We decided to go five-star for our stay in Mumbai.  Because when you travel to New York City, don’t you really want to stay at the Plaza? After a day of touring the City Palace in Jaipur and flying Indigo to Mumbai, we checked in at the JW Marriott at Juhu Beach, swam in the hotel pool, ate sushi for dinner, slept in preparation for the next big day.

Busy Mumbai

First stop, Elephanta Caves.  It was a long car ride to India Gate from where we are staying, but the trip was informative and comfortable, thanks to Yogesh, our driver.  Mumbai reminds me of Kolkata.  We would visit when I was as a child living in Dhaka to spend days shopping on the streets of the teeming city, swimming in the hotel pool, and reading our newly purchased Tintin and Asterix comic books.  Like Kolkata, Mumbai has the crumbling old Victorian buildings next to the intricate alleyways of the shanties and shops that were built around it — an immediate, visual archeology of India after the Raj. We arrived at India Gate,where the Brits came and then the Brits left India. Next to the gate, we caught a ferry to take to the island of Gharapuri on the Oman Sea to see the temples that were formed out of the rock in the mountain somewhere between the 6th and 8th century AD.  We paid the 20 rupees to sit on the top level of the little ferry, a fee that is only applicable to foreign tourists ( we’re now used to this in India — every entry fee we paid for monuments and museums are structured so that foreign tourists pay more.)  Off we set with Indian families dressed in their best saris and jewlerly for a picnic on the island.  Once again, Emma was asked for her photo by three young men sitting opposite us.

Emma and I dubbed them the Mumbai Beatles.

Menod spoke English well, though he was shy about it.  He explained that he and his buds from work came by train from a city 800 kilometers away for Menod’s interview with the bank headquarters in Mumbai.  They decided to make a holiday out of it.  Emma and I decided they looked like the young Beatles.  Menod was Paul, one was John and the other George.  It seemed fitting that Ringo didn’t make the trip for spiritual enlightenment — didn’t it always seem that Ringo just tagged along to India for the jewelry and ganga?

The monkeys of Elephanta

Off the ferry, we opted to ride the small children’s train to the very bottom of the climb up the mountain, just so that we could say that we had ridden planes, trains, automobiles, boats, rickshaws and baby taxis on this trip. Then the climb to the caves at the top of the hill. There are monumental steps leading up to the caves, covered by blue tarps strung by the merchants that line the stairs.  I shouldn’t have predicted that Mumbai wouldn’t have monkeys playing as they did at Jas Villas, because if you string a tarp, there will be monkeys jumping on it in India.  The walk up the ancient stairs was long and hot. We passed the Beatles, who opted to have lunch at a restaurant about half way up the hill. We soldiered on, downing a liter of tanda pani (cold water) on the way. It is too hot to eat in the midday in India.

We climb another mountain

The caves are amazingly grand.  The first cave has a carving of the three aspects of Shiva, the creator of joy, the terrifying destroyer, and the master of positive and negative principles of existence and the restorer of harmony. But in each of the larger caves, I was drawn to the chapel that held the lingam, a cylindrical stone representing the all-encompassing energy of God.  There, in the dark chapel, one experiences peace that comes from a singular focus on the divine that is not manifested in human form, but in this universal symbol of dynamic energy — powerful, all-encompassing, eternal and radiating into everything in the universe.

Peace, tranquilly

The strong wind whipped up many more whitecaps for our journey back to Mumbai.  Emma and I and Menod and his friends sat on the lower level of the bow of the boat.  It was rough and then got even rougher , the waves splashing us repeatedly so that we were soaked.  Curiously, I wasn’t that frightened.  Was it the reassuring presence of the Beatles, who laughed with Emma at every splash? Or the tranquility that came from hiking the mountain and entering the cool dark places to be in presence of the eternal?