Our Mumbai Neighborhood
We watch India swirling with life on the street below our hotel window on the Colaba Causeway-the stretch of land that the English filled the Bay with that turned Bombay, now called Mumbai, from an Island into a peninsula. I love to watch the pretty (little children always are) school children in their clean ironed uniforms pour out of the building across the streeet at 3pm into loving care of parents who come to meet them helping carry away their florescent pink water bottles and blue backpacks like young school children everywhere.
The trim, graceful garbage lady in a dirty grey sari collects garbage out of the street at 7am in the morning with two pieces of cardboard and a green plastic tub…by evening the street gutter is full of garbage again. We are staying at an intersection of two streets and the woman cleans one street but not the other…one street must be her street…maybe she is paid by the private school so the parents don’t have to walk through the litter.
After four days the beggars know we won’t give them anything so they leave us alone…we have become part of the community of taxi drivers, fruit vendors, shop sellers, security guards and street cleaners. One pretty little beggar-woman carrying a baby looked up at me and asked where I was from…America I said…oh, she said with a sad face, I saw the plane that went into the big building on TV…are you afraid in America…
Tags: Bombay (Mumbai), Conversations, India, Mumbai, Touching Experiences
Zoe