I read this rousing entry about Mumbai from Friday's NY Times...and I couldn't agree more. Mumbai or Bombay as I remember it from my youth, was for all it's problems an enchanted city for me. There was an undercurrent of the mystical and magical. It was a place of riotous life and death, a place where everything seemed suffused with meaning...this despite the crushing poverty we experienced leaving the airport and driving through the narrow streets at night lined with people sleeping near the curb, the flooding in the streets during monsoons and the choking stench of humanity during the dry months.
It seemed to me each person I met, whether well-to-do or destitute contained this concentrated kernel of desperate beauty, of ambition, of raw possibility. I've had a white hot streak in me to make a pilgrimage there for years...and if I had the wherewithall (which I unfortunately don't), I think I would travel there in the same way I ached to return to New York (my birthplace) after 9/11 or longed to return to the roost in San Francisco (my adopted home) after the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Note to self: maybe I should start listening to these urges.
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