The bus trips between Pune and Mumbai were quite an experience. Why on earth did I even remotely imagine that it might be like a Greyhound bus ride? I was told that the Volvo bus service is the best and so looking forward to a luxurious and comfortable bus ride (even hoping that there might be Wi Fi like the kind you get on the Bolt bus) I got onto the bus at Wadia College in Pune…
I was in for a surprise: No reserved seats, no specific bus stops, getting on and off at random points on the highways, hauling your own suitcases across streets and over ground where there are no streets, fighting for the seat you reserved because other people did not reserve seats and yet sat wherever they wanted to, trying to dig for information because no reliable information is ever provided on the phone or in person, learning how to read geography to know where you are because there are no street signs, learning how to hold your body so that you don’t give out the wrong signals to the leering males who might be sitting next to you on the bus… Yes, a different kind of skills set that Indians have to learn in order to successfully navigate living the ordinary life in India. This brings me back to the great divide between affluence and poverty in India. In my few days in Mumbai I felt the same phenomenon of parallel universes that I had felt in Singapore. I was living in this universe of affluence but could see right through its transparent walls where next to me was the universe of poverty and squalor. But I could not get near there – I could not cross the dividing line, I could not step through the glass wall that divided these two worlds – the highway was too far removed from the roadside, the car was moving too fast to stop or allow my camera to take a picture, the apartment building was too high up on the hill, Peddar Road was too far away from Dharavi, Shiro’s was too far removed from the dhabas.
I could see the other world but I could not reach out and touch it – there were too many barriers. I would have liked to stop the car on the highway, get off and walk over onto the roadside and enter the world of slums, narrow streets, crowded alleyways, smelly sewers, dirty stalls, stray dogs and half-naked children playing on the streets – to get a feel for a Mumbai one seldom experiences because we happen to be born on the other side of the fence. But I know that along with all the squalor is also all the color, the vibrancy, the music, the dance, the layer upon layer of history and the arts and the context, the warmth and generosity of the human heart, the strength of the human spirit, the faith of human devotion, the potential of the human mind, the India that is Indian and not the India that is colonial and in being that is so “western”…
