Saturday afternoon with a bicycle

Last night I had the idea to possibly go to Matheran in the morning. I set an alarm, but slept through it by about half an hour, which meant that I had less than 20 minutes to get to the train station, so I bagged that idea and went back to sleep.

Instead I spent the morning doing nothing, and then went on a ride around the city in the afternoon. My first stop was the Oxford bookstore. I had heard that they had good tea there. This was true. I had a little argument with the security guard who didn't want me locking my bike to the fence. I asked him where I should lock it then, and he suggested that I park it on the sidewalk next to the other bikes. Now, I love my bike, but I'll admit that by bike shop standards, it is not super fancy. It is a fairly standard fixed gear conversion. However, it is the fanciest bike I have seen in Bombay by quite a bit. People with more than a hundred dollars or so to spend on transportation in this city do not buy bicycles. Also, I keep it fairly free of mud, and there is no rust, which is not at all the case with the rest of this city's fleet. So it sticks out like a sore thumb, and is likely to evaporate quickly if not chained down. This was as obvious to the security guard as it was to me, and he kindly decided to let me lock it to a tree inside the fence.

Space is a commodity in Mumbai, and the bookstore was evidence. The shelves were stocked with glossy new covers like a Barnes and Noble or some such, but the arrangement of the aisles had more in common with a used book store of the sort that tries to fit the entire literary history of the world into a few square meters. Somehow there was room for a tea shop with an extensive menu, and I had a good cup of tea. The sweet milky chai that can be had at every street corner is in many ways a wonderful thing, but the quality of the actual tea is moderate at best. It is mostly sweet warm milk with cardamom and tea flavor.

Oxford bookstore is in Churchgate, and from there I rode out along Marine Drive past Chowpatty Beach and up onto Malabar Hill. I had actually done this part of the ride that I did on Thursday night. I'm really needing some escaping the city, hence the plan to go to Matheran, but riding randomly around the city seems to help. The tide was way out and I stood for a little while and watched people picking their way around in the muck.



Up on the hill I encountered Banganga Tank. The road heading up from Chowpatty continues for a while, and then peters out and at some point is a driveway. Before this happened, I turned off on to a smaller street, and continued down the other side of the hill, picking my way through the fairly empty streets. I stopped to look at a temple that was nestled among the blocks of apartments, laundry fluttering like prayer flags in the background of the elephants and apsaras and monkeys carved into the stone of the temple roof. A few small plants sprouted from the among the granite menagerie. Someone directed me to continue on down the steps to the tank. Legend has it that on this spot, the Hindu hero Ram asked his brother Laxman for some water, whereupon Laxman shot an arrow into the ground and created a spring. Or so it apparently happened five thousand years ago.

Today, the tank is a rectangular pool about the size of a football field. There are stone steps leading down to it on all sides, and a number of temples wedged in among the apartments and tea stalls and vegetable markets, including the one that first caught my attention. Some kids were trying to get their cricket ball out of the water. A few people were sitting on the steps, and there was one guy bathing in the tank. The water looked thoroughly uninviting. It was a blackish green color and had a lot of trash floating in it. I sat by the steps for a little while and appreciated the incongruous craziness that is Bombay. Sitting there had a nice peacefulness to it.



From the tank, I continued north up to the Haji Ali Mosque. The mosque is built on a rock in the middle of a small bay/tidal flat, and is reached by walking along a causeway from the mainland that gets submerged at high tide. Along the causeway are people hawking flower garlands and caps for the devout, knock off designer sunglasses for the cool, and brightly colored plastic things for the small. There are also the ranks of the crippled, asking for alms. It occurs to me that in this country with such a labor pool that a seemingly good job like landscaper at a major research institiute won't even necessarily get you out of the slum, these people are professional sufferers.



Inside the compound of the mosque, I sit and absorb the activity around me. I chat for a little while with a guy from Gujart who is in Mumbai interviewing for some jobs in marketing. He thinks we should go to Goa for Christmas/New Years. Families sit about chatting, people selling ice cream and tea stroll through the crowd, and the voice of the Imam drifts out over everything. A man with huge dreads and dark glasses walks past, talking to the tea seller. He has at least fifty pounds of steel chains and padlocks draped over his torso, and carries what looks like a brass spitoon. He is also the most in-shape person I have seen here. My guess is that he spends much of his time smoking ganja and doing yoga.