged in group therapy, leaving the compartment a mess of scales and shells.

But it is the dabbawalas, or lunch-box carriers, who are Bombay’s most famous train riders. Feted by Prince Charles and Richard Branson, studied by the Harvard Business School, and given a Six Sigma rating (one error in six million transactions) by Forbes Global, these five thousand men trawl the trains in trademark white kurtas and Nehru caps, schlepping some 200,000 lunch boxes to offices.

The concept is simple. Every morning, millions of commuters leave suburban homes at dawn to be in their offices downtown by 8 A.M. The dabbawalas show up two hours later, pick up boxes of home-cooked food, and deliver them to the offices.

They code the boxes so that the vegetarian Jain diamond merchant gets his non-garlic dal, the fish-loving Konkani trader his chili prawns, and the dieting Gujarati executive his steamed vegetables. Later, empty lunch boxes are collected from the offices and delivered back home. No modern technology, no computer spreadsheets—just memorized codes and the muscles to fleet-foot coffin-sized trays containing multiple lunch boxes through the crowded chaos of Bombay’s streets. A sample code would be D9MC3, where D is Dadar station, the point of origin; 9 is Nariman Point, Bombay’s financial district; MC is Mafatlal Center; and 3 is the third floor. Beyond that, these paladins of piggybacking keep track of their lot of lunch boxes, perhaps through the scent of distinctly flavored masalas and curries.

It isn’t just food delivery that makes Bombay the epitome of economic ingenuity. After all, you can have toothpaste delivered in New York City. The difference is this: If you compliment a New York cabbie for his knowledge of the city’s streets, he’ll probably shrug it off. Cab drivers in Singapore or London might murmur politely that they’ve grown up in the city. A Bombay cabbie, however, will take your measure and ask as you get out, “Do you need a tour guide? I get off my shift at 4 P.M. and can show you the city. Only one thousand rupees for four hours.”

If you have a need, someone in Bombay will intuit it, and before you can name it, even to yourself, someone will service that need. That’s the difference.

I think of this as I enter Chowpatty Beach. There is something wonderfully egalitarian about the scene here. Bombay’s millionaires may have their exclusive high-rises along Marine Drive, but the sea is open to everyone. All of India is in evidence: burka-clad women helping kids build sand castles, Goan Christian couples strolling at the water’s edge, and large Hindu families sitting on the sand, sari-clad grandmothers munching peanuts alongside teenagers in halter tops.

This is the thing about India—just when you dismiss it for its many ills, it surprises you. For instance: The traffic, while chaotic, is an exercise in democracy. A bullock cart and bicycle have just as much right on Indian roads as a Mercedes-Benz, and indeed it is the Benz that is vulnerable to dents and scratches from passing cows. So while I sympathize with the ferengis, or foreigners, who complain about India’s choked roads, I think the trick is to view the whole thing as a circus, not a thoroughfare. Where else, after all, will you see a cow chomping on a billboard of a Bollywood vamp painted in lurid pink?

At Chowpatty Beach, smiling urchins carrying bamboo mats accost me. They offer to spread the mats on the grainy sand and bring me takeout from the nearby stalls. “Relax, madam,” they say. “Here menu.”

“These guys weren’t here a few years ago,” a friend tells me. “But they have figured out that people don’t like to stand in queues and pick up food, so they do it for them.”

Whether it is a one-dollar chaat (street snack) or a million-dollar transaction, when there is money to be made, Mumbaikars know how to make it.

The Bombay Stock Exchange (the oldest in Asia) invented the badla, which my financier husband tells me is “a homegrown over-the-counter carry-forward system”—whatever that means. Matka gambling, a giant numbers-based lottery, possibly the largest in the world, originated in Mumbai. And even today, you can walk into a seedy lane within Chor (the word means “thieves”) Bazaar, hand over a suitcase full of rupees, and have forty thousand dollars delivered to your son in Michigan the next morning so that he can make his tuition payment. All the kid needs to do is say a code word to the guy who shows up at his doorstep the next morning. No records, no receipts; simply word of mouth and trust. That’s Bombay’s hawalasystem: illegal for sure, but Bombayites trust it more than Western Union. The city’s diamond merchants use angadias, or trusted couriers, who transport four to ten million dollars’ worth of cut and polished diamonds from Surat to Bombay. These angadias guarantee safe delivery of the diamonds for a salary of approximately a hundred dollars a month.

“You won’t go hungry in this city,” says Rajan, who drives me around from dawn to midnight. “As long as Maha Lakshmi [the Hindu goddess of wealth] is here, the money will come.”

Although I grew up in India, I never had the courage to approach Bombay. The city was as much a chimera to me as New York is to a kid in Salem, Indiana. It was too crowded, too fast, too big, too much. It took twenty years and a detour through the Bronx to give me the nerve to tackle Bombay.

In 1996, while I was away in America, the city shed its elegant colonial name for the earthier Mumbai. Locals use both according to whim and circumstance, calling it Mumbai at government offices and on commuter trains and Bombay at nightclubs and art openings—perhaps a city as many-splendored as this one deserves two names.

“Bombay or Mumbai, it is Urbs Primus Indis,” pronounces a bearded gent after a ponderous sip of sulaimani chai at the Prithvi Theatre café. “Res ipsa loquitor,” he adds. Unneccessarily, I think, since I don’t know its meaning.

The Prithvi Theatre’s café is where the city’s cognoscenti come to sip tea, write scripts, and, it seems, spout Latin. I’m there one evening to watch a play called Jazz. After the show, I steal away from my friends to chat up the spectacled chappie who has intellectual written all over his hand-loomed kurta. I expect profundity, even gravitas, but not the Latin. Typical Bombay show-off, I think sourly, as I retreat to my french fries. Res ipsa whatever indeed.

After I look up the meaning, I realize that the man’s comment underscored the way Mumbaikars view their city. Mumbai is the capital of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, yes, but like all great cities of the world, its identity is deeply individualistic and not entrenched in geography, religion, or indeed the state to which it is attached. What the Netherlands is to design, Los Angeles to fame, Dubai to money, and Kyoto to beauty, Bombay is to trade and opportunity. Everyone in this town has a gig. (One socialite, Chhaya Momaya, coaches rich businessmen’s wives in “controlling odors” and “rest room etiquette.”)

To escape the stultifying upper echelons of Bombay society, I take a boat trip to Elephanta Island and the magnificent temple complex. Built between the second century B.C. and the twelfth century A.D., it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s blazing hot, and I have to climb some 120 steps to reach the entrance. Ahead of me in the queue are an Indian woman and her three British friends. It’s clear from her accent that she grew up in the United Kingdom. It’s also clear that she is going to fake being a native because the entrance fee is twenty rupees for Indians and two hundred rupees for foreigners. The man behind the counter sees right through her and charges her the foreigner price. Then comes my turn.

“One ticket,” I say.

“Indian or foreign?” barks the mustachioed man.

“Indian, of course,” I reply, feigning outrage.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“Bangalore.”

“What’s your zip code?” he asks.

I don’t expect the question, and for the life of me, I can’t remember my zip code. Perhaps it is the heat; perhaps it’s the exertion of climbing a gazillion steps. I stare at him, wide-eyed.

“Look, madam, don’t try to fool me.”

“I am not,” I cry. “Here, you want to see my license?” I hand him my Karnataka state driver’s license.

“Twenty rupees.” He admits defeat.

As I wander through the beautiful caves, trying to take in the monolithic sculptures of Lord Shiva in the half-man, half-woman Ardhanari pose, I’m overcome with remorse. After all, I hold a U.S. passport and ought to pay foreign rates. The man was simply doing his job. He ought to be congratulated, not conned.

So I walk back to the counter and offer to pay the difference. The man gets suspicious. Why am I trying to pay more money? Am I from the income tax department? Am I offering a bribe? Am I a reporter with a hidden camera?

No bribe, no camera, I reply, exasperated. I am indeed from Bangalore, only by way of New York.

“Look, lady,” says the man, “I don’t care if you are from Bangalore or Bangladesh. I am not a Raj Thackeray to discriminate against people. You want to give me two hundred rupees. Then give, by all means.”

He pockets the cash and I walk away, perplexed over whether I’ve just done the right thing or I’ve just been had.

The man’s allusion was well put. Two years ago, the politician Raj Thackeray tried to polarize the city by pitting native Maharashtrians—the “sons of the soil,” who make up just over fifty percent of the population—against scores of migrant North Indians. The city didn’t bite. Sure, there were some skirmishes, but most Bombayites simply didn’t buy into the “us versus them” argument. That’s because Bombay is a city of immigrants—always was, always will be.

The Koli fisherfolk came here first in 1138, in Arab dhows that they rowed across red sunsets to discover what the Greeks call Heptanesia, or Cluster of Seven Islands. The Kolis named the hilly uninhabited isles Mumba Ai after their patron goddess, Mumba Devi. Koli settlements still exist in Mumbai, right by the water. The men still fish; the women, pretty in green saris, take the fish to market.

The seven hilly isles were under the control of a series of Hindu rulers starting with Ashoka in the third century B.C. and ending in the fourteenth century with the Silhara dynasty, which made Elephanta Island its capital. At the same time, the Muslim kings of Gujarat captured Bombay. Arab spice traders visited and called one of the islands Al Omani, which the Brits corrupted into Old Woman’s Island.

In the second century, the Bene Israelis, descendants of the Jews who escaped persecution in Galilee, became shipwrecked off the coast of India and made their way to Bombay. The Baghdadi Jews followed. Although they forgot Hebrew and lost their religious books in transit, they maintained their dietary restrictions and kept the Sabbath, leading them to be called Shanivar Telis, or “Saturday oil-pressers.” Today, at least ten synagogues, including the beautiful blue 125-year-old Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, exist in Bombay. Ehud Olmert and Madonna were recent visitors.

The Parsis, or Zoroastrians, who fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the tenth century, ended up in Bombay in the 1600s. For such a small community, they’ve made a global mark: Conductor Zubin Mehta is a Parsi from Bombay, as is his brother Zarin Mehta, the current director of the New York Philharmonic. So is Ratan Tata, who runs India’s largest private sector conglomerate, the Tata Group. So was the lead singer of the band Queen, Freddie Mercury, formerly known as Farrokh Bulsara—a Bombay boy.

The Parsis built ships, lent money, sold textiles, and traded opium, all of which were remarkably lucrative. Unlike the pre-colonial Hindus and Muslims, who considered themselves defiled if they shook hands with an Englishman, the Parsis had no such qualms. Like all comprador communities, they adapted names and customs that could be comprehended by the British. Typical Parsi names include their trade, as in Treasuryvala (vala means person), Icecreamvala, Canteenvala, and my personal favorite, which happens to be the name of a successful Bollywood film producer, Screwvala—as in Ronnie Screwvala.

Today, Bombay’s Parsi population is dwindling because intermarriage is discouraged. Parsi housing colonies—called baugs (literally “gardens”)—offer apartments to Parsis at subsidized rates, which, in land-starved Bombay, is always a source of envy and contention.

Most worrying of all, there are no vultures at the Towers of Silence. Parsis don’t bury or cremate their dead; instead, they offer the corpses for vultures to feed on, something that “probably made sense in the desert,” as Nadir Godrej tells me. Today, the Towers of Silence occupy fifty-five acres of prime property in the posh Malabar Hill district. The Parsis put their dead into special slots for men, women, and children in these towers and allow them to be consumed by the vultures—at least in theory. Other residents complain about rotting corpses.

“There are no vultures anymore,” says Homai Modi, a trustee of the KR Cama Oriental Institute, which preserves rare Zoroastrian and other manuscripts. “Solar concentrators [essentially a huge magnifying glass] have been installed, but they cannot function effectively during the monsoons. Several Parsis now go in for electric cremation, but most of the priests will not perform the usual prayers.”

A beautiful lady with translucent porcelain skin, Modi also heads the Maharashtra branch of the Indian Red Cross. She talks about Bombay’s resilience, its ability to recover after bomb blasts, floods, and Hindu-Muslim riots. Modi and her sister, Dr. Firoza Bhabha, are what we might call Good Samaritans. “Bombayites call us mad Parsis,” says Bhabha with a laugh. A slim, elegant lady with an easy smile, Bhabha is a successful pediatrician in Bombay. But her real passion is VOICE (Voluntary Organisation in Community Enterprise), a charity that educates Bombay’s street children and prepares them for independence and a livelihood. After the 2006 Bombay train bombings, Bhabha and her son, then a student in Boston, went to Sion Hospital, where the blast victims were brought, to volunteer. “They had no need for our help,” she says. “Everything was under control.” People had lined up to donate blood; the emergency room was functioning with seamless efficiency; dead bodies were classified and sent to the morgue; and the wounded were attended to right away. “That is the spirit of my city,” says Bhabha.

Bombay’s spirit of resilience is often a matter of pride for its natives. Yet after the terrorist attacks of November 26, 2008—referred to locally as 26/11 in poignant allegiance to 9/11—things were different. For the first time, Bombayites were angry. They wanted basic human rights: safety, protection. They wanted the city’s government to do its job.

A week after the attacks, a massive peace rally was held near the Gateway of India, and thanks to Twitter, Orkut, and Facebook, in cities across the globe as far away as Florida. But “the protests and text-message slacktivism. . . seem naive in their rejection of the political system,” wrote Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out Mumbai. Mumbaikars, he said, needed to “focus their outrage.” Still others simply wept. “My bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai?” asked Suketu Mehta, author of the masterful Maximum City, in a New York Times op-ed. “People use the spirit of Bombay as an excuse,” said a transplanted Bombayite at a candlelight vigil I attended in Bangalore. “Floods, bombs, corruption, terrorism—the city takes it all and rises from the ashes. Well, guess what. We’re done. We quit.”

The city did rise from the ashes, though. A few days after the attacks, even as the entire nation engaged in a collective, anguished soul-searching, Bombay picked itself up. The trains were running, the hospitals were humming, and the blood banks were, as usual, oversubscribed.

Bombay’s generosity in times of crisis is famous within India. The city comes together and pulls itself up, all the more heroic given its hands-off, even cold, attitude during normal times. “People here don’t care where you come from or what your social status is,” says Deepa Krishnan, a former banker who runs one of the city’s best tour companies, Mumbai Magic. “It is all about where you are going.”

One rainy June morning, everyone is going to Mahim’s St. Michael Church to see the bleeding Jesus. It is a bloody miracle, and everyone wants a look. People stream out of offices, cut college classes, and queue up outside the church to see a framed photograph of Jesus with a red patch on his chest.

I am the only voice of dissent. Couldn’t it be the moisture? I ask the crowd. Could the red paint of Jesus’ robes have bled and created that red patch? They glare coldly at me. Obviously I am new to Bombay, they say. This is a city of miracles. A few years ago, Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-god, began drinking milk. At temples all over Bombay, people would pour glasses of milk down the elephant-god’s mouth and the stone-idol would slurp it up. This happened for weeks before Lord Ganesh was satiated. Miracles happen all the time at the Haji Ali Dargah, one of the most famous mosques in the world. Now it’s Jesus’ turn. Nobody knows exactly why Jesus is bleeding, but whatever the reason, they are going to send a photograph to the Vatican for verification.

The residents of Dharavi, India’s largest slum, believe that Jesus is bleeding out of sympathy for their plight. Thanks to Bombay’s expansion northward, Dharavi, which once used to be on the city’s fringe, has now become metropolitan Mumbai’s geographic center. With its central location came the land sharks. A couple of years ago, Mukesh Mehta, an architect from America, announced his $3.1 billion Dharavi Redevelopment Project. According to his plan, 360 of Dharavi’s 557 acres would be parceled off to different real estate developers who could erect office buildings, luxury hotels, and malls—on one condition: that they would have to house the million-odd slum dwellers who currently live and work in Dharavi. The residents were aghast. Dharavi is already the most densely populated place on the planet, nearly six times as dense as daytime Manhattan by some estimates. How can you bring more people into the place? The infrastructure would collapse. Indeed, it already has.

Dharavi may be a slum, but it is also a thriving economic zone. The Economist estimates the value of goods—leather handbags, embroidered clothes, pots—made in and sold from Dharavi every year at $500 million. “A lot of loading and unloading happens in Dharavi,” says Raju Korde, a social activist who opposes the plan. “It doesn’t account for the web of activities that we have here.” For now, the redevelopment proposal is stalled within the quagmire of Bombay’s bureaucracy, but for Dharavi’s residents, it represents an uncertain future—and the growing schism between the haves and the have-nots.

For many in the West, their introduction to Dharavi came in the form of Slumdog Millionaire. Last year’s Oscar winner for best picture was partially shot in Dharavi and transformed two of its residents—nine-year-old Rubina Ali and ten-year-old Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail—into international film stars. Months after the two returned from the Oscars, an English newspaper reported that Rubina’s father was trying to sell her to Arab sheikhs for more than $300,000, a story the father adamantly denied. Both stars continue to live in Dharavi with their large families.

Dharavi’s other residents, meanwhile, complain that Slumdog Millionaire has done little to help them. “I may live in a slum, but I am no dog,” a little girl complained in an interview. Others said that their lives were exactly as the film portrayed, while newspaper editorials opined that the film glorifies poverty. But one thing is certain: It will not be the last take on Mumbai, not least of all from the film’s director, Danny Boyle, who is said to have bought the rights to Mehta’s Maximum City as a future project.

Within India, Mumbaiya English is known for its swagger: part Brooklyn with the hip-hop beat of the Bronx, plus some Hindi words thrown in for good measure. A typical Bombay greeting is bhol, or talk. Every sentence ends with yaar, which means friend but has now become a verbal tic like dude, as in, “No, yaar. Can’t party tonight.” Ask a friend about his latest quarrel with his girlfriend and you will be met with a taciturn, “Avoid, yaar,” or “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Women are babes, men are dudes, and everyone is irreverent.

Bombay’s colonial history is best told in the spangled argot of its natives. With advance apologies to all the Mumbaikars who will poke holes in it, here is my attempt.

So there was this babe, Catherine de Braganza. A Portuguese princess with a beaky nose. Roman Catholic. Her parents tried to marry her off to pretty much every royal in Europe before foisting her onto England’s Charles the Second. Charles was broke and wanted Lady Catarina’s dowry: six shiploads of gold plus the port cities of Tangier and Bombay. The Portuguese thought they were suckering the Brits, you see. Tangier amounted to nothing in 1661; Bombay at that time had less than ten thousand people. The Portuguese didn’t want it.

So anyway, the British crown got the biggest lollipop of the century, and they didn’t know what to do with it. So the bozos leased it to the East India Company for a measly ten pounds a year. The East India Company realized right away that Bombay had this great inland harbor, which protected its ships from Arab pirates. So it moved all its shipbuilding operations from Surat, in Gujarat, to Bombay.

Now this guy, Gerald Aungier, was the second governor of Bombay. He went around inviting everyone to move to Bombay. “I’ll guarantee your safety,” he said, “and give you religious freedom. Let’s grow fat and happy together.” So they came—the Bohra Muslims, the Catholic Goans, the Gujaratis, the Marwaris from Rajasthan, the Sindhis, the Jews, and the Parsis. Anyone who wanted to make a buck made his way to Bombay.

The Jews and Parsis hated each other because they competed for the same businesses: shipbuilding, textiles, and opium. They competed with each other in the Good Samaritan area, too. These Parsis really are mad. Much of Bombay University was built by a Parsi: one Cowasjee Jehangir, who made so much money that the family called itself Readymoney. (I am not making this up. Wiki it if you like.)

The other guy with a funny name is Benjamin Horniman, and man, was he horny! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Horniman was Irish and supposedly gay. Being Irish and all, he supported the Indians against the Brits. After independence, the government honored him by changing Elphinstone Circle into Horniman Circle, which is what it is called to this day. Prithvi Theatre stages plays there during the summer.