Flamingos?

On Thursday night I joined the Ducrohets at a gathering of the French expats in Mumbai. It was held at a restaurant close by TIFR that Laurent had told me about, but that I had yet to explore myself. Like the parade of masochistic devotees last weekend, the cat feeder, Sunil the shoe shine guy (I've met him again, and discovered that he actually has legs, they are just rather small and not much good for walking on.), and TIFR itself, this place is one of the amazing incongruities that Bombay hosts. We stepped inside and into high-ceilinged, low-tabled rooms, with walls thick enough to block the street noise, and some low key techno playing on a good sound system that could have just as easily been in New York (or perhaps I'd be better to say Paris, since I've actually been there and since everyone who showed up that night was French).

I was struck during the course of the evening by how children are often treated so much more generously in India. While we were having our beers and Pizza Capricciosa (it seems that cheese does exist in India, if only in limited distribution) seated on low couches covered in raw silk, Brieuc was making the room into the jungle gym that is any room to a 3 year old. In between serving drinks and lighting Laurent's cigarettes, the waiters played with Brieuc, tickling him with the bolsters that he'd removed from the other couches as they set them back in place and relighting the candles when he blew them out. Though I've heard that places the don't allow kids exist in Mumbai, I've never encountered one, and the places like this one and Peshawar (where the manager once came out and scolded Laurent for keeping Brieuc from running amok while we were waiting for our dinner) are more common.

Yesterday, I went to an evening of short films on the roof of one of the hotels along Marine Drive. Yogi had mentioned it earlier in the day while a few of us were standing around outside, and though there were no plans fixed, Sreekar and I found ourselves on the same TIFR bus there, and when we found the roof of the Oceania, Yogi, Pablo, and Pablo's wife Anita were there, and Shoba was on her way. While we waited for the sky to darken enough for the films to show, Yogi and I watched the fruit bats cavorting in the twilight. "Are they showing off or what?" exclaimed the suave young Mumbaiker sharing our bit of terrace wall. A tree's canopy reached to a couple stories below the rooftop, and in it a dozen or so of them were congregated, close enough that we could see their pendulous acrobatics as they explored the branches for fruits. And when they floated in the evening breezes above Marine Drive, the streetlights shone through the thin skin of their wings, showing spindly finger bones splayed against the currents of air.

Eventually, the films started, and we made out way to the blankets set out in front of the chairs for the overflow seating. It seemed that we had happened upon a film club whose meeting night had been discovered by a weekly paper and suddenly the club had to deal with a few times the audience that was expected. The guy who introduced the films was effusively excited about the turnout, and promised to have more chairs over the weekend (there will be more films showing tonight and Sunday).

The first film was the best, a documentary on the flamingos that I didn't see last weekend. Apparently, high tide is not the best time to go and see them as we had thought, but instead about an hour or two before, when large parts of the mud flats are still exposed. I'll go this weekend and see if I can find them. The documentary described how sometime around 1994, 10,000-20,000 lesser and greater flamingos decided to converge on the Sewri mudflats. I don't know what Sewri means in Marathi, but it sounds like Sewery, which is an accurate enough description. However, it seems that the mix of sewage and industrial effluent creates a concoction such that the algae on which the birds feed really flourish. Unfortunately, there are also significant amounts of heavy metals being pumped into the water (ten times what India considers safe in many cases), quarrying operations that are rapidly changing the shape of Thane Creek (where the mudflats are), and there is a giant bridge going up soon that is slated to pass right through the mudflats. The film and the response that it garnered form the audience did quite a bit to shift me from my sour mood regarding the existence of environmentalism in Bombay, though Yogi and Shoba did have to explain to the old woman sitting next to us that seeing the birds in real life would be even better than seeing them in the film.

The rest of the films were more like what I was expecting; a comedy based on the difficulty of finding change, a spoof on the "separated at birth" theme that is rather popular in Hindi cinema, with a moral of national integration, a blundering mess of a mystery about a young couple found dead at the bottom of a cliff, and a story about a homeless guy who doesn't understand the concept of money, but happens on a briefcase full of it. After each film, the director would have a few minutes for questions. This was fun, and added to the film club atmosphere. Yogi, Shoba and I were amused that the only question the evening's anchor seemed to be able to ask was, "How much did the movie cost to make?" This was especially ironic when he asked it of the guy who made Paise...?, the film about the beggar who tried to eat a suitcase full of money and came up frustrated.

After the film, Yogi, Shoba and I went for dinner at the Tea Center. The food was great, but we ended up with more than we could eat. I find that this happens often when I go out to eat in India. It is a given at a thali place like Joshi's, but even at a regular place like this, food in Bombay seems to be feast or famine. It is hard to turn down a few more mouthfuls of a beautifully spiced dish, and easy to tip past the saturation point.

And in other news, I've been amusing myself and my streetside friends of the minute by letting people ride my bike, or at least try. When I first started out riding around in Bombay, I was really hesitant to let anyone take my bike for a spin. Other than one kid who I met on the very first day out, I tended to fend off any requests to take a spin. But after a certain point, I realized that there was no real reason for this, and that it is more friendly and more fun just to warn them and then watch. It turns out that the size of the bike and the fixed gear really do make it pretty much impossible for someone to just get on and ride.

It usually works about like this: I pass a group of guys hanging around on the sidewalk, or they gather when I stop somewhere. One of them is the most forward, and after a few questions about the bike, they ask if they can go for a ride. I show them the fixed wheel, and they nod like, "yeah, whatever, Gora, I know it's a bike." With some effort, they swing their leg over the seat which is at least four inches too high for them. On their tip-toes, straddling the top tube, they put a foot on a pedal and prepare to push off. Generally, the pedal they are putting weight on is not forward enough to carry them all the way into the seat, which they usually can't reach anyway, or for them to get their weight onto the other pedal, without passing the bottom of the arc, at which point they still have most of their weight on the initial pedal, and it stops the bike. Since they aren't really moving yet, they don't fall all the way over, but it is also not really a graceful dismount. At this point, the crowd of friends who I am standing with starts laughing and everyone is trying to figure out what is going on.

The experiment often ends there, and the bike is returned in a flurry of head wagging, but sometimes the would-be rider has more perseverance, and manages a few wobbly turns of the pedals. A few weeks ago, I spent a Sunday afternoon letting some people figure it out, and some of them did eventually. I had noticed a bike with an unusually large gear while out walking the day before, and the owner, Chandrakhar, asked me to come by and show him my bike. He was able to ride it pretty well after a little while. We went for a ride around the city that afternoon and last week I stopped off and though he wasn't there, I left him one of the copies of Cranked that Jill sent.