"The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of (the city), even as we walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Bombay minutes, (...) but I didn't and couldn't recognize it. I know now it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of gods, demons, empires and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce that courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. (...)
Then there was the people. Assamese, Jats and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin and Konarak; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Parsee, Jain, Animist; fair skin and dark skin, green eyes and golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incomparable beauty, India."
The text above is an extract from the international bestseller "Shantaram", written by Gregory David Roberts (Abacus, 2003), but it reflects with great reality what I felt myself when we first arrived in Mumbai. I knew beforehand that India was a country both intriguing and controversial, but I feel Mumbai is the place where the opposites are a thousand-fold more exponential, more obvious. It screams at you from every alley, every corner, every glassed-eye look of every face, every skyscraper or makeshift hut in the endless expanse of shantytowns.
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