Enjoying the Adventure of the Long Haul by Jack Guerin

Author:Jack Guerin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: travel, christianity, family, faith, biography, autobiography, new zealand, faithbased, travel asia, travel indonesia
Publisher: Jack Guerin

To Mumbai

The Air India flight wasn’t exactly pleasant, but we were looking forward to our first visit to Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The reason we had this stop-over was because of our flight arrangements. Prior to landing we flew over many square kilometres of ugly brown slums. The airport had a good scheme for getting an official taxi, for which we paid at a ticket office. Then we had to fight our way through the waiting porters, who desperately wanted to carry our bags and take us to a taxi. We found our taxi and sped off to the Methodist guest house, where we had booked a bed for two nights. It took us an hour to find the place as the driver searched for the address. Once inside, we couldn’t help but notice the quietness of the house – a distinct contrast to the hectic streets outside. And the atmosphere inside was as cold and unsmiling as the resident Westerners and their Indian servants. It seemed to us that the servants had copied their masters’ lives and had taken on their sombre habits. But their actions were so unnatural, carrying out their duties like trained, unemotional, puppets dressed in Western clothes. We could imagine these Indian guys going home after work, playing with their children and laughing spontaneously with their families and friends. How sad that they had learned this obvious gloomy way of life from these solemn guest house proprietors.

In the evening we went for a walk and saw up-close the homes of some slum dwellers. They lived in plastic and cardboard make-shift dwellings on the edge of a busy road. A crawling baby had a cord around its ankle to stop it getting out onto the road. Cooking was done in the gutter, with the black exhaust fumes from closely passing cars being mixed in with the cooking food. The older kids enjoyed being videoed, and we felt like the pied piper as they laughingly followed us along the street. But the caretaker at the guest house wasn’t amused. He let the children, and us, know that he didn’t want any of these dirty, urchins contaminating the sacred building he was paid to guard.

At the subdued breakfast table the next day, we met an Indian guest who offered to take us out to see the sights of Mumbai. Dr Raj was a surgeon, trained in the USA and now living outside Mumbai. He was on a large number of boards and committees, and exerted a strong Christian influence in the many places he served. The doctor was going to town to buy a camera, and he took us around the city in his old car. He told us there were four million people living on the streets of Mumbai, and that its port was hugely busy. We passed a very large, high-walled, roofless enclosure, where a sect known as “Parsees” left the bodies of their dead exposed to the elements and the scavenging vultures.

After breakfast the next day, we set off in a taxi to the airport for our flight home.

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