The rhythm of life

Sat downstairs in Leopalds I see prosperity. Inside Mumbai’s most famous bar, large photos of the Eiffel Tower and ancient Greek columns hang beneath the ceiling, just out of reach.

India’s film industry produces around 1,000 films a year (double Hollywood)

People pass by the open windows with a resentful leer. A single beer costs six times the working class Indian’s daily wage. Then I go outside and see the overflowing public toilet spitting urine onto the street, skinny homeless people breathing in the fumes as they curl up on the unforgiving pavement, small children lying almost lifeless on dark streets and beggars with outstretched hands, despairing.

India divides. And in Mumbai this disparity between rich and poor reaches its pinnacle. Initially I was overcome by the unfairness, focusing on it every time I turned a corner. But once I accept it, and settle into Mumbai’s inimitable rhythm of life, I find a city in which the diversity of India can be experienced in a single weekend.

Mumbai is not a pretty city during monsoon. Torrential tropical storms devour the streets, squashing people together under insufficient shelter. Buses become scenes of fistfights as 20-odd people fight to squeeze on; if you can’t get on, preventing others from doing so is an acceptable second prize. When the rain abates, I only see fumes, the bellowing smoke overwhelming the air as it rises from roads of impenetrable traffic.

But tell me a financial capital whose main roads look good? From four lanes to two, and then narrower again, I run from the fumes into Mumbai’s slender capillaries. A man frying paneer pakoda in bubbling oil, an amputee with a homemade crutch and a gentle smile, people drinking boiling chai in plastic shot glasses, a humongous bushy moustache shouting for rickshaw customers.

Everything stops as the clouds unload, and then it resumes again, as if somebody is pressing pause and play on the DVD player. For over an hour, I walk up and down, watching the microcosm replay itself, before sharing a chai with the amputee.

Picking my way through the microcosm, I find a crowded cafe. “Where is the toilet?” I ask. “Just through there,” replies the chef, pointing towards the back of a grey concrete building with his stomach.

He substantiates the directions by walking me towards sacks of rice, past festering fans and towards an open doorway. With my body blocking the remaining light I tentatively step forward, my left foot squelching, my right foot following… the toilet was literally just through there.

Stepping into the toilet wasn’t how foreigners used to enter India. The Gateway to India was completed in 1924 and served as a monumental show of colonial power, marking British VIPs’ entrance to the continent.

As the city grows around it, and its indo-saracenic walls fade, the gateway to India resembles an evaporating attempt at power. There is something comical about a 26-metre high glorified gate trying to maintain its authority in a city that has long thrown away colonial shackles. It’s the city’s chief tourist attraction, but its incongruence with the surroundings has turned it into a Disneyesque fabrication.

I find other remains of British rule in the nearby district of Colaba, large discoloured balconies overtaken by locals selling counterfeit DVDs and sunglasses. A curious suited man stops me, gazing at me through off-set eyes.

“Are you famous?” he asks. “No.”

“Are you sure?” I’m embarrassed, perhaps Mumbai’s gossipers have spread news about the toilet incident, but he begins to smile: “You should be in Bollywood”.

India’s film industry produces around 1,000 films a year (double Hollywood) and regularly needs white people as extras. The film is Houseful 2, and the set resembles a British palace designed by foreigners, everything regal yet exotic.

Three competitive assistants give me directions, each pressing forward their faultless creative vision with clarity, like “this is a wedding, look happy, why are you smiling?”

I’m a prosperous Western guest at a royal Indian wedding, standing with a glass of poisonous, champagne-coloured liquid and forcing my unconscious not to lift it to my mouth. I imagine the day six months from now, when Indians flock to the cinema to witness a scene, 52 minutes in, when you can spot a white guy in the background almost puking on his bowtie after sipping his drink.

Bollywood is the Indian obsession and on cramped streets the movie theatre shines proud. Beside the gleaming welcome signs a succession of moustachioed heroes sell traditional snacks from rattling wooden carts: crispy potato samosas, deep-fried chilli, squidgy mushroom pakoras, not a scrap of popcorn.

Then from the humble comes the ostentation, the inside of a Mumbai movie theatre, showing that it’s not only what’s on screen that transports Indians to a different place.

Around the corner a temple is another vessel of transportation. A line of simple robes files inside, the unassuming locals going for their meeting with one of Hinduism’s 30 million gods. Using a bag full of street snacks as conversation starters, I try to find out more.

The answers come back like a dreamt-up version of Dungeons and Dragons. There is Shiva, the woman god, who has nine faces, personalities, so people have a different face to pray to, dependent on the situation. And she rides a tiger.

My favourite is Hanuman, the monkey god. His magical powers include a long staff which can control time and weather. An animal god worshipped by humans? Hanuman is undeniably cool, flipping the foods chain and suggesting our alpha status isn’t perennial. In spite of their circumstances, I find the working class Mumbains have an endearing arrogance, one that appears to come from the inside, dare I say it, from their religion.

Back among the rich in Leopalds, I see the same arrogance. Mumbai seems to have everything India is aspiring to: the skyscrapers, coffee shops, in-your-face advertising, flash cars and blackberries. In some places it’s as if the people are laughing in the face of poverty.

But the swagger of the affluent Mumbains seems fabricated by material consumption. And after a weekend exploring the different sides of Mumbai, I know there are better places to spend my time than hanging out with the rich. I’d rather be on the overcrowded streets, among the people who make the city tick… even if it means treacherous toilet facilities.