Its been a week since my stay in Mumbai; armed only with a clean-shave and a mono-brow I had braved the chaos of Pune's Parihar Chowk (looking for Greyhound), the Deccan highlands navigated by a cng cowboy and the thick, belching smog of Mumbai's city limits' traffic to meet my friend Rohan, a fellow from the wars at Wits.
Okay, maybe it wasn't as bad as I make it sound:
After a slight scuffle between the Greyhound conductor and a mysterious champled side-pathed short-pantsed gentleman, I found myself sitting pretty in a cab with 3 other fresh-faced professionals (computer programmers, of course) bound for the Dadar train/bus/taxi station in downtown Mumbai.
I spent the ride from Pune to Mumbai in a light sleep, broken only by the intermittent screech of tyres and frantic hooting (the car had only been dinged once the whole trip).
Being a classic feringhee I can admit (with no shade of guilt whatsoever) that I was a little apprehensive about the trip: I was actually more than a little anxious about the city that loomed in front of me, 2.5 hours later. With the scars of 26/11 still fresh, my Mum's panicked worry about the regional unrest and my Spanish roommates grim comment ("You are bery brave"), I was unsure about what to expect.
Here I was, brown enough to be taken for a local at first sight, with a skin-deep heritage that crumbles easily under hindi interrogation, almost ready to yield up my personal effects to anyone who would ask, stuck in one way traffic surrounded by an odd neighbourhood in which slummy, derelict flats rub shoulders with clean, sparkly commercial headquarters.
This is my first image of Mumbai and, indeed, the most stark image that I have of India; a place of contradiction in which the modern wealth of a burgeoning economy sits juxtaposed with a busy reality of life ancient - poverty and progress in the same bed.
As our zero-emission jalopy descended into the depths of the city (I didn't even notice us moving; its seemed as if we had reached the chowk by osmosis) I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I spied the large, unmistakable frame of my buddy Rohan and I realized that I wasn't alone at all, and that all my previous misconceptions were about to be dismantled.
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