When I found out in March that my company was sending me to India for six weeks, I was elated but apprehensive. Removed from even distant family, I would be enduring the nation's metros alone. But when six weeks were up, I decided repeatedly to extend my stay, until I had to be dragged away-four months later-from a city I had grown to love: Mumbai, formerly Bombay.
I felt the first stirrings as I spent a weekend taking a local train down to Churchgate, sticking my head into the wind and leaping out at the stop; walking from Victoria Terminus (universally, "VT") to Gateway of India, passing Flora Fountain and High Court on the way; strolling past shopkeepers on MG Road: sellers of shoes, shirts, toys (anything, really); and racing back to meet friends at Metro Cinema for an afternoon showing of "Sarkar Raj," about the shady dealings of the Bombay underworld.
Even when the monsoon struck in June, a time when my friends told me my love would be tested most, I was deeply enchanted. This entailed slogging through waist-high water to meet a Duke friend at the rail station, sequentially taking three rickshaws to get home from Juhu when each broke down in the flood and suffering a blackout and climbing eight flights of stairs to change out of dripping clothes, just to go outside and play in the rain. Yes, it is painful, but they also write songs about the Bombay rains, to praise the city that renews itself annually.
The struggle to live in Mumbai, from its wealthiest to poorest inhabitants, is not an easy one. Mumbai matches the world's highest urban density with wildly overpacked roads and rails, adds in thousands of Indians streaming daily to its choked confines (including Asia's largest slum), and mixes in city and state politics that makes Washington, D.C. look like child's play.
But people come anyway, from all corners of India, with the mentality that anyone can make it in Bombay. That ambition guarantees me the ability to want something-deodorant, chocolate, vodka, nail clippers, cellphone charger, tailoring or camera repair-and find it in a small shop within a five-minute walk. And yes, you can get a haircut on the street for 33 cents.
Those who struck last week, instead of building on this singular dream, were working to destroy an open city. Bombay was hardly an innocent; years of pursuing money and pleasure-through means licit and illicit-saw to that. Bombings and gun battles in every major city across India over the last 15 years have inured the urban Indian to the background noise of terror.
This attack, while more brazen and terrifying, was hardly unprecedented. In 2008 alone, I had experienced the attacks in Ahmedabad (a city in my home state) and in the tourist capital of Jaipur (only three weeks after I had visited). Nor was the attack particularly democratic. Sadly, Mumbai is now a rich city tailor-made for the elite, and the terrorists struck there. Normal to me was dinner at Dome or Blue Frog, striding confidently through the Oberoi lobby en route to the rooftop pool overlooking the bay, or gazing out to sea from a Nepean Sea Road balcony.
Why does this latest act of brutality cut so deep? Perhaps because Mumbai found its way into my heart. I saw a city of kind and generous people, from housekeepers to taxi drivers to the corn grillers at the Dadar shoreline and roll-makers at Bade Miyan, behind the Taj Mahal hotel.
Amit Varma wrote on the India Uncut blog, "I often say that Mumbai is the only city in India where you can land up from anywhere and feel at home right away. Indeed, if the men behind this mayhem... came here as tourists, they too would feel at home in no time."
In the wake of the attacks, the time for fault-finding and finger-pointing, for calls for uprising among an apathetic elite came too quickly (though indeed it is necessary). The time for singing the praises of this beautiful and vibrant (in Suketu Mehta's phrase) Maximum City was skipped.
Perhaps you would have liked to have read a reflection from a lifelong Mumbaikar who has seen the city far more deeply and brutally. But this is what it means to fall in love as an outsider, and see that loved one hurt, badly.
Hirsh Sandesara, Trinity '06, is a first-year medical student. A candlelight vigil remembering the victims of the Mumbai attacks will be held Thursday at 6:30 p.m. on the Chapel steps.
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