Mumbai does not wake up; it erupts. The first wave of sound comes from the birds, of which there are impossible hordes, especially (I'm told) now, at the end of the monsoon, when everything is wet and green and lush and bursting with a vitality that must last through the coming months of baking heat. There are swarms of crows, and from the moment the first of these begins its cries, only minutes elapse before the fabled 'early-bird' is joined by thousands of slightly less ambitious but equally vocal peers. Then there is a sound I have not yet identified, but is reminiscent of a cross between an owl and a gibbon, and I am increasingly worried that it's the pigeons. If this proves to be so, I will be doubly cautious of them, because no pigeon at home could possibly produce so mighty a coo**. Smaller, gentler birds (and once again, I apologize for having no idea what sort any of these creatures are, yet) soon begin to twitter and to tweet, and theirs is a more musical addition to the chorus, a soft soprano peeping against the tenor ululations of the pigeons and the alto rending of the air incited by the crows. Finally the less numerous but more exotic bird-calls (cuckoos, shrill trumpeting, whooping bellows and barking trills that evoke an image of Amazonian warriors, birds to be sure but nameless for now) join the request for sunrise, and soon it is difficult to differentiate them; a Mumbai morning begins in one massive, intricate avian conversation. Masala is the name given to the Indian mixing of spices, but it is, in its own way, the philosophical essence of Mumbai; the blending of things, diaspora, a feral plurality. Between five and six in the morning, the air comes to life with an auditory masala of bird call that I, at least, am neither able to nor interested in sleeping through. In short, the symphony here is free.
The next voice on the scene is not a voice at all, but the low, thundering rumble of the trucks; huge, lumbering remnants of two or three decades past, by the standards of home. The trucks here are all painted in bright colors—-usually deep reds and greens--as though industry is unwelcome here if it cannot don at least a pretense of beauty. That is another theme of Mumbai; glorious, gaudy, explosive color and pattern, sight-rending combinations of brightness and richness and contrast, as though every moment of production were also a celebration, or a mating call. The trucks amble on, but soon the baseline hummed by their huge engines, and the beat that booms as they slam their loads into pot holes is overtaken by the car horns. Once they begin, flooding the streets like loquacious automotive geese, they don't stop again until they've chased away the sun, and even then they squawk and bleat their way to sleep beneath the moonlight. But there are local echoes, too; the sweeping of floors with the long-bristled and short-handled brooms, running water from a multitude of huge, outdoor taps, wagons and crates that make the sharp crack and muted scrape of distinctly wooden things. Stalls and gates open by the thousand and so metal grinds against its rusted, flaking skin in a clanking, staccato jingle. Bells cry out to school children that classes are beginning, and the sounds of car alarms and radios constitute a juxtaposition as they interrupt the clatter, reminding me of home. The call to Muslim prayer (now strangely familiar, as a consequence of the Western media's obsession with the Muslim universe) is a distant, crooning Arabic voice that sounds from high above the city floor, played over huge P.A. systems to reach the faithful from amongst impossibly large populous of infidels below. One must be thankful that humans have no capacity to see the waves of compressed air that create sound, here, because the skies of Mumbai would be so densely occupied by ripples of endless amplitude and period that blindness could be the only effective consequence. What I mean to say is, basically, that Mumbai is an unbelievably cacophony.
But my favourite part of the city so far, and I confess I am pandering to cliché here, is the aroma. It is quite simply not like any other olfactory experience. I have on several occasions read as much by Western authors, who have taken it upon themselves to try and compress into English the endless assault on the senses that twenty-two million souls in such a small space can make. Even so, I was unprepared for the pungent, intoxicating reality of it, but they can hardly be held accountable for failing to prepare me, because the simple fact of the matter is that you've got to be here in the flesh to really understand it. Therefore, I too inherently join the failed ranks of articulating this experience. The smell is unique, and this morning in the shower it finally occurred to me what about it endears me so; it is the smell of the social. It is a smell the so-called natural world will never produce, because it is created by millions and millions of people doing what people do, and doing it together, which is of course something--anything--and endlessly thus. Human beings cannot help but do; we create, we move, we push, we change, we imagine. Marx, in what continues to be one of my favourite quotes, wrote: "What separates the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the architect raises his construction in imagination before he raises is in reality." The smell of Mumbai is incidental, but it is born of untold imaginings and labours compiled together in a geography that is bursting with the effort of containing them. The smell here is thick and humid, a composition of sweat, spice, shit, vehicle exhaust, industry, a million forms of flora, and a generality of life in every stage of birth and decay, all baking beneath the oven of Mumbai's equatorial latitude. It could clearly be said of any city that it's fragrance is contingent on the labour of its people, but I think it is too easy to mistake the scent of industry for the scent of the social; it is not just the fires that people light, here, that lifts the smell of Mumbai into the air, but the endless motions of the people themselves, and so the air smells of their histories as well. I love it, I love it, I love it; whatever else I may come to know about Mumbai--and there is enough hurt and harm in the poverty and fight for space here, to know heartbreak with a relentless intimacy--I have truly and helplessly fallen in love with aroma of this city. It is a small thing, perhaps, but the intertwining of scent and memory is a mysteriously salient means of connecting to our personal histories, and so I am grateful to have so beautiful a link to this adventure by which to travel here again from the platform of the future.
**[note: This was written two days ago; jetlag has found me waking at 3:00am, and in those early morning hours I've now confirmed that they are, indeed, pigeons. But, Mumbai was playing a joke on me. Housing here tends to occur in compounds; large blocks of apartment buildings that tend toward a shared central courtyard. It makes for many towering vertical alley ways of concrete and glass, which become magnificent natural amplifiers. As such, I realized this morning that the pigeons are not quite so perilous as I thought, but rather have been cooing into a makeshift amphitheatre outside my window, and thus leaving me unjustly intimidated!]
The next voice on the scene is not a voice at all, but the low, thundering rumble of the trucks; huge, lumbering remnants of two or three decades past, by the standards of home. The trucks here are all painted in bright colors—-usually deep reds and greens--as though industry is unwelcome here if it cannot don at least a pretense of beauty. That is another theme of Mumbai; glorious, gaudy, explosive color and pattern, sight-rending combinations of brightness and richness and contrast, as though every moment of production were also a celebration, or a mating call. The trucks amble on, but soon the baseline hummed by their huge engines, and the beat that booms as they slam their loads into pot holes is overtaken by the car horns. Once they begin, flooding the streets like loquacious automotive geese, they don't stop again until they've chased away the sun, and even then they squawk and bleat their way to sleep beneath the moonlight. But there are local echoes, too; the sweeping of floors with the long-bristled and short-handled brooms, running water from a multitude of huge, outdoor taps, wagons and crates that make the sharp crack and muted scrape of distinctly wooden things. Stalls and gates open by the thousand and so metal grinds against its rusted, flaking skin in a clanking, staccato jingle. Bells cry out to school children that classes are beginning, and the sounds of car alarms and radios constitute a juxtaposition as they interrupt the clatter, reminding me of home. The call to Muslim prayer (now strangely familiar, as a consequence of the Western media's obsession with the Muslim universe) is a distant, crooning Arabic voice that sounds from high above the city floor, played over huge P.A. systems to reach the faithful from amongst impossibly large populous of infidels below. One must be thankful that humans have no capacity to see the waves of compressed air that create sound, here, because the skies of Mumbai would be so densely occupied by ripples of endless amplitude and period that blindness could be the only effective consequence. What I mean to say is, basically, that Mumbai is an unbelievably cacophony.
But my favourite part of the city so far, and I confess I am pandering to cliché here, is the aroma. It is quite simply not like any other olfactory experience. I have on several occasions read as much by Western authors, who have taken it upon themselves to try and compress into English the endless assault on the senses that twenty-two million souls in such a small space can make. Even so, I was unprepared for the pungent, intoxicating reality of it, but they can hardly be held accountable for failing to prepare me, because the simple fact of the matter is that you've got to be here in the flesh to really understand it. Therefore, I too inherently join the failed ranks of articulating this experience. The smell is unique, and this morning in the shower it finally occurred to me what about it endears me so; it is the smell of the social. It is a smell the so-called natural world will never produce, because it is created by millions and millions of people doing what people do, and doing it together, which is of course something--anything--and endlessly thus. Human beings cannot help but do; we create, we move, we push, we change, we imagine. Marx, in what continues to be one of my favourite quotes, wrote: "What separates the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the architect raises his construction in imagination before he raises is in reality." The smell of Mumbai is incidental, but it is born of untold imaginings and labours compiled together in a geography that is bursting with the effort of containing them. The smell here is thick and humid, a composition of sweat, spice, shit, vehicle exhaust, industry, a million forms of flora, and a generality of life in every stage of birth and decay, all baking beneath the oven of Mumbai's equatorial latitude. It could clearly be said of any city that it's fragrance is contingent on the labour of its people, but I think it is too easy to mistake the scent of industry for the scent of the social; it is not just the fires that people light, here, that lifts the smell of Mumbai into the air, but the endless motions of the people themselves, and so the air smells of their histories as well. I love it, I love it, I love it; whatever else I may come to know about Mumbai--and there is enough hurt and harm in the poverty and fight for space here, to know heartbreak with a relentless intimacy--I have truly and helplessly fallen in love with aroma of this city. It is a small thing, perhaps, but the intertwining of scent and memory is a mysteriously salient means of connecting to our personal histories, and so I am grateful to have so beautiful a link to this adventure by which to travel here again from the platform of the future.
**[note: This was written two days ago; jetlag has found me waking at 3:00am, and in those early morning hours I've now confirmed that they are, indeed, pigeons. But, Mumbai was playing a joke on me. Housing here tends to occur in compounds; large blocks of apartment buildings that tend toward a shared central courtyard. It makes for many towering vertical alley ways of concrete and glass, which become magnificent natural amplifiers. As such, I realized this morning that the pigeons are not quite so perilous as I thought, but rather have been cooing into a makeshift amphitheatre outside my window, and thus leaving me unjustly intimidated!]
I wonder if you'll always notice the smell, or if you'll adjust as one normally would. Hopefully you won't adjust. I imagine the smells stimulate the mind.
ReplyDeleteWhen I went there, it was amazing; especially that nostalgic smell. I hope you do not assimilate to it.
ReplyDelete