Today began pleasantly, turned frustrating, became more frustrating, took a detour into embarrassing and shameful and had ended up with knackered.
The parrots were pleasant. I am staying in Hotel Moti, just behind the Gateway of India (on land not sea). The hotel, run by the “friendly and hospitable Raj” as Time Out Mumbai describes him (and he is), is on the ground floor of a huge, splendid five storey crumbling mansion that could easily be an extra in an Addams Family film. But because Raj is hospitable and because the ground floor was full, he housed me instead on the fourth floor where he lives with his family. There is no lift. The room was enormous and the fourth floor has a wraparound balcony where, if you lean out far enough, you can see the Gateway of India. And in the morning, after Raj's maid has brought tea and toast, which doesn't happen on the ground floor, you can see green parrots. No cage, no nothing. Just a load of green parrots, hanging out on the building opposite.
From then on, the day went downhill.
Probably it wasn't sensible. I called Jockin for more instructions. I said, “I've been walking for 15 minutes and I haven't reached the T junction.” He said, “It depends how fast you walk.”
Fifteen minutes later, I found the building. I found the office. The staff looked at me with a profound lack of interest. They were busy reading newspapers. I asked where Jockin was. “He left.” When is he coming back? Shrug.
I thought of a Zen garden I'd seen in Japan and wished I was sitting in it.
Eventually Jockin phoned and ordered them to take me to see some toilets. A boy and a woman who was either pregnant or fat led me for twenty minutes through Dharavi slum and barely spoke to me. They led me to a toilet I'd been taken to the day before, and then to another one I hadn't seen, beside a pile of rotting disgusting garbage and a fetid drain. There is lots of rotting fetid garbage and fetid drains in slums. I've had enough of them now. Please give me plumbing.
Two hours later, three hours after the appointed time, I left. I spent those two hours talking with my mother in Hong Kong by text message, and marvelling at how a dozen people could fill an office and do bugger all except read the newspaper, and how rude they were. I have never walked out on an interview before, but I was by then not in the best of moods to ask Jockin about his views on shit. Even if he did win the Asian Nobel Prize. By the end, someone I was texting was advising me to burn down the rude peasants' hovels (he was in Solihull, to be fair) and that was mild compared to what I felt like doing.
The train back was relatively empty. When it was near Victoria Terminus, I stood up to get off. Not at the door, because Indian trains have no doors. At the opening, then, some women were standing all along the side. Some pushed up next to me, and I moved and stood in the middle. I was glowering. A woman said, “SIDE!” and I said “Yes, boss,” because I was in my militant and unpleasant mood that my mother knows well, having watched it occur fairly often over a twenty year period. But I moved. When it got to VT, three million women leapt onto the train and shoved and pushed and crowded and panicked. The woman who'd said “SIDE!” smiled at me. The smile said, “See?” but in a nice way. I lost about two kilos being squashed by commuting women. It was like seeing two hundred rats squeezed in a very tight space and trying to get out of it.
No it wasn't. It was like nothing I've ever seen before.
That was the embarrassing bit. My glowering helps with putting off gropers (groper count today: zero), but sometimes it gets out of hand. Sorry, woman on train.
By the end of the day, my feet, ears and nasal passages were black.