Pinto’s theory was that there is no such thing as a poor person in Mumbai — just ‘drug addicts, drunks and insane peoples’ he said. ‘Same as everywhere.’
The people sleeping on the street, he told me, chose to do that, because they were in Mumbai before the monsoon earning money at any one of the millions of jobs, and as soon as the rain came they would go back to their villages where they more than likely lived in a house. They did not want to waste their money on a boarding house, he said, when the weather was warm, the streets were safe if you chose the right ones, and the money would go a lot further at home. I never found an Indian person who disagreed with him.
As for beggars, Pinto would not let me have a bar of them.
I saw begging on only two occasions. The first time it was a little girl tapping half-heartedly on my window, making eating motions.
‘Pinto, I really feel as if I have to give her something,’ I said.
‘Ma’am, look at all the gold this girl is wearing. She has many investments. Do not give her any money, ma’am. Do not look at her, ma’am.’
She gave up pretty quickly, but a few days later when the car was stopped at traffic lights, another girl came up to the window and this one was carrying a baby on her hip. A baby!
Before I could say anything, Pinto pointed out how fat the baby was. Indeed, I could not help but stare at the baby, and because it was so beautiful I could not help smiling, and because it was just a big, fat, beautiful baby it smiled right back at me. That baby didn’t know it was begging, it was just a baby. I don’t know why, but that made me feel better.
Also, I was smiling more in Mumbai than I usually do, because I had discovered laughing yoga. As I said, I’ve no time at all for ordinary yoga; I don’t like the outfits or the music or the pain and suffering. However, I had read in a guide book that there was laughing yoga every morning on the beach at Chowpatty, which is Mumbai’s Waikiki, sort of, in that it’s a beach in a city, although people on this beach wear saris not bikinis. Oh, and I don’t think you can swim in the water because of the pollution.
Laughing yoga sounded like, well, a laugh, so one morning I got up at six and made my way to Chowpatty. There I met Kishore and his band of merry men and women, who were gathered in a circle on the sand, the sun rising behind them, as they embarked on a series of gentle exercises.
This sort of yoga is not designed to stretch and challenge, but to move every part of the body. Even I could do that. Once we’d finished this part of the class, we moved on to our laughing exercises.
Some involved pretending to peel a coconut or pop a balloon or talk on a cellphone or look Japanese. While you were peeling your coconut or popping your balloon, Kishore encouraged everyone to look at the people around them and laugh. It was impossible not to. Jack the Ripper could have turned into a jovial chap doing laughing yoga on the beach at Chowpatty.
It really taught me a lot about laughter. You can start off faking it, but by doing that you open yourself up to the real thing, and next thing you know you’re feeling a million dollars.
Speaking of which, laughing yoga gave me the idea for a book, which I actually started writing the first day I was in Mumbai. (This has never happened to me before, and what’s more I finished the book in four months, but that’s another story.)
The Indian ladies at laughing yoga always seemed happy when I turned up, and it really warmed the cockles of my heart to join their little community, even though it took maybe four visits for me to realise that it was probably a senior citizens group. (Fifty, by the way, is not senior.)
Over time, though, I detected a certain cooling from Kishore himself, which didn’t seem very yogic. He hitched his pants up a little high for my liking, not that I would hold that against him, but I was getting a vibe that wasn’t entirely friendly.
On my last day in Mumbai, I fronted up at 6.30 and the ladies were again excited to see me, one of them telling Kishore that I was on my way home.
‘What is your name again?’ he asked me before the class started. I told him.
‘Sarah-Kate, come over here, please,’ he said, pulling me away from the group.
I thought he was going to tell me that I was bound to lead a long and interesting life, or that I had bad posture or that my aura was giving him cause for concern, but instead he said, ‘You are supposed to give me 1,000 rupees every time you come here.’
One thousand rupees! That’s about 20 bucks, and more than I would ever pay to go to any form of exercise, or in fact anything that didn’t involve a free cocktail. In Mumbai, it’s an outrageous sum.
‘Oh, I don’t think I have enough money with me,’ I said.
‘You pay me what you can,’ he said.
Boy, did that wipe the smile off my face.
I had to peel my coconut extra hard that morning, let me tell you. It was my worst Japanese look ever. But as I ran up and down the beach with my friends in their saris, I considered that I had got an idea for a book from coming to laughing yoga, even if Kishore was a high-pants hitcher, which is not, after all, a crime.
But there was the bird that had shat on him so spectacularly the previous time I’d been there. Was Karma an Indian thing? I had wondered at the time.
As the laughter continued throughout the class that last morning, I fought the urge to be disillusioned. I was disappointed that Kishore hadn’t turned out to be more special. His earlier talk about laughter being free was complete b*llsh*t, since in fact it cost 1,000 rupees a pop.
Beware of false idols, I thought, revisiting the commandments which throughout my whole life I have been so careful not to break. (Speaking of b*llsh*t …)
Yeah, well, I’m no angel either. And Kishore never promised to be special, that was just another of my expectations, and for facilitating the idea for a novel I loved writing, and for making me really laugh, I did owe him something. After the class I went over and slipped 2,500 rupees — all I had with me — into his hand.
It was too much, in my opinion, but only half of what he had asked for. Still, we were both richer for the experience.
It’s just that my sort of richer was better.
These boots were made for dancing at an ALL-MADONNA GAY DISCO
I’m not particularly a shoe person, but I do believe that short-term happiness can be fuelled by footwear. However, if it’s too short-term, that happiness can be turned on its head and lead to unhappiness, which is inclined to stick around a bit longer. Don’t ask me why. Well, you can ask me, but I will answer by saying ‘Because a man said so’, which is what I tell little kids when they ask why some ladies have moustaches and why some thighs are chunkier than others. Little sh*ts.
Anyway, I have examples of shoe unhappiness and shoe happiness, so I’ll give them right here.
When I was editor of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly I was paid more money than I had ever earned before (although it was hardly squillions), but the problem with that was that I was working harder than I had ever before (so squillions would have been better). I don’t mind hard work, I’m actually quite good at it, but I don’t like being out of my depth, and at the Weekly, some of the time, I was out of my depth.
I knew how to put a magazine together, and I loved that part of it. Being in charge of 30-odd staff was a learning curve, but still I could manage that, too. What I could not control was how many people bought the magazine each week, especially when I was operating on an ever-shrinking budget to produce it.
That gave me the heebies, and sometimes if you have the heebies you do weird stuff. So, once I went into the city and bought two pairs of shoes. They cost $600 each.
This was completely and utterly nuts.
They weren’t even the right size; they were half a size too small.
So, I bought them anyway, then went and sat in my car and felt sick. Like, really heave-into-the-bowl-retch-till-you-pee-yourself-a-tiny-bit sick.
I could not believe I had done that. I am not an impulse buyer at all, and I had never spent $6
00 on anything, let alone done it twice.
Those shoes brought me no happiness at all, especially as they were so freaking uncomfortable to wear. Every time I looked at them, I thought of how sh*tty I felt before I bought them and how sh*tty I felt after. They had sh*tty written all over them.
Actually those shoes were a sign that I needed to get a new job, which I soon did, and I never spent that much money on shoes ever again … until the next time, which had a much happier outcome.
In the meantime, I was nervous about spending a single cent on shoes and did so sparingly, and, while I often bought shoes a size too small, I only ever bought them on sale.
Take my Stephane Kélian boots, for example. They were marked down to $300, and so I ignored the fact that they rubbed the skin off four of my toes every time I wore them. Indeed, I ignored that for three years before deciding to replace them. That took another three years.
I must have tried on every pair of boots in New Zealand and every second pair in Sydney, and quite a few on the west coast of the United States as well. Then, in 2011, on the month-long stay in New York City researching The Wedding Bees, I found the perfect pair of boots. They were in Saks Fifth Avenue, and they were flat-heeled, high-top equestrian boots in plain black leather in my enormous size of 42, which never ever happens.
They were Chanel and cost $1500.
Obviously, I could not spend $1500 on a pair of boots, so I had to bid them a sad farewell. For the next four weeks I tried on every other pair of boots in Manhattan. I even bought a pair and took them back to our rented apartment, wearing them on the carpet before deciding they were too uncomfortable. Actually, I did that twice.
Every time I passed a shoe shop I went in and tried something on, to no avail. The Ginger was going spare. Shoe shopping was eating into his museum and gallery time.
Then, on the second-to-last day of my stay, I went to Bloomingdales, which was having a 30 per cent off sale, even on the Chanel shelf, which is pretty unusual, although there was only one pair of high-heeled shoes on display in an itty-bitty size that would not even fit my finger.
Still, I asked the snippy shop assistant if there was any chance that he had a pair of the flat-heeled high-top plain black equestrian boots in a size 42. He looked at me as if I was a big scary giant, which in shoe world I actually am.
‘No,’ was his reply.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ was his reply.
‘Could you not look out the back?’ I asked.
‘No,’ was his reply.
‘Please,’ I begged.
He rolled his eyes so magnificently that I was nearly moved to hand over the gold medal I myself had won in the Eye Rolling Olympics in 1997.
Then he went to look.
And when he came back, he was bearing a tattered Chanel box and, what’s more, a smile.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘But there they were, just sitting there.’
There they were, the only boots I had ever found that I loved the look of, that fit me perfectly, and that were 30 per cent off.
I know $1000 is a lot to spend on shoes, but I also know you could buy three pairs for $333.33 and end up throwing them away because they weren’t right.
I bought them. Of course I bought them.
What’s more, I pulled them on at 4pm that afternoon and was still wearing them at 4am the next morning, having danced the night away at an all-Madonna night at a gay disco in the East Village.
I’ve worn those boots every cold day ever since, and I still love them with all my heart.
A little bit of research can go a long way when it comes to shoe happiness.
The secret to a long and HAPPY MARRIAGE? DON’T ASK ME
The Ginger and I have now been married for 21 years and are often asked how we have done it.
I don’t know.
I guess I’ve never had an axe in my hand at the exact moment when his neck’s been on a chopping block. And I guess he really does believe the thing about the microchip.
As previously discussed, by mutual agreement we didn’t have kids, which could have something to do with it. So we won’t have anyone to look after us when we are old(er), but we have had a lot more sleep. I’m sorry, but we just have.
And we argue so much about how to bring up the dog that I can only imagine that if the dog needed an education and discipline, we would be up sh*t creek without a paddle.
But actually the reasons to argue have become fewer and fewer over the years. The dog aside, there have only ever really been three things that provoke hearty disagreements: cooking, money and navigating.
I used to enjoy baking when I was a kid, and as a single girl flatting with other single girls I was as keen to be in the kitchen as the next person, but rotated a fairly limited repertoire of dishes: apricot chicken, macaroni cheese, Sunday roast and smoked salmon pasta.
When the Ginger arrived on the scene, he cut a swathe through my repertoire and attempted to open my palate to many more herbs and spices and a lot of very hot chilli. The Ginger had been cooking for himself since he was a young lad, and was very set in his ways. Whenever I tried to help him it would end in tears. Half the time mine; half the time his.
‘You chop the carrots like this,’ he would say, demonstrating a slightly different method, which to my untrained eye gave the exact same result.
‘You put this much salt in the pot.’
Ditto.
‘You stack the plates that way.’
Well, now it’s getting annoying.
‘You put the tea towels here.’
I’ll tell you what to do with the tea towels …
Where I came from everyone did their bit, so whenever the Ginger cooked I wanted to help him. But in a moment of culinary clarity one fractious evening in the kitchen, I had a real light-bulb moment.
‘He doesn’t want me here’ is what I thought.
My help was not helpful to him at all. My Ginger likes doing things The Mark Robins Way. He does not want Sarah-Kate Lynch coming along and mucking that up for him. And so, I stepped away.
I cannot tell you the relief — mainly for him, but also for me. I can still bake well enough, but the routine of the three-meals-a-day thing bores me to sobs. He can have it. And he can do it whatever way he likes, so long as it’s sitting in front of me at breakfast, lunch and dinner times.
I’m like a Northern English coalminer sittin’ at t’ table banging me knife ’n’ fork and shouting, ‘Bring me my bl**dy dinner! Bring me my bl**dy tea!’ (Actually, that may not be what Northern English coalminers do, but I certainly affect what I imagine is their accent while I am doing it.)
Regarding spending, I can hardly be bothered doing too much of it these days and neither can he, so that argument pond has well and truly dried up.
And the purchase of a decent GPS ended the navigational meltdowns, too.
If there is any one thing that has kept us together through the rough and the smooth, it has probably been the simple fact that we are and always have been good buddies. We like doing the same things at the same time, and we both like to laugh, especially at him. Well, I particularly like that, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s been mocked in my magazine columns for 17 years, after all. And hasn’t even noticed.
Also, we’ve dealt with a lot of cr*p. My dad died not long after we met, we had money trouble in the early days (who didn’t), we had career meltdowns, family dramas, and we had the measles. These life-or-death situations drive people apart or bring them together, and luckily for us it was the latter.
I’m sure that one of the reasons why my attitude was just to box on and get over it was because the Ginger told me he would not want to go on living without me in his world. He even had a plan, if the worst came to the worst, to jump off the cliffs at Piha. And he was going to take the dog with him.
Well, I could hardly let that happen! Poor dog.
But I remember one day, a few months after I’d been in the horse-spittle,
when we were sitting at the beach — me in the blazing sun and him huddled in one of those little beach tents that are a must for all children — and gingers.
I was in a perfectly good mood, but one’s mind does wander along peculiar paths when one has had to confront a serious illness.
‘My life insurance is up to date, isn’t it?’ I asked idly, as I watched the surf roll in. ‘I mean you would be OK?’
When he didn’t answer, I turned around, and he was sitting there, staring at me, tears rolling down his face. He’d even stopped eating his fish and chips, which has only ever happened once before, when he was six, and he still talks about that bit of fish, so I knew this was serious.
I think maybe a lot of couples don’t get to know how much they mean to each other until it’s too late, but we sort of did, so we’re OK. And I think our chances of being OK were better than some in the first place because of the being good buddies thing.
Actually, I had a very interesting discussion with the novelist Nicholas Sparks a year or so ago. He’s the bestselling author of The Notebook and um, a bunch of other #1 bestsellers. They’re love stories, every one of them, and he is truly the international master of this genre, plus, he told me, he knew within two days of meeting his wife-to-be that they would get hitched.
‘So you believe in love at first sight,’ I said dreamily.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I believe in logic.’
He then went on to tell me that he spotted his wife-to-be in a car park, liked the look of her, got chatting, and asked her out on a date for the following day.
During this second meeting he found out what her parents were like, what religion she was, whether she wanted to get married, to have kids, to stay at home or work, whether she wanted to live in the country or the city … and the list went on.
He witnessed her being kind to children and old people, and basically by the end of that day he thought to himself that he probably could find someone better, but that she wouldn’t be that much better and it could take a long time. And so he told his wife-to-be that they were going to get married, and eventually they did.