After a couple of days rest and recuperation, I caught my second train up to Mumbai. This time is was 400km and cost the princely sum of £1.50. There is no '3rd class' technically on Indian railways, it's '2nd class' and I won't go into all the details, but there are many different kinds of ticket one can buy for train travel, but 2nd class is basically bottom class, from a multitude of better classes, steerage if you will, and what we would commonly think of as 3rd Class. It is the only ticket you can realistically get on spec. Given that I was travelling to one of the most densely populated places on planet earth, Mumbai, it was also a bit busier - ok, I won't mince words, it was a LOT busier. Indians have no sense of personal body space, and good job too. For 6 hours, people were nuzzling my armpits, sniffing my crotch, and goosing my bottom. It felt more like a fully clothed orgy than a train ride. Top spot seems to be a horizontal lounge affair in the luggage rack, on top of the luggage. Sadly these tiny smudges of prime real estate had long since been claimed. Bad luck for me, I got to sniff and goose a rather large Indian gent who was in even worse sanitary condition than myself. All thoughts of orgies flickered and then died, mere moments after he inserted his armpit into my nose. Still and all, it was nothing more than a few percentage points worse than the daily commute to Blackfriars on Thameslink and I still rate the Indian railway system as the very best cheapest and deadly way to travel.
So I'm in Mumbai, well kind of. I'm actually in a place a shade north of Mumbai proper, Thane. Thane is pronounced 'Tar-ney' as in 'chilli con Tar-ney' and not as I thought 'Thayn' as in 'Hail Macbeth, Thayn of Cawdor'. That caused all sorts of grief at the railways ticket office yesterday. It's a city in its own right but is basically being gobbled up as Mumbai itself oozes outwards, ever growing. It is now essentially a large suburb of the super conurbation. A bit like Widnes, is to Liverpool, or Stockport to Manchester. It serves no real purpose in its own right besides providing a ready pool of labour for its bigger and on the whole more prosperous brother. That's not offensive, surely? Possibly, I know nothing about those places. Alright it's like Winnersh to Reading. Mostly pointless but with a train station. You get the idea. I need the train station here to carry me further north. It has obviously crossed my mind to travel into the heart of Mumbai as I'm here, but the place is absolutely vast, I can see it stretching out, dominating the horizon, and I know what I'll find when I get there; even more madness, even more people and even more noise. Thane has a surplus of all these qualities already, so I'm fine for now. Mumbai is permanently covered in a thick beige miasma, a poisonous airborne soup of fumes and pollution. A candy floss of carcinogens if you will. I honestly don't think it can be terribly good for the 20-ish million Mumbandians who have to live with it.
Me avoiding the very nexus of all this foul atmosphere means that I'll miss out on a few tourist pics and taking a tour of the famous slums but not much else I reckon. Having seen, having lived, in several slums now, I don't believe I'm missing out on anything new. Besides, they are a tourist attraction now and I don't feel highly motivated to join other westerners, holding their noses, while photographing the less fortunate and generally getting in the way of people while they're fighting for their very survival. I'll stay in Thane and wait for my train.
A seemingly tranquil Thane. It's not, but there you go.
The best surreptitious shot of train armpits I could manage.
The Mumbai miasma. I LOVE the smell of carbon monoxide in the morning....
No comments:
Post a Comment