15 Chapter 15. Bombay

Accompanying me on the bus ride was Moira, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Sydney, Australia, whom I had only recently met. At five foot six, she weighed a mere 110 pounds. While her temperament matched her red hair, she was also by equal measure brave and warm. Like all of us at that age, she was insecure, although I had learned to hide my insecurities behind a shield of bravado.

I often heard people say that Australian women come fourth on a list of importance among Aussie men—behind football, mates, and beer. While this may be apocryphal (or at least I hope it is), I did get the sense she had been hurt in the past. We were together for nearly two months. I owe her more than I recognized at the time, perhaps even my life. But I was young, and male, and sometimes stupidly unaware—an ailment for which the only cure is time and experience.

The bus from Benares to Bombay was a journey of 1,500 kilometres through a series of towns and cities, many of which I now know hold religious and cultural significance. The bus did not stop long anywhere, but the journey still took two days. On the first night, Moira and I stayed over in a crowded rest stop, almost an open garage with small cots, then boarded the bus again the next day.

We arrived in Bombay lacking any real knowledge of the city. We had heard from other travellers, however, that the Red Shield House on Mereweather Road, near the Gateway to India monument, was a good place to stay. It was known as an international hostel and had been run as such by the Salvation Army since the early 1930s. It had a reputation among travellers for good Western food and good clean beds and was considered safe from thefts—all of which was true at the time, though it seems nowadays to have also garnered a reputation for bed bugs. Moira and I checked into the three-storey building but left after two days because, despite all its advantages, the hostel had one significant problem: the floors were segregated and males and females were not allowed to sleep in the same room, unless married. We moved to a nearby hotel.

I was feeling better at this time. I had finished the last of my penicillin prescription, and on one of my first days in Bombay went to a nearby health clinic for a stool test. The antibiotics had done their work: on December 1, a stool examination conducted by the Breach Candy Hospital came back negative. I was home free. Or so I thought.

Today, Mumbai is the financial and commercial capital of India. In 1976, it was still called Bombay—the name officially changed only in 1995—and was not yet the financial giant it is now. The history of the city was overshadowed by its position as an important outpost of the British East India Company. My sense of Bombay at the time was of a city “on the make,” a habitat of both legitimate and not-so-legitimate entrepreneurial wannabees. The hustle and bustle of cars and rickshaws, policed by khaki-clad soldiers carrying lathi sticks, did not offer much hint of its eventual prosperity.

Like any large city—especially large port cities—Bombay had its seedy side. The black market thrived, as did the drug trade. Margot Miller remembered well its opium dens: “We were going in and what looked like very strong beautiful women were shaking our hands, ‘Come in, come in,’ and then we realized that they were all in drag. They were eunuchs.”¹

But Bombay also had beautiful and spacious parks, where people picnicked on colourful cloths spread out on the ground, children ran around laughing and shouting, and pickup games of cricket were played. Its architecture, then as now, was also beautiful—a mix of neoclassical, Victorian, and Art Deco.

Moira and I did not stay long in Bombay: we boarded a ferry bound for Goa on the morning of December 5. Three days earlier, I had written a letter home. Moira took it from my hand and cheekily wrote on the bottom, “Have just spent a few days with Trevor and we’re on our way Goa shortly, shall take care of him. Take care, Moira (Australia).”

The sea voyage was, by 1976, well known to Western travellers. We rode deck class, squeezed in with mixed-blood Portuguese returning home and what I described as “extraneous foreigners of the world.” The seats were not designed for comfort—“hard benches covering life rafts made in Yugoslavia.”

There was an American girl on the boat who said that she had been on the same boat once before and had witnessed a different captain allow a passenger to drown through sheer negligence. She had been briefly arrested by the captain, she claimed, when she denounced his actions, but the passengers circulated a petition and succeeded in having him replaced by someone else. I did not see our captain, but his loudspeaker announcements were enunciated in a perfect Oxford accent—a colonial holdover of status one encountered throughout the former British Empire.

There was also a well-spoken Catholic woman on the ferry. She had been to several countries, but now she was returning to Goa. Fifteen years earlier, Goa had still been a colony of Portugal. Internal opposition to the Portuguese administration had been building for several decades, with support from India, until finally, in December 1961, the Indian government sent in its army and expelled the Portuguese within the space of two days. The woman remained bitter about the takeover. She hated Indian bureaucracy. “It was better under the Portuguese,” she said.

The ship and the day moved on. We tossed in the waves, but gently, like a cradle in the breeze. Another passenger, an American of Yemenite origin, waxed poetic: “Soon, brother sun will sink and then, wonder of miracles, sister moon will rise.” I pointed out the moon had in fact been already visible on the horizon for several hours. He argued that this was impossible. The poetic moment was broken, though it did not stop me from waxing poetic about the sunset myself:

The sunset was exquisite, beginning with gold and apricot orange, then after the sun was gone, making its spectacular encore, first with soft pinks and turquoise blues, then tinges of green, and the pink giving way to arterial reds forging the bottom rims of greying clouds. We stand on the middle deck for twenty minutes, my arm wrapped around Moira’s shoulder, our breathing measured to that of the changing sky.

Moira and I made sandwiches and drank tea. Later, we made beds on the aft deck and retired for the night, which we spent in “a broken but harmonious sleep that took us to the sun’s rising.”

1. Miller is presumably referring to hijras, a term often translated as “eunuch.” In the past, eunuchs were employed in royal courts, often serving as guards to harems. Today, however, relatively few hijras are castrated males. In India, they are recognized as a third sex.