Fish curry and other delights

Early Wednesday morning I arose and dragged a rickshaw driver out of his pleasant doze to take me to the Pune railway station. The streets of the city were dotted with makeshift huts, filled with sleeping families, that seem only to pop up on the roads at night. The railway station was deep in its groggy morning bustle, everyone and everything gray in the smoke and fog of seven AM. I found my train and my coach without event – an accomplishment and a tribute to the Pune railway station, given previous experiences in other cities – and sat looking out the window for the duration of the three hour journey. It was a peaceful trip, the green-gray landscape punctured only by the villages through which we chugged our way, and by the dark outlines of mountains looming in the distance. We chugged into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in the heart of Mumbai, formerly and currently known as Victoria Terminus – V.T. Station – in the heart of Bombay.

And it was awesome. Awesome, as in, I was in awe. It’s just like a European railway station--okay, maybe that’s because it is a European railway station – as hectic as Gare du Nord or King’s Cross, and as beautifully constructed, but filled with hundreds of Indians. The vaulted ceilings and huge passageways through which sunlight glinted and shone in particle-bits filled my heart with excitement and hope. So this is Mumbai, I thought. This is the famous Bombay.

Completely lost, I followed a middle-aged woman dressed in jeans who had been on my train; confident, small, and alone, she looked like she knew what she was doing. I followed her through what looked like three main passageways, each grander than the last, until finally she exited the building. So did I, loosing her in a crowd of people. Amazingly, I didn’t see a taxi stand. I walked around the perimeter of the building and ran my eyes over the impressive façade of V.T. Station—but not long enough to distract my mind from the canvas bag on my shoulder. I clutched it to my side for fear that my passport, tickets, and several thousand rupees (I had maybe $90 on me, which goes a long way) would be taken from me without my knowledge. I definitely inherited my mother’s sensibilities on this score. How well I remember that time my father and I had boarded a train to Dehra Dun, ducked out to get a cup of chai on the platform, and returned to find our backpack – filled with wallet, credit cards, and a doctoral dissertation – gone. Thankfully, thankfully, we had taken our passports with us to the station platform.

Eventually I spotted a line of taxis streaming into yet another corner of the station. When I got there, no one—not a single driver—tried to ambush me, rip my bag from my shoulder, and drag me to his taxi. I was quite surprised. This had been my usual experience at train stations; come to think of it, though, it’s never happened when I’ve been alone. I asked two groups of security guards where I could find a taxi. They looked at me with laughter in their eyes and slightly cruel smiles of amusement (or maybe I'm just projecting): look at the white girl, already lost in Bombay!

Finally a round man in a tattered shirt and the white turban of a Sikh came panting over to greet me. He dragged a bedraggled-looking old man—and me—to this taxi down a little alleyway, arguing vehemently all the way with the other man. The rapport between them was how I imagine it to be between brothers who teased each other too much growing up. “Where’s your luggage?” the first man asked me. “This is it,” I said, pointing to my bag. He looked at me in disbelief. “Okay, 350 flat to the airport, madam.” This, surprisingly, was the rate that Lonely Planet had cited. Perhaps my lack of luggage, the fact that I was traveling alone, and my long salwar kameez convinced him I was less of a tourist than I was. And again, when we got to the taxi: “350! Don’t pay him any more, okay? 350!” “Okay,” I laughed and wagged my head in agreement. He yelled at my driver some more, tapped the window, and galumphed off.

The taxi was absolutely crumbling. It had no windows except for the front and the back ones. When I sat down in my seat, I found myself literally resting the nape of my neck against the rusty metal cylinder that pumps gas into the engine. We grumped and rumbled our way out of the alleyway, my driver muttering in Marathi the whole time. “Sub thik hain?” I asked him in the only words of Hindi I know. (“Everything okay?”) “Sub thik hain,” he grinned in return, and I liked him immediately. This was going to be quite the adventure, I thought. Raindrops began to fall on the windshield, and my driver reached his arm outside the hole where the window should have been, grasped the windshield wiper with his fingertips, and moved it in a wiping motion over four inches of the windshield. He only made it more blurry than the rest. But I trusted my driver—he seemed like a nice guy—and I was going to the airport on a good flat fare. Salaam, Bombay, indeed.

Not for long. We drove two minutes into a run-down part of town; it was filled, to my surprise and happiness, with Arabic writing, women dressed in the full niqab, and men with white skullcaps. It was the first Muslim neighborhood I had visited on this trip to India. Thinking of my beloved, boring Amman, I felt strangely and wonderfully at home. But my driver stopped the car in a lurch, and a young man came running over. The driver motioned for him to get in the cab. “Oh, no, you don’t,” I thought, remembering everything I had ever read about white women letting more than one man into the front of taxis in which they traveled.

Unwilling to be made into a textbook case of sexual harassment, I put up a fight. “No,” I said sternly, “no no no no no. We are going to the airport. Now. No one else.” My driver shrugged his shoulders, conveyed an expression of total innocence, and yelled at me in Hindi. Realizing I didn’t understand, he got out of the cab, the other man got in, and my old driver said to me through the window, “He drop you! My shift, bas!” (“Over!”) “350 only, okay? 350! No more you pay him!” I slapped on my most pissed-off look, and slammed back with a sigh against the seat. The gas tank rattled. “Fine. Go. Let’s go.”

My second driver started driving, but it wasn’t long before we stopped again. He waved to someone in the taxi next to us, and the other taxi pulled over. “Get out,” said the second driver, “you go there. He take you.”

“What is this?” I fretted. “Why does no one want to take me to the airport? I am I cursed or something?” This was completely unlike the India I knew, where people practically fell over themselves trying to do a service and get in a conversation – plus a rupee or two – with foreign tourists. The whole thing was a little sketchy, for lack of a better word, and I was starting to get nervous.

“This is it,” I warned both my third driver and my second driver, who was now standing outside the window. With the most commanding voice I could summon, I demanded: “This is it. No more switches. No more stops. I have to get to the airport. Now.”

“350!” Responded Driver Number Two, completely ignoring my request. “350! No more! You pay him 350!” We sped off. The third driver was the worst driver yet: apparently unable to keep his hands steady on the wheel, he swerved the car back and forth constantly, braking and accelerating wildly. “I could drive this car better than you could,” I thought, “and I haven’t even driven since my driver’s test, let alone on the left side of the road.” I am always prepared for some amount of bad driving in India – it’s just the way it’s done, and it usually works out fine, unless a cow gets in the way – so to say that Number Three’s driving worried me is saying something. Perhaps too quickly, I decided I didn’t trust him.

Not far out of the city proper, he pulled over on the side of a highway. Pointing at a red light on the dashboard, he said matter-of-factly, “Fix battery.”

I threw a fit. “Are you kidding me?” I yelled in English. “I have to get to the airport! This is ridiculous! I can’t believe this!”

“Battery, battery!” He yelled back, feigning the expression of total innocence that I had seen one too many times that afternoon.

“Fine,” I spat. “But jaldi karo, okay? Jaldi!” (“Do it quickly!”)

“Jaldi, jaldi!” He intoned back, already out of the car and running across the highway to a little shack on the other side. “Great,” I thought, “he’s going to fix our battery in a roadside paan shack.” To add to my frustration, he actually left the car running while it was parked, ensuring that our battery would die quicker than ever.

I—at least a little bit legitimately, I think—freaked out. Five, and then ten minutes passed by. It felt like hours. I thought the car was going to explode, that I was going to be abducted, that Number Three was smoking God-knows-what in this little shack while I was stranded on the side of the highway in a car whose battery was quickly expiring. Ten, fifteen more minutes passed by. It felt like days. I started to cry, expressing feelings of fear and helplessness that I may have tried to hold back for a few hours too long into my trip to India. It all came out in the back of that taxi, purring along on the side of a Bombay highway. I sobbed and whimpered like a toddler.

So I did the only thing I could think of: I called my parents, who were fast alseep in New York City at three AM.

I knew that they would have left the phone cord plugged into the jack for precisely emergencies like these. My mother answered groggily, and upon hearing my voice and my apology for calling in the middle of the night, sat bolt-upright (judging from her tone) and asked me in a very worried voice what was wrong. I blubbered out the whole story, and how I was sure everything was going to be fine but things were scaring me a wee bit too much.

My confident and commanding Mummy talked me out of the taxi, staying on the phone while I grabbed my bag and crossed the highway to find my driver in his precious battery shack. He was just standing around. All the men in the shack looked at me in surprise. “How long would this have taken if I hadn’t come to find him?” I thought. My parents on the phone, I wiped my tears and demanded in English, “Listen, buddy, I don’t have all day, so I’m just going to get another taxi. Bye.” I turned around and walked back to the highway.

The driver stood there in disbelief.

I reached the side of the highway and raised my hand to hail another cab, but Number Three came running up behind me. “Okay, okay,” he said. “We go to the airport now.”

I was about to kill him.

“I’m so glad you called, sweetie,” said my Mom and Dad. That’s the kind of parents I have, even when they’re woken up in the middle of the night for no reason.

We got to the airport without a hitch. He even cut out out all the swerves, quick brakes, and dramatic accelerations.

In a weird twist of everything, my arrival in Goa brought me one of the best taxi rides of my life. (Not the best – that one was between the Syrian border and Damascus – but definitely up there.) Number Four and I drove off into the tropical paradise of Goa, lush with coconut trees and grass and calm people. We watched the red sun set as we headed north, talking and laughing all the way. Kishur, the driver, informed me that I must be married by 22 at the latest, and that I will be an old woman at 25. He was only 30 himself, he bragged, and he already had a beautiful wife and daughter. Lucky Number Four.

And that was the auspicious start of a beautiful two days in Goa: my friends and I migrated aimlessly from the white beach, to the no-shoes restaurant, to our straw huts. We beheld the big sky full of stars and breathed the fresh air. We drank cocktails and ate fish curry. (At least I had one day after Yom Kippur to enjoy that blissful stuff!) We swam in the light of the setting sun.

But back in Pune, I have to say, I am just as happy. I love the familiarity that has come to shine on life here, and the comfort of studying Sanskrit for hours on end. I had missed my roommates for those few days away; I unlocked our flat to find a garland in my doorway and a sign that read “Welcome Home”. Unbelievable!—Even my return to normal life has been a celebration.