Law, Partially

I’ve been back in the States for two weeks now. Some Indian reflections are in order. Consider this closure. I think I’ve done all the things in the States that I had been dreaming of all summer. I’m drinking red European wine and eating European cheese as I type. (American wine and cheese were also dreamed about, but it just so happens that I’m going European tonight.) These items are prohibitively expensive in India, but at Costco in the U.S., they’re just the right price. I ate Mexican food at El Maguey. I saw friends and family. I spoke English, and everyone understood. As I type this, I’m thinking, being back home sounds underwhelming, and actually it probably is. I have unfinished business, it feels, in India. Eleven weeks just wasn’t enough time. I was intimidated by India when I first arrived there. What shocked and scared me most at first was the madness of the streets. People were walking on highways. Also on highways there were roadside stalls set up. People didn’t stop at r...

Amand, my shoe-shining friend who I bought the box for, reappeared in my life today. I was supposed to meet him last week, but I was sick, and I never had the ambition to make it over to Linking Rd., and then I went to Goa. It’s a pretty big hassle for me to get to Linking Rd. after work because after work I have to come home and work on writing my blog and writing for Jurist. Plus, I usually stay at work for 10 or 11 hours. I wasn’t sure if Amand would still be at Linking Rd. He’s supposed to start shining shoes at a train station. But I went there today, and there he was at McDonalds. He saw me, and he was real excited to see me. He wasn’t doing very well. He said he hadn’t been making much money since the rains have started so heavily. He said no one wants their shoes shined on Linking Rd. in the rain, but they would want their shoes shined in a train station. He said he got his license from the railway company, but now he needed the blue shirt. Blue pants and blue shirts are the un...

This is a short anecdote about how foreigners like me are ignorant enough of custom to experience what natives won’t. One time I rode an overnight Amtrak train from Toledo, Ohio, to Penn Station, New York. Sitting next to me on the train was a guy about my age from Estonia. I’ve been to Estonia, so we had a jumping off point for conversation. He had been touring the U.S. on an Amtrak rail pass, similar to a Eurail Pass – a certain number of rides taken within a certain number of days. Our train left from Toledo after midnight. He told me he had spent the earlier part of the day walking around Midtown Detroit. Midtown Detroit? Around the train station? Are you serious? I volunteered at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Midtown Detroit. The ten blocks or so of the Cultural District and Wayne State University were passable by Detroit standards, but the train station neighborhood? I didn’t even like driving through there. This is one of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods. There are bloc...

Maybe the monsoon’s not here. It didn’t rain today, but I did go to a slum wedding. I bestowed a bunch of bananas on the two grooms who were riding through the market district on horses. The grooms were 19 and 17 years old. Yesterday in writing I called the box maker Babapul, but his name is actually Babalu. His younger brothers were getting married. Babalu said he would get married after the monsoon. There was a riotous party marching down the street. Young people filled the streets dancing, and the only music was some heavy, hard drum pounding. Prof. Rama told me at the Tamil wedding that the drums during the wedding keep out the bad spirits. This is the two brothers riding down the street on horseback. They raised their veils for me to take their picture. Their wives-to-be were waiting for them at home where later tonight they’ll walk around a fire seven times, and everyone will continue partying until 5a.m. I could have taken so many pictures here, and I hope the blurriness of thes...

I told my lawyer friend, Ganesh, this morning that I went to Dharavi. I told him that I didn’t think it was so bad. He said Dharavi is huge, and I was probably only taken to the best parts. This may be true. He said the Hindu part is not so bad, but the Muslim part is squalid. This is in line with what I know about India’s Muslims. They tend to be poorer and disadvantaged. (read at least the beginning of this article ) He said that because criminal enterprises are based in Dharavi, he’s had to go there before to scout out counterfeits of our company’s products (cooking and hair oil). He said in the Muslim area, people will be pooping and cooking in the same place, and there will be animals slaughtered in the middle of the street, the blood running down the middle of the street, which is an open sewer. It makes sense to me that the Muslim area would be worse, but Ganesh is a Hindu (a Brahmin at that), and Hindus tend to look down on Muslims. He said Muslims don’t get educated or work be...

Dharavi should be fairly famous in the U.S. because it was in National Geographic in May. I was rather gripped by this article , but I figured I would be too scared to venture into there by myself. (Check out the Geographic photos too ) Alvin found this tour group, Reality Tours , on the Internet that offered tours of Dharavi. He, I, Christine, and Jingyi went on the “Slum Tour” on Saturday. I told some lawyers at work I was planning to go, and they asked if I was crazy and said, “I hope you have life insurance.” Among their reasons for me to not go is that organized crime is based out of Dharavi. I think that organized crime is actually based all over the city (and in Dubai). At an Indian 25th wedding anniversary party last night, I told a group of Indian yuppies that I was going to Dharavi and jaws all around me dropped. One yuppie said, “Are you serious? It’s shit there, man.” But I think this kind of purposeful avoidance is symptomatic of how one lives in India. The middle classe...

Linking Road has become a central location for shopping in Mumbai. Lining the street are boutiques selling cheap clothes that look like Western clothes. There is also the hip department store, Shopper’s Stop, selling brands I have never heard of but that are all the rage for Indians who want to dress like a European or American. There is also a United Colors of Benetton. The street is overflowing with people and cars. Vicky from Jaipur and His Quest for a Box Every day people are pouring into Mumbai from the countryside, looking for opportunity. Last week a boy asked to shine Alvin’s shoes, and Alvin started talking to the boy. The boy was named Vijay and said he was from Jaipur in Rajasthan. He said that in Jaipur he heard that he could get a good job in Mumbai because he spoke English well, but in Mumbai he couldn’t get a real job because he couldn’t afford the legal papers that would allow him to work. They cost Rs. 9000 or about $120. He said his shoe shining business would be much...

If he wasn't dead when I saw him two nights ago, he was dead last night. A friend stopped in a rickshaw next to him last night and said he was still lying there. She looked for chest movement, and there was none. And there were flies on him. So what are you supposed to do when you come across a dead body? Pick him up and take him to a crematorium? This is India, so they'll probably just throw him in one of these open sewers. But who are "they"? Who does pick dead bodies up off the street?

I was having tea with two of my coworkers in the cafeteria of my office building. There are large windows all along the exterior walls, all were wide open, a breeze was flowing through, and we had a view of Mumbai proper across Mahim Bay. I pointed out the window and told my coworkers that I had walked down there on the shore of the bay, which is also on the “wrong side” of a highway, on my first morning in Mumbai. This was my ill-fated “jogging” adventure – the one where I walked around lost for almost 3 hours. My coworkers were surprised I had gone down there and said don’t go down there after dark. It’s not safe. On this wandering adventure I could tell I was on the “wrong side” of the highway, and there was a tunnel under the highway to get to the “right side.” It was a long tunnel, full of trash and a few people sleeping on the ground, and I was like, “Shit, what’s going to be on the other side.” I walked right out into a slum. I was wearing my dorky jogging shorts and running sho...

Seeing these people in the streets so poor, all these people setting up their shabby stalls hocking whatever they can, these road workers shoveling concrete with their bare feet, not to mention these massive slums, as the Indians call their shantytowns, and the little slums set up on sidewalks and in alleyways – seeing all of this on my way to work, I was thinking of how my Mumbaiker acquaintances and my guidebooks are so fond of saying how little street crime there is in Mumbai, how we’re not in danger when walking down the street, how these suburban kids in Lockhandwala are joking with each other as they walk right past a slum. Why aren’t these slums overrun with drug crime like the favelas of Brazil or the inner cities of the U.S.? Is this just not the Indian way? Is it that the Indian way is to work hard instead of pursuing crime’s quick buck? But isn’t selling drugs also hard work? I mean, it’s risk your life work. Maybe it’s because Indians don’t take as easily to recreational d...