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The Elephant in the City

By Kurt Inderbitzin

“New York is the Bombay of the West,” one of my hosts, a successful, jovial businessman in his 50s tells me.

I am in Bombay (now officially called “Mumbai) because I have been offered a job here and am trying to decide if I should uproot my career, my family, my life to move to another world on the opposite side of the planet. From the moment I arrive, I am overwhelmed by the abject poverty everywhere, by the generosity and warmth of the Indian people, and by a city that, at least in terms of nonstop hustle and bustle, really does put New York to shame.

But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start with first impressions.

As my plane descends into Bombay, it flies over a shanty down, miles and miles long and as impoverished as anything in the world. Blue tarps and green garbage bags make up the roofs, and from where I sit, I see no roads or passageways, just one interconnected shack with another. And I think, there is no way, NO WAY, I can live in a city with THAT. It’s just too much reality…it’s just too damn depressing. The American woman sitting next to me, who has lived in Bombay for 4 years, notes the sickened look on my face and tells me it’s okay, that things aren’t always what they seem in India. I have no idea what she is talking about, and don’t have time to ask, because we are already on the ground and beginning to disembark.

Inside, it takes 90 minutes for my bags to come down the conveyor belt. Two people on the flight told me that if I move to India, I better get used to things moving slowly, and their advice is already ringing true. A driver from my hotel hands me an umbrella, takes the bags, and carries them to a small car. I try to follow through a torrential downpour, but my glasses fog over from the intense heat and humidity. I scramble blindly after him, reaching to cover him with the umbrella also, but he moves too fast even though he’s hauling my bags, and seems utterly befuddled by the notion that I wouldn’t want him to get wet.

The drive to the hotel is…well, traumatic. There are no lanes, no sidewalks, and virtually no stoplights or stop signs at intersections. Cars and motorized rickshaws and motorcycles and bikes move about like a swarm of bees, bobbing and weaving in a sort of controlled chaos at lightning speeds. They sometimes come so close to the ramshackle shops that line the streets that shopowners must quickly (yet casually) move a magazine stand or child out of the way to avoid disaster. People walk down the streets among the cars like they belong there, seemingly impervious to the consequences of fast moving metal meeting human flesh. At least a dozen times I let out an involuntary yipe, convinced we will collide with another vehicle or worse, with a pedestrian, but every time, the driver taps the horn, makes an adjustment, and zips on ahead, unscathed. As we near the hotel, the driver suddenly cranks the wheel to the right – dodging two cows lying peacefully in the middle of the street – then cranks it back to the left to miss a man walking down the road defying gravity by carrying a stack of egg cartons at least six feet high. I climb out of the car at the hotel shaken, and not at all confident I’ll ever get back in another in India.

In the hotel, I get my first taste of the “civilized” side of Bombay. A team of staff-members greet me – in a country well north of a billion people, labor is dirt cheap and plentiful. Two doormen open the door and the trunk, three bellboys grab my two bags and three hotel clerks check me in.

I reach the room, collapse on my bed, and think, man, what have I gotten myself into.

* * *

Nobody knows for sure how many people call India home, but the general consensus is about 1.1 billion. Of that number, 90 to 95% are poor – living on less than $3 per day. The remaining, some 50 to 100 million people – as many people as in England – are not poor. They man the call centers you reach when you call customer service in the United States, they manufacture the clothes you buy at The Gap and Banana Republic and they build mega, world-class companies in banking, telecommunications and computers in India’s booming economy. Many of these middle-class and rich people call Bombay home.

What happens when a city houses 50 poor people for every person of financial means? You create an environment where anything – ANTHING – that involves human labor is unbelievably cheap. Here are a few examples:

· virtually everyone who owns a car has a personal chauffeur (a personal chauffeur costs about $100 a month)
· virtually anyone with an apartment has a full-time “servant/cook” (about $100 a month)
· when you enter a store, there are always 3-4 people at your service, instantly
· when you eat at a restaurant, 3-5 waiters see to your every need
· if you want a massage, figure $2 for an hour
· if you want a personal trainer, figure $5 per hour
· if you want your laundry done, figure six to seven cents per garment.

Basically, for very little money, you can have someone in India do virtually everything for you that you yourself don’t want to do. That is, if you are okay paying someone do things you yourself don’t want to do.

* * *

It is my first full-day in India. My hosts greet me at the hotel (in a chauffeur-driven car, of course), and begin taking me around the city. My hosts were all born in India, but have studied and traveled extensively abroad. Which is to say, they are “westernized.” They dress differently than Indians, they speak differently, but they are still very much Indians. That is, they are friendly and warm and patient and they absolutely try to make me feel as comfortable and happy as they possibly can.

And in fact, they are succeeding. I do feel better. The roads are just as chaotic as the day before, but I take it all in now not with so much fear, but with…amazement. How they hell do they all avoid colliding with each other when there are no traffic rules? It just defies logic.

We pass a small shanty down, and they can see I recoil a bit. They understand – it hurts them to see the poverty too – but things, they tell me, aren’t always what they seem in India. I’ve heard that line before. Then they tell me everything in Bombay is cheap, except real estate. Thus, while many people can’t afford to rent a decent apartment – and resort to building shacks instead – they may not be as poor as they appear. And just as they say it, I catch a glimpse inside one of the doorways leading into the shacks, and indeed, inside, I see…well…a computer. Attached to a state-of-the-art flat screen monitor.

We arrive at their apartment building – they want to show it to me as an example of the kind of place I might live if I make the move to Bombay. The building is, by American standards, dilapidated. Some of the exterior walls are crumbling slightly, and all are covered with black mold. It is, in a word, revolting.

We climb into an elevator – the old style where you have to pull a wire door shut – and as it creaks and moans its way up the building I close my eyes and just hope with every cell in my body that it will make it. It dumps us out into a tiny hallway that is itself in something of a state of disrepair. Then they open the door to their apartment, and…behold…heaven on earth. Stunning, marble floors spread out into an airy bright, modern apartment. A large, plasma TV blares out CNN. A modern kitchen with oak cabinets and state-of-the-art appliances opens out into a living room decorated with handsome antiques and oriental rugs. It is an oasis in the middle of…of what?

I take it all in and think maybe they’re right, maybe everything isn’t what it seems in India.

* * *

It’s not just human provided services that are dirt-cheap in India. Manufactured goods, food and telecommunications are at some of the lowest prices in the world. Here are some examples:

· 80 channels of cable (including CNN, HBO, Disney, BBC) are $20 a year

· Mobile phone service (better quality than in the US) is about $20 a month, for virtually unlimited calls

· Name brand, Ralph Lauren and Gap shirts (with the US price tag of $49 to $79 right on them) are $6

· An entre at a very good, high-end restaurant is $5 (although you can get a very good meal for $2)
· A name brand, designer-label purse that is $90 in the US is about $6

· A litre of bottled water is about 25 cents.

Several people – both Americans and Indians – inform me that once you shop in Bombay, you’ll never shop anywhere else.

* * *

By my third day in India, as we cruise around town, the traffic no longer fazes me. I focus more attention on all the beautiful trees and the ornately dressed women than on the run-down buildings, and there is a part of me that is starting to warm to the place.

My hosts take me to the area of town where the city’s laundry is done (as mentioned earlier, for maybe 6 cents a garment). What I see there, like so many things in India, defies all logic.

Hundreds of men stand over concrete vats washing, wringing and hanging out to dry shirts, pants, sheets, underwear – you name it. Okay, nothing that unusual there. But what is unusual is that all the vats – the vats where they wash and rinse the clothes – are filled with mud water. Dark, brown, filthy mud water. Yet all the laundry that is washed and rinsed in the mud water ends up hanging on a clothes line, sparkling clean. The blues are rich and true. The yellows as shiny as the sun. Even the whites are beautifully, flawlessly white.

We climb into the car, and as we pull away, I demand an explanation from my hosts. They have none – they don’t understand it themselves. Then, in the middle of our conversation, our car suddenly comes to a dead stop – very unusual in Bombay. I look up and see, about thirty feet ahead, a giant elephant standing in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. And for a second, I get a little pissed-off – the damn elephant has no right to block traffic, I think! And then I realize how comfortable I must already be here. I was, after all, not immediately awestruck by the sight of an elephant blocking traffic, but rather pissed that, well, an elephant was blocking traffic.

It is later that day that my host tells me over dinner “New York is the Bombay of the West.” Well, if New York is “the city that never sleeps,” than Bombay is the city that never sleeps on steroids. It is relentless and at times overwhelming movement, commerce, life, 24 hours a day, day in and day out.

And if New York is “the Big Apple,” well, next to Bombay, in terms of sheer size, population and activity, New York is really just a crabapple.

Will I land here for a few years? Right now, I don’t know. I do know that if I make the move there will not be one moment of boredom. Too many elephants, oases, and white sheets cleaned in mud for that.