February 27 Entry - Mumbai

Academy Award Night in the US but Monday morning in Mumbai. What fun to be watching Slumdog Millionaire clean up at the Oscars while in the city where it was made. From my personal vantage point, I haven’t seen anything like the poverty, filth, or sadness that either the movie portrays or that I saw in Delhi. This is not to deny the reality of the portrayal of the city but rather an accident of where I’m staying in relation to the tourist areas and where my hosts work.
But I am getting ahead of myself....
A review of the entries thus far reveal that I have failed to introduce the most important characters in this story. First of all, Cindy who has traveled with me for six weeks and returned home to California on Feb. 18th is an old friend from the late sixties. We were married for a very long time to two best college buddies who were also business compatriots and we spent many a New Year’s Eve or summer idyll around the pool in Erie or in motor homes playing bridge, Risk, and otherwise having a great time. Cindy moved to San Diego several years ago to be near her two married kids and two grandchildren.

The people we have visited are all friends from my five and a half years in the Foreign Service, a later-than-midlife adventure which few people even dream about. One comes into the FS with a group of others and mine was the 111th A100 class, named after a long-forgotten training room somewhere in Arlington, VA. There were 89 of us and Jeremy (Kuala Lumpur) and Nancy (Mumbai) were among them. Jeremy was in Thai language class, Nancy in Dutch, and I in Greek on about the same schedule so we spent most of 2003 together before heading off to our respective first posts. Jeremy made a detour first, however, and was a volunteer for six months in Iraq before the government was even (nominally) turned back to the Iraqis. He met Max in Thailand, married her two years later, served a tour in Berlin and is now an economic officer in KL.
Nancy and her husband Dennis hail from Portland, OR and have welcomed me as a single into their lives throughout our careers and have introduced me to many Portlanders in lots of places. As we were (the only two members of our A100 class) together in Western Europe (well, that’s a bit of a stretch for Greece), we saw quite a bit of each other, meeting in Athens, Santorini, Amsterdam and London. Their next tour took them to Bogota and Nancy is now the Immigrant Visa and American Citizens Services chief in Mumbai. That title qualified her to lead the American response to the Thanksgiving terrorist attacks here and her stories are harrowing. It is she, of course, who had to identify the American dead, including the rabbi who was killed, at the morgue.

Marielle and Steve also came into the foreign service after other careers (she was in the 114th A100 class along with Kathryn who you will meet later in Corsica) and we met in Athens where they arrived and remained about six months after my arrival and departure. Marielle’s second assignment was in Chenna, Indiai and they arrived in Delhi only a few weeks before my visit with them.

What all foreign service officers have in common is a love of travel, adventure, making new friends, representing the U.S. sometimes in spite of our foreign policy. We all are required to do one consular assignment, i.e., visa interviews or American citizens’ services. Some, like Nancy and her husband Dennis who has also been hired as an "eligible family member," have chosen consular work as their career area. Jeremy is an economic officer and I was in public diplomacy. Most of the time one doesn’t get to actually work in their chosen "cone" until their second or third tours. I didn’t work in mine at all except to be special assistant to the undersecretary for public affairs and public diplomacy, Karen Hughes and, briefly, for her successor, Jim Glassman.
While we are scattered around the world, we also cross paths very often. Everyone comes back to Washington for one week or six or eight month trainings for their next positions and new languages. As I was assigned to DC for two and a half years, I got to see everyone as they came through town and it is great. There is an open invitation to visit just about anyone you ever met wherever they happen to be.

Perhaps I have pushed that invitation a bit far by arriving on the doorsteps of Jeremy and Max, Marielle and Steve, and Nancy and Dennis for extended stays and their generosity in sharing their homes, time, help, and travel lust with (Cindy and) me has been just fantastic.

Friday through Monday, February 13-17. Weekend trip to Amritsar and the Golden Temple. Our flight back from Udaipur was hours late on Thursday and we lazed around at Steve and Marielle’s aside from a trip to see the Mughal Gardens outside the Parliament Building. They are open only once a year for about a month. Security is VERY tight, no gum, smoking, food, or even water is allowed, and the place is filled with school trips. Beautiful, elegant. We ate in a Thai restaurant in Connaught (sp?) Place a circle of once grand shopping centers and businesses.

Saturday morning bright and early we met at the US Embassy for an American agency/school/embassy sponsored trip to Amritsar which was probably one too many excursions for Cindy and me. We found almost everything about it distasteful but are surely glad that we didn’t miss seeing the Golden Temple, one of the most famous places in the world and rumored to be as popular a site for pilgrimages and tourist visits as the Taj or Mecca. The Sikhs are the guys with the turbans who you run across driving cabs in DC. The sect broke away from Hinduism over the caste system and pride themselves on humility and equality. The cornerstone of their rituals is a carrying of the hand written book from five or six centuries ago from its resting place adjacent to the Temple to the center of the Temple where it is read aloud continually by a group of priests until it is returned to its bed at sundown. A huge pool - more like a lake - surrounds the property and pilgrims actually bathe in it as part of the ritual. It was a cool morning when we were there and there were hundreds of men dunking themselves in the water and managing to redress under the cover of a towel. I was told that there is a separate place where the women can also bathe without being seen.

At the end of the Temple tour, there is a visit to the museum where we get to see the history of the nine Sikh gurus as they fought against their enemies. It may be all about equality but, like all religions, its also all about bloodshed in the name of God and some of the bloodiest paintings of beheadings I’ve ever seen.

We were also treated to one of the more bizarre rituals I’ve ever seen. Amritsar is 20 km or so from the Indian/Pakistani border and every evening at about 6:00 a ritual lowering of the flags on either side of the border occurs. Believe it or not, about 10,000 people assemble on each side and sit in bleachers (or in our case, due to our high diplomatic status and the advance notice to the Indian authorities that a group of 25 of us would be there, front row seats and lots of obsequeous behavior, tea, cookies, cake and a private meeting with the commandant) to watch a half hour of strutting, marching, huffing and puffing by the guards. Really quite a colorful show and fun to watch. The soldiers on each side do exactly the same movements and marches at exactly the same time and it’s all kind of a friendly contest of cheering and choreography.

So what didn’t we like about his little excursion?
- We met at the Embassy at 6 am.
- There followed a twenty minute bus ride to the train station in Delhi which is the home to about 10,000 homeless souls who sleep all over the station itself, bales of stuff waiting to be loaded on or off trains, in parked or abandoned cars. Truly a horrifying sight as the sun is beginning to come up over smoggy, filthy Delhi. A human cart dragger appeared to take our luggage away and it miraculously appeared again fifteen minutes later at the train.
- Our seats were clearly not in the first class car - or else this is as good as it gets. Dirty, drafty, the fine odor of the "facilities" which consist of nothing but a squat hole which empties directly on the track (giving a new meaning to "living beside the tracks"). Now, mind you, this was also NOT the bottom level of service because at least we each got a seat. And we were served lots of tea and not even so terrible food - breakfast on the way and dinner on the way back.
- It is a six hour trip each way..... We saw miles and miles of wheat fields (pronounced veet veelds) as the Punjab has become the breadbasket of India. Seeing green after all this time was an incredible treat.
- The guide, Mr. Singh. A smelly man with a short man’s inferiority complex. Name dropper extra ordinaire, he has been in the business for twelve years, is himself a Sikh, with an incomprehensible accent to his nevertheless knowledgeable English, he was insufferable. We alternated between trying to stand close enough to struggle to understand whatever he was saying and getting as far away as possible. Cindy persevered more than anyone else and by the end I thought they might kill each other because he was ticked off at her for asking him to repeat himself and pronounce everything again and she was, like the rest of us, sick of his pomposity.
- The hotel was dark, dirty, and they twice through us in crew lounges capable of holding 15 people and set up a barely passable buffet. Both Saturday’s and Sunday’s lunch were at the Chrystal Restaurant, either the only decent restaurant - and it was terrific - or the only one that gives a kickback to the tour company so we were spared the hotel for those two meals. We were actually allowed into the dining room for breakfast, a rather sorry affair. I think I reached my breaking point when, ten minutes after requesting coffee, I looked up to see a smelly waiter waving a teaspoon of instant coffee over my cup and asking if it was enough.....
So, back in Delhi at midnight on Monday night, President’s Day to the rest of you. We spent Monday and Tuesday recovering, packing and preparing for Cindy’s departure to home and mine for Mumbai.

Wednesday to Friday, Feb. 18-27 Mumbai
I leave Cindy at the airport with sadness that our six weeks together is over and with a real sense of good fortune that any two people could have gotten along as well as we did for this long. I have missed being able to comment honestly about what I’m seeing and reacting to since she’s left!

Mumbai impressions: Dennis and Nancy’s driver, Badr picked me up at the airport late afternoon. I was immediately assailed by the heat which everyone here considers to be just the end of a chilly winter. I’m not kidding. It’s 90-95 each day and this is only the beginning of the heat build-up leading into the monsoon rains in June. I’ll try not to mention too often how uncomfortable it is.

But where is the cacophony of honking motorcycles, cars, cabs, rickshaw etc. that I’ve come to expect? Not that honking is not still a part of driving. But here it seems much more cosmopolitan, sophisticated. And I’ve discovered the reason for the honking: It seems that rear and side view mirrors are either not provided or immediately broken so honking notifies that you are passing.... Wide boulevards. Observed lane markers and traffic lights. Not a single cow sighting on the way. Indeed, very few cow sightings in nine days in Mumbai. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but cement mixers, cranes on top of high rise building projects, even a steam shovel or two. Dennis told me that one high rise was taken down entirely by men with picks and axes though....

The apartment is in a building on top of a residential hill in a good section of town and not far from the famous and sophisticated centers of the city, a ten minute walk downhill to both the Consulate where Dennis and Nancy work and the Breach Candy Club. Yup, that’s the name of a swimming, tennis, and dining club right on the Arabian Sea which my friends joined as a way to escape the heat and the lesser-than-Delhi but still prevalent crush of people, traffic, and pollution. Originally a British social club, the only Indians there were servants but those days are long gone. So is the polish on the place but with a glorious view, an indoor and second floor balcony restaurant, a huge swimming pool and an undercover lap pool (one wouldn’t even consider going into the sea; consider 20 million peoples’ worth of raw sewage pouring into said sea and make your own judgment), playgrounds and canvas sunning chairs, it quickly looked to me like a place to call home for much of the time here.

I’ve been here for more than a week and have done very little because, well, you know.... The heat.

Worth mentioning, though:
The State Department and the Indian cultural centers were jointly celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s visit to India and Gandhi. MLK the third, his wife, and a whole retinue of Congressmen and Senators were in India for the President’s Day weekend. This kind of visit involves an incredible amount of work on embassy and consulate employees plates as every whim of each member of the delegation is indulged and a carefully choreographed schedule of sight-seeing, shopping (yes, guided shopping), dinners, meetings, and cultural events is put in place. The group arrived from Delhi the same day I did for a jazz and blues concert.
And I had a ticket! In Mumbai’s concert hall, a la Kennedy Center, Herbie Hancock, Shaka Khan, Dee Dee Bridgewater, the Theloneous Monk Institute musicians, and a host of other American jazz and various Indian musicians played to a packed house. The energy in the hall was palpable and I’ll never forget it. If only "we" would wise up to the indisputable fact that cultural and public diplomacy is not only cheaper but also way more effective than military might in winning the hearts and minds of people in other countries. This was an elegant, happy, sharing affair and everyone loved it.
Dennis and Nancy have a knack for meeting and becoming friends with interesting people wherever they go, especially among the arts community as Dennis is an artist. On Friday night we went to a gallery opening. And last night we watched the reprise of the Academy Awards at the home of a radio talk show host who’s one of the most recognizable names in Mumbai. Just us for dinner.... Another pinch me moment. The same gentleman had taken us to a promotional event for a vodka company in a very chic bar on top of the Taj President Hotel after the concert and I’ve never seen so many photos snapped in my life. Because an American diplomat of any level is considered a celebrity, Nancy and Dennis have appeared in India GQ and several times on the society page of the Mumbai paper.
On Sunday, we went to the horse races where "Elle" magazine was sponsoring one of the races. Located right on the water, the race course is a real throwback to the colonial era gone to seed. The glitterati were turned out in their finest and the paparazzi were there again snapping away.
Saturday afternoon was spent, as it often is here, shopping, lunching, and doing errands. With your driver waiting outside and holding down parking spots, it’s all very civilized. Nancy bought a new formal Indian outfit and I wore my silk Vietnamese dress to a Parsi navjote, the Indian equivalent of a bar mitzva. What a hoot. Lots of Bollywood dancing, preening, Indian food. Hot. Very hot, even at 10 pm.
Nancy’s motto is that one can only stand to do one thing in a day in India and I think she’s right. I took a cab downtown one morning at about 9:30, way too late to beat the heat, viewed the famous Gateway to India which was mostly the exit from India for the British in 1947, sat in the Taj Mahal Hotel (you remember it from the November terrorist attacks) coffee shop overlooking the pool over a cappucino, just so I could say I'd been there. Built by a man named Tata- now one of the wealthiest names in the world, with one of the biggest steel mills - at the turn of the last century when he wasn't allowed into whatever the fashionable British hotel of the time was, it is unbelievably opulent. I'm reading The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux, three inter-related stories, one of which is set at the Taj. I was surprised that I could even get in, given the terrorist attacks and the fact that the Taj group turned Cindy and me away in both Udaipur and Delhi. I walked to the unairconditioned museum of art. Nice collection, serious headache by the time I left. On the way to lunch, I not only saw a rat but tripped over him/her. He/she got confused crossing the sidewalk due to on-coming pedestrian traffic, all of which had backed well off, and he finally settled on coming in my direction. Lunched alone at the Indigo deli and fled for home with the driver who Dennis sent for me.

Yesterday, I felt that I had mastered the corner of Bombay which is mine and actually managed to find a store I wanted to shop in without benefit of driver. A long walk but at 10 in the morning it was okay. As I was paying for my purchases and inquiring about taxi rides back, a bescarfed woman offered me a ride. Turns out she’s from Saudi Arabia, has lived in India most of her adult life, and her niece from Kuwait was visiting her. Perfect English. Perfect. I "lunched" at Crossword Bookstore, a la B and N and then walked up the hill to a VERY busy hair salon where color and cut were accomplished for $40. Now I won’t have to worry about that again until I’m in Cairo!

Such is life in India. This is a change from the pace I have been living at as a tourist but it’s just going to have to be alright. It was my hope to stay in places long enough to really get a feel for living in them. So far, Cindy and I kept moving frequently enough to be mostly tourists, albeit tourists staying in someone’s home. Now, I have slowed to a crawl and will spend two weeks in Delhi going nowhere but for early morning walks and reading by the pool until it’s time for cocktails on the roof each night.