Thirty years ago I left home.
I left my home town of Brisbane, Australia. I left my job. I left everything that was familiar. I left my country for the first time to go to Mumbai on a graduate exchange program. (I left home so long ago that Mumbai was still called Bombay.)
I arrived there suddenly, in the middle of the night. I landed in Bombay airport and students from the host University were waiting to meet me. I came out of the airport and saw the wall of people standing by the barriers. I remember noise and I remember the smell of the outside air - fuel fumes, rubbish. I was taken by taxi through the quiet streets to the women's guesthouse where I would be staying.
I looked out the window as we travelled. everything lit and unreal orange by the street lights. There were cows sleeping on the streets which made me smile, but the dividing strip in the centre of the road was strange and lumpy. I realised these lumps were clusters of sleeping people. Not just a few, but hundreds of them, all along this road, like a long people shaped traffic island, all the way from the airport into the city centre. I'd been warned about the level of poverty but I hadn't expected this.
My accommodation at the guesthouse was a bed in a shared room on the fourth floor. To get to the front door I had to step over several men who were sleeping on the floor in the building's entrance. Did I cry myself to sleep that first night, wondering what the hell I had got myself into? I can't remember. There were certainly other nights still to come where this would happen.
My first day. Did I go out? Or did I sit in the guesthouse, terrified by the outside, so much chaos, so noisy, so different.
"Did you eat yet?" my roommate asked me in the evening. "Let's go get some food. There's a place nearby."
A few minutes later I'm sitting on a folding stall on the street, (not the footpath, the actual street) under those orange street lights that make everything look like a strange dream, while a man with a wok balanced on the back of a bicycle cooks up a big bowl of fried rice. I didn't realise I was so hungry. I'm eating this food so quickly, then remembering halfway through what the guidebook and my doctor warned me: "Never eat street food! You'll get sick." The sense of disappointment in myself that I've failed already on day 1.
Except I didn't. I didn't fail and I didn't get sick. At least not that time.
A few days in and I realise I can't tell my Bisreli water bottle from anyone else's Bisreli bottle in the fridge. The Indian girls at the guesthouse refill their bottles directly from the tap.
(My doctor and the guidebook again: "Never drink tap water! It will make you sick!")
The Indian girls shrug. "Bombay water is the safest water in India," they tell me. "The water company is privately run by Tata. And it's the dry season. In monsoon season it's different."
I start drinking tap water too. And I don't get sick. At least not from that, not then.
I had a job to get to. That was why I was here, this was what I'd exchanged my old familiar life for. Every morning I would join the hundreds of people standing on the corner waiting for the bus. I had tried to learn Hindi numbers before I came to India as I thought it might be useful, and indeed, it was, because the bus I had to catch to work had numbers on the front in Hindi, with English numbers only on the side.
Every morning I'm standing in the hot sun with hundreds of native Hindi speakers waiting for the bus. As the bus comes around the corner I am trying in my head to work out what this number is. Is it the bus I need to get on to get to the office? By the time I have worked the number, the bus has pulled in to pick up passengers. I can see the English number now, but it's too late. The local people who could read the Hindi numbers are already well positioned, with the elbows out, ready to push their way onto the bus. This white girl is stuck at the back of the crowd, watching the full bus pull away.
Luckily, there were several buses stopping here that I could get on. Eventually, there would be enough of a gap in the crowd or I would be lucky to be standing at the right place when the right bus arrived and I could push and shove my way onto the bus and make my way to the office at Nariman Point.
The bus conductor was part magician, part contortionist. No matter how full the bus, he could make his way through the crowd of people, smiling, chatting, collecting fares, giving out tickets.
The journey home was easier as I got on at the starting point of the bus. I remember sitting in the bus as it slowly filled up. Warm afternoon air after being in aircon all day. I remember a smell of dust and charcoal and roasted peanuts - street vendors selling snacks to commuters for the journey home. I remember golden afternoon light, the burning heat of the day softening.
I remember the fumes and the smell of the thick pollution as the bus churned its way through the traffic of the afternoon rush hour.
The office was different to what I was used to. At regular points throughout the day a young boy would come by with a tray full of glasses of chai - spiced pre-sweetened tea - and place one on every person's desk. It was nice but at the same time I felt embarrassed to be served in this way. People explained to me to not feel bad, after all, this is his job. He is paid to do this. If he weren't bringing the tea, he wouldn't have a job, and without a job he wouldn't have any money and with no money he wouldn't have anywhere to live or anything to eat. It was a harsh lesson in capitalism and economics.
At lunchtime I followed my colleagues out to the street food stalls beside the office. There was a simple set up, each stall did a handful of dishes listed on a chalkboard. You chose your stall and stood by the shelf that ran around the cooking area. They took your order and a plate of food would be put in front of you. You ate standing up. The food was good but occasionally I ordered something too hot for my very much untested tastebuds.
"No really, it's fine," I gasped, choking and gulping down the best part of a soft drink, trying to calm the fire in my mouth.
(I learned early on not to trust Indians who said "Try this. It's not very spicy.")
The bathroom set up at work also held some surprises. I learned early on it was better to use the Indian-style squat toilet cubicle than the one western toilet cubicle. The cleaning ladies, who had their own special cleaning lady room next to the toilets where they sat and chatted when not cleaning, didn't know what to do with the western toilet so they didn't clean it. It was disgusting or worse. Instead the squat cubicles, all tiled, were always sparkling clean. As soon as anyone came out, the cleaning ladies would go in with a mop and bucket, throw water about, washing the whole place down.
My colleagues were all erudite people who were happy to explain facts about India to me. I learned a lot from them. Like the day in the office they were discussing what language people should learn. (India has more than 700 different languages.)
Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra, the state where Mumbai is located. Someone advocated for that as the local language.
"But how do you communicate with people from other states then?" someone countered. Hindi, as the official language, is the language you should speak, they posited.
"But what about in the South?" someone else came back. "Hindi will do you no good in the Tamil states." (There is a kind of linguistic line across India separating the northern Hindi speaking states from the southern Tamil speaking states.)
Some brave soul suggested English, but there was much dissension here, as English is an introduced colonial language, and the idea was they should be promoting their own languages. (I should point out this discussion took place in English amongst people working for an English language newspaper.)
"But English is the language of business," the brave soul persisted.
The final opinion that ended the discussion was "Sanskrit, because Sanskrit it the mother of all languages."
The others looked dubious at this, because this suggestion was similar to someone in Europe suggesting we should all learn Latin to communicate. While I suspect no one agreed with his sentiment, no one wanted to speak out against Sanskrit, so the conversation ended and people went back to their work.
It was work that left me crying in the night and indirectly made me sick.
I had been at work for several weeks, reading the papers "to learn about the situation in India". I had learned a lot, like the Indian number crore, meaning 10,000. Figures were just as likely to be reported in crore as in thousands or millions. In the absence of any other task I read the papers from cover to cover, even the sport, even the matrimonial ads, with their descriptions of "wheat coloured" girls in need of a groom.
I had left a job I liked. A job that kept me busy. I had spent all my savings to get here, and I was sitting all day at a desk with no task. I was bored. I was frustrated.
It took time to track down the manager who was supposed to be responsible for me. He was embarrassed.
"I'm about to leave this job," he explained, "so I can't give you any task. And my replacement will need some time to settle in before he could give you any task. It would have been better if you had come in six months time."
I had left a job I liked. A job that kept me busy. I had spent all my savings to get here, only to find there was no reason for me to be here. It was around this time I got sick. My body realised there was no need to be brave anymore, to show up bright and eager at the office. There was no need to show up anywhere.
This is when I cried through the night, cursing at the circumstances that had brought me here, contemplating my options since I finally had to admit this was a failure.
The local students tried to find another position for me but it was hopeless. Between sickness and disappointment, I had had enough. I was ready to leave. That night I cried until dawn, but I cried my sadness and sense of failure into a new idea. I wasn't going to go home just yet.
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