I just had one of the best days ever today. I talked to a guy at my hostel this morning at it turns out he's also read Shantaram. He was going to go to one of the slums, so I joined him.
We took a tuktuk to the train station and then got on the train to town. I thought the train would be crazily crowded, but it was not bad at all. It was probably because it was noon on a Monday though. The trains don't have any doors so people are hanging halfway out of the sides of moving trains just like you would picture an typical Indian train.
We got off at our station and started walking. First there were a few shabby looking apartment buildings and I thought a bit disappointedly that this was the actual slum. We kept walking and crossed a street and walked into a small alleyway and two kids run up to us and want us to take a photo of them. After a few seconds there's a crowd of kids laughing and shouting "photo, photo!". I thought it might be a bit risky taking photos in the slum area, but I quickly realised that it was not gonna be a problem at all.
We walked along further into the slum and everybody were watching us with their big brown eyes and they would gather around standing in their tiny doorways and some would approach us wanting us to take their photo.
Their houses were tiny but very clean, they were all built on top of each other with whatever material they had happened to get their hands on. The passages between the houses were narrow and even more narrow passages went off in all directions from the main one. It was like a big maze of narrow passages lined with tiny doors were you sometimes glimpsed a bit of a small space that served as sleeping area, living room and dinner table for a whole family.
We kept walking in the slum labyrinth for more than an hour, sometimes getting to bigger streets were there would be the occasional motorbike honking their way through the crowd.
There are several slums in Mumbai and the one we walked through resides one million occupants. These are poor people but not one single person approached us wanting money or trying to scam us or sell anything. It felt as the safest, friendliest place so far in Mumbai.
We got some nice local food after our long walk through the slums.
We then headed to some place were they do the washing for many hotels and businesses, unfortunately we were a bit late so we didn't see much of the washing going on, but there were loads and loads of washing drying. We walked down to the area and had a walk around. It was one of the dirtiest places I've ever seen. Honestly, I don't know who would want to have their washing done in such a dirty, stinking place.
We got ourselves an awesome little tour guide while we were walking there, he was about ten years old and was showing us his tattoos, one of them being "boss" written across his knuckles. He kept pace with us for quite a while, walking through all the dirt with his bare feet.
We went to see a mosque called Haji Ali which is linked to the mainland by a path. All along the side of the path there were people begging. There were old wrinkled women, ancient grey men and tiny children. There were people missing limbs, blind people and some murmuring prayers.
After our long day we decided to head back to our hostel, only now it was rush hour on the trains. This time it was way more crowded. The station were we got on was ok, but the next station we got pretty squeezed together with a crowd of Indian men. They have special carriages for women, but since I was with Aron, we were in the regular carriage, which meant I was the only female and the two of us were the only tourists. We were squeezed right in the middle and we didn't know which side we were getting off on, but some Indian guy was really helpful and pointed us in the right direction. It was so crammed that we couldn't get to the doors, but when the train stopped a lot of people got off so we just followed the flow and managed to jump off the train.
We had a crazy tuktuk ride to wrap up the day. The whole tuktuk was really unstable and wobbled even when it was supposed to go straight, add to that a crazy driver and I was literally holding on to dear life. We dodged cars, bumps and people with such close proximity that I was certain we would hit something and with the state of the tuktuk it would have meant that we would have been scattered all over the street along with pieces of the tuktuk. This is everyday traffic in Indian and no matter how close it seams to a major accident everything just magically weaves past each other. Because everybody drives the same crazy way they are used to dodging each other and honking their horn as they do so. Luckily we got to our destination without a scratch even though my heart was racing.
After all the walking and excitement and action today I'm once again totally exhausted. Tomorrow night I'm going to spend on a night bus going to Goa, so maybe I should take it a little bit easy tomorrow considering I might not get that much sleep on the bus.
But you never know in Mumbai...