Weekend #2

2 Feb-4 Feb

Friday wasn’t feeling well in the afternoon, nearly migraine-ish, so I came home early. On the train, a little boy came up begging, and it broke my heart. He couldn’t have been more than 4, dark dark skin caked with dirt and dust, sweeping along the floor, picking out who knows what to keep. He just looked so earnest and plaintive, his silence was screaming at me. I gave him a few rupees, which I think irritated the other women in the compartment, maybe because they think it will raise his expectations that they will give, too?

Responding to beggars is a tricky issue- apparently there are lots of schemes where the beggars report to someone like a pimp, and he takes a cut and manipulates them in various ways. I don’t think the same reasoning for not giving to individual homeless people on the street in San Francisco works here- there I rationalize by giving to reputable, legitimate organizations who not only serve the needs of the homeless but also organize to try to root out the problem altogether. Here the problem is just so vast, and giving to NGOs isn’t necessarily a sure thing. But giving to beggars when they come up to me on my way to the train, or in a rickshaw (one little girl came up to me tonight and touched my feet- a major sign of respect for Hindus- they touch the feet, then touch their third eye and heart) just seems like it perpetuates the cycle of dependency. Of course, on yet another hand, it’s such a pittance to me, why shouldn’t I give? When I’ve tried talking to other expats about it, many have had lots of attitude about being targeted by beggars because of their whiteness and how they won’t tolerate it. My friend Paul who has been traveling around Asia for 3 months now said he buys them food or clothes instead of just giving them money- that way you avoid the pimp scheme.

It was about 6 when I got off the train, and on the walk home I saw that everyone seems to take a break from their businesses and work to have chai and a snack. Chai wallahs go around with these metal carriers with glasses and hand out their ambrosia. Anyway, Friday night I went to Erin and Batya’s for Shabbat dinner, which was really nice and chill. Turns out that the Aussie I almost met before the Dalai Lama was in fact Benji, who I met formally Friday night, along with Danie, another World Partner member, and Matt, a graphic designer a few years older who also used to write for Let’s Go when he was a Harvard student (including the 2002 edition I have!), and worked on the living wage campaign. Their neighborhood, Mahim Sitladevi, is cute, I should explore there during the day.

Saturday I met Manor, the other AJWS volunteer corps member who also went to Brandeis and roomed with Daniel Pepper on a high school Habonim Dror program in Israel. We went to Elephanta Island, about an hour’s boat ride from the Gateway of India, a relic of the British empire, built to commemorate the arrival of the queen back in the day. Both the island and the area around the Gateway are full of peddlers of things as irrelevant to the site as plastic Barbie cell phones, these huge inflated balloons they have all over the place here, squeaky duck toys, and cheesy tee-shirts. On the island they also had touristy handicrafts arranged on tables forming a gauntlet in the main staircase you take to get up to the site. The caves were not what I’d seen before in Sri Lanka- more like carvings into the side of rock, not natural caves with internal carvings or paintings. Some impressive figures, but the most memorable sight of the day was a trio of baby puppies biting and fighting and then clamoring to feed from the mom. So cute! And really cute to watch a little Indian toddler coo over them, too.

Saturday night I just stayed in because I was pooped from the day’s exertion. The heat really slows me down, jeez. Sunday morning I read the rest of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, which is pretty good, watched K-Pax on tv, and then met Akshay at the Kala Ghoda festival, which was actually awesome. Live music and dance performances, lots of booths with different crafts and wares, food, a children’s play area, art exhibits, etc, spread out all over the neighborhood. He gave me a good tour, pointing out that the run down building I walk past every day on the way to work was actually the greatest hotel during the colonial period, where Mark Twain and various dignitaries stayed. Now it’s falling apart entirely. We also visited Horniman’s Circle, walked around Fort by the Naval area, walked through several street cricket games, and an art gallery where the painter was present- really cool modernized version of ancient Buddhist pieces.

Later in the evening when we stopped to get a cold drink, I saw a white girl on a pay phone (here pay phones work differently than at home. There aren’t private booths, there are stalls set up on the sidewalks with regular phones and you pay according to what kind of call you are making, and for how long (local land line, long distance land line, international land line, mobile, etc. I don’t know what they stand for, but they all say ISD and STD, and every time I pass I think it’s a stand where you can go and buy Chlamydia or syphilis or something. Ha!) and thought to myself that if she’s a traveler I could just let her use my cellphone, show some foreign solidarity. Then I realized she looked familiar, and as soon as she hung up the phone and turned around, I recognized her as Sarah Beller, my old roommate from Washington, D.C. who I probably haven’t seen in like 5 or 6 years. Crazy! She was here with her boyfriend Scott (they were together in 2001, too!), who works for the Ashoka Foundation. He had a conference. As it turns out, they stayed with Leah across the hall in her flat right before I got to Bombay. Small, small, tiny world. So weird.

A little while later we met up with Akshay’s friend Kaushal and 2 Korean travelers he’d met, Annie and Hee-Joon, along with two other locals, Rahul and Rohan. Akshay met the girls through his blog, I think, and they were staying with Rahul through couchsurfers.com, which is an international travelers’ informal home hospitality network, sounds pretty cool. Speaking of small worlds, turns out Annie’s freshman roommate at Yale was a senior at Shaker when I was in 9^th grade, and I remember her, and she also used to live in San Francisco in the same apartment building Miles has lived in for the past year. Wowee. Anyway, we all went to Leopold’s, a classic watering hole for tourists and locals on Colaba, the heart of the tourist district in Bombay. Colaba is also allegedly where Bollywood scouts pick people up, but I have yet to see this happen, unfortunately. Leopold’s was really fun, and it felt like true traveling to be with such a mixed group of people who all had this night in common.