Marine Drive at night strikes me as an excellent microcosm of Mumbai.
Marine Drive is a major road in Mumbai, which runs along the shore of Back Bay, an inlet of the Arabian Sea that is encircled for about 270 degrees by the city. On the ocean side of the road, which is 6 or 8 lanes wide (the "lane" is a pretty flexible concept here) and divided in the middle by a narrow median, there is a wide sidewalk promenade and a concrete bench that hangs out over the "beach."* The place is reasonably well lit, and the person at the front desk of my hotel assured me that it's safe until late into the night.
*It's not really a beach, at least not until the north end of Marine Drive. Everywhere else, these very strange concrete blocks are piled up along the water's edge. Think about the shape created if you start with a ball and then add lines to it out to what would be the vertices of a triangular prism with the ball at its center. That's the shape of these blocks. I'm sure there's a name for this shape, but I have no idea what it is.
The first thing that struck me when I walked out onto Marine Drive about an hour and a half ago was the view. The only other time i had been on the road was in a taxi coming in from the airport yesterday morning, when it was so hazy that very little of anything was visible. Tonight, on the other hand, the lights and billboards of Mumbai's skyline lined the bay all the way around its edge. The sheer number of buildings was less impressive than their height; Mumbai rivals New York in the skyline department (and surpasses it by about 6 million in the population department). This being India, at least two of the buildings were cricket pitches, both of which are within four or five blocks of my hotel, and one of which will host the Cricket World Cup final in a few weeks.
More interesting, though, were the people. The promenade was bustling with Mumbai residents of various persuasions and backgrounds. Girls in miniskirts walked hand-in-hand with boyfriends, as did girls in abayas. Indian twenty-somethings chatted rapid-fire with each other, code-switching easily between English and one of the many Indian languages I don't understand (this being Mumbai, it was most likely Hindi or Marathi, but it's all Greek to me). On the road, ramshackle taxis that look like they were built by the British Raj jostled for position with sleek new Mercedes sedans.
And then the wind shifted, and for a second I was stopped in my tracks by the foul odor of raw sewage. It is, after all, Mumbai.
And then I kept walking, enthralled by the beauty of the scene and the crowds passing me by. It is, after all, Mumbai.
