I woke up to a bird in my room.

 

Accidentally leaving the door to my balcony open a crack, one of India’s prolific raven-type birds had bounced it’s way in and was ticking it’s beak along the wood floor.  When I got out of bed to shoo it back out the door, it just looked at me.  I had nothing to give it, so out it went.  I soon would learn that more often than not, all forms of life in India were like this bird - persistent and desperate, brave yet heartbreaking.  And this was in the first 5 minutes of my first real day in India.

 

I left the room around 10am (early for a Sunday morning in India...the street swarming with only a fraction of the weekday crowds) and met with Andrew Rose, the mastermind behind my trip here.  About my age, with a newly shaved head I’d soon be jealous of, we immediately hit it off and started our adventure.  We began by walking around the area of my hotel and where his apartment is, the ‘suburb’ of Bandra.  The word ‘suburb’ is completely devoid here of any of it’s western trappings....this is an almost suffocating mix of shacks, shanties, decaying apartment complexes, mid-construction high-rises, with the odd church or mansion tossed in for good measure.  We passed a small side-street fruit market, every type of exotic produce you could want, and paid 100 Rupees for a pomegranate.  It didn’t last long.  A beggar woman a block down made the international symbol for “hungry” and we couldn’t help but give it to her.  Andrew said it was for the best, and not just in the philanthropic sense.  Fruit here is grown with the local water, and the local water can kill you (at least if you’re a sensitive westerner like us).  

 

The fruit woman was just the first of literally thousands of the begging poor we would encounter and observe this day.  Almost too much to even comprehend, one has little time to rebound from a display of crushing inhuman conditions before facing the next.  Toddlers begging with infants in their arms, naked filth encrused children, the blind, crippled and helpless.  You have to find a way to mentally rise above it or it can crush you.  Sadly, giving to these people only encites mobs of even more of them relentlessly following you - the general rule for foreigners is to simply not give, as hard as it may be.  That rule was broken many times today, especially for those offering services (no matter how paltry)...but India’s poverty is unlike anything else in the world.  It simply can’t be described or comprehended, even when staring you in the face.

 

After wandering around Bandra (and the world’s saddest beach) we hopped a train, which is one of the more surreal experiences a traveller here can have.  Rickety, held together with little more than wire and solder, the train cars are filled beyond capacity.  ‘Packed like sardines’ hardly begins to cover it.  Sardines have it easy.  It is literally the highest density of packed in human beings I have ever seen (even on TV).  And this was a sunday, the lightest day by far.  We lucked out and found a first class car that we found comfortable standing room in...shoulder to shoulder.

 

We headed to Chowpatty (beach in the local dialect) where hundreds of fully clothed couples sat and watched the water.  A few waded despite the water being noxiously polluted (none swam...not because of pollution but apparently no one in India knows how to swim and are terrified of deep water).  There was a piecemeal little ‘carnival’...several ancient rides that are completely man-powered.  Meaning, to ride the ferris wheel, several men scale to the top of it, grab on, and proceed to pull it violently to the ground where they quickly hop off.  We rode one of those swinging boat rides, powered by two men the same way you’d push a child on a swing.  It was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

 

Which is an almost perfect way to describe India as a whole.