Mumbai
–Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus), Mumbai (Bombay) in August 2005
I’m still in the middle of finishing my third year review (though I have started Dark Knight Returns on the sly). However, today’s news has shocked me back three years to the month I spent in Mumbai and traveling through parts of Southern India. I was about to move to Mississippi and start a new life, and thought I’d just do a complete system restart by spending a month in India. I’d always wanted to go to Bombay, primarily because of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and it seemed like the right time to do it. No one else had the time/money/interest to go with me, so I went alone. Alone, except that I blogged it. It was the start of this blog, actually. I’d hidden the category, since this blog had become something else in the meantime, but I’ve pulled it back out today.
I have to get back to editing my review (it’s getting close!). But my thoughts are of fruit juice vendors in Colaba and lazy dogs in the street with the shouts of men hawking their carved Ganeshes in booths outside the Leopold. Even the OMG awful crush of the “Ladies Compartment” on the train from Mumbai to Hyderabad that I caught at the VT. And I will be thinking of the Gateway to India with the (persistent) guides hawking their services alongside the forbidding elegance of the Taj Hotel.
I will be conjuring that Colaba tonight. Maybe it will do some good.
Tags: Colaba, India, Leopold, Mumbai, Rushdie, Taj Hotel, terroist attack, VT
Graphic Novels, Mumbai & South India August 2005, Revolution
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By maggie, November 29, 2008 @ 4:57 am
Amazing picture! Did you stay at the Taj or just snap the picture while in the city?
By Amanda Clay Powers, November 29, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
Thank you Maggie! The VT is so beautiful, it’s hard to take a bad picture of it.
I was too poor, alas, to stay in the Taj…I was in a lesser hotel a few blocks away in Colaba. It’s definitely not the kind of place a librarian could easily afford.
But I walked past it every day in my explorations…I was in the Leopold every day. Though I missed out on the tower beers that have been reported in the news…lol. As a woman traveling alone in India, I was very sober the entire time.
I’ve been missing it so much. I loved Suketu Mehta’s Op Ed in the NYTimes today. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/opinion/29mehta.html?_r=1&em) His book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, is one of my favorites about Bombay/Mumbai.