I’m washing down a warm honey-filled croissant with a sweet latte. The walls of this café are lined with a novelty collection of jams and jazz plays over the speakers. One could assume I’ve long departed India and am now back in the cushy confines of the states, but it isn’t so. I’m a stone’s throw from India Gate and the Taj Mahal Hotel having brunched with a couple of new friends in Bombay (the newly assigned “Mumbai” is only present on maps and the tongues of tourists). My brother Stuart made an e-mail introduction to an old college friend of his, Arunoday, and he’s allowed me to tag along with him for a taste of the city in my final days.
Mr. Singh and his friend Aditi have proven gracious hosts and we speed around, offering forth a taste of 1st world India. My entire trip thus far has been swathed in delicious roadside curry, offers of ear cleaning on train platforms and illegal spice markets. Digesting the contrast between the levels within which I’ve been embedded derives a perverse sense of entitlement. Bargaining with rickshaws days ago has now become waiting on the valet. Fruitless attempts at locating English periodicals in Calcutta are no longer. Arunoday and Aditi introduced me to an international newsstand stocked with local titles, one of which includes a feature on him (a budding Bollywood star).
Having once been among the masses, the vantage I hold from the passenger seat of an air-conditioned SUV has created a complete shift in the experience. My go-to options previously would have been to frequent the tourist heavy sites of centuries past, but I’m now truly living as a local. To witness Bombay from the placement of moneyed Indians has involved a sudden transition that I could not imagine possible when wiping dirt from my brow after a day spent on the back of a motorcycle chasing through the streets of Varanasi. Spending what amounts to $70 in the local currency on lunch feels intensely insensitive having witnessed certain abject poverty all trip long.
When traveling, I painstakingly research, plan and obsess. After laying out the structure to my adventure, I imagine what types of welcome surprises will slap me in the face, things I would never be able to foresee. More than my rural accident outside of Delhi, Nepalese encounters in Darjeeling or glucose charged adventure in Bangalore, being allowed a couple of days under Arunoday’s charge has proven to be the most enthralling surprise thus far.
He, Aditi and I dine, see a movie, wax poetic over music, I jostle with a film director over the untenable debate of baseball vs. cricket and as soon as it as all began, it is time to say goodbye. Goodbye to my new friends. (Friends human and friends imagined, as I’ve shamelessly laid claim to a connection to the land based on my brief foray.) After a satisfying near month long exploration I bid India and Asia farewell, my return home finally before me.
