‘In India if you have a big second toe it means you are very bossy,’ he said. ‘All the mothers do not want their sons to marry the lady with a big second toe.’
He wiggled his own smooth brown toes, and Annie looked down at hers, neatly manicured, none of them too short or too long.
‘You are a good and loyal friend,’ said Shruti, peering over from her position further around the circle. ‘Very practical.’
‘Goodness, that sounds boring.’
‘Hmmm. Can you wiggle your little toe separately from the fourth one?’
Annie could on her left foot but not her right.
‘Interesting,’ said Mikhila, looking on. ‘It means one half of you is adventurous and not to be trusted with my husband, and the other half of you is very predictable.’
‘OK, I want you to push your feet as hard as you can up against the person standing next to you,’ ordered Heavenly. ‘Up against their feet, OK? So the outsides of your feet are right up against the outsides of their feet and you are pressing into them, into the sand. Then I want you to cross your arms in front of your body and grab a hand on either side.’
The circle did as it was told.
‘Now, press against those feet, and pull those hands. Press and pull. Press and pull. Press and pull!’
For a kid, Sandeep was surprisingly strong, and Annie fought to keep her balance as he pressed and pulled.
On her other side, Pooja was far more frail, and the side of her foot was calloused and hard, but she was also remarkably solid in the sand. At first Annie feared she would pull the old woman’s arm out of her socket, but Pooja was pulling her, too, the energy in her palms hot and definite.
With her own arms being pulled across her body, it was like being locked in a very intense hug.
She felt suddenly emotional. It was the connection, the physical connection of being part of something, someone, a group of someones.
A warmth rose up, radiating out from some small dark place inside her and reaching to her edges, as if for air, the sun, the tingle in the atmosphere of a random group of separates all somehow briefly but certainly tuned in to each other, to make one lovely, smooth, magnificent, single something.
This was what she was missing at home.
Here, on the other side of the world, with a bunch of almost complete strangers, Annie did not feel lonely.
AFTER LAUGHING YOGA, when the group found out Pinto was taking her sightseeing, everybody had a suggestion as to where she should go and in which order, but her taxi driver had it worked out anyway.
‘I show you my top five,’ he said, as Annie buckled herself in. ‘First we go to Gateway of India because now is good time. No peoples.’
The Gateway of India was a beautiful basalt arch perched on the edge of the harbour down in Colaba, which Pinto said was the heart of South Mumbai. He was surprised that Annie had never heard of it, because it was the city’s number-one tourist attraction.
‘I’d barely heard of Mumbai before I got here,’ she reminded him as they drove down a wide road with grand if past-their-use-by art deco apartment buildings on one side and a vast dusty cricket ground on the other.
The Gateway had been built during the British Raj, more than a hundred years before, especially for a visit by King George and Queen Mary, Pinto said. ‘Although the king and queen arrive some years before it is here.’
‘So it was built for them — but later?’
‘Yes, ma’am. This is sometimes the way in Mumbai.’
Once upon a time the harbour had been a rough place for poor fishermen to come and go, he said, but now it was where all the famous people arrived in the city if they were coming by boat.
Annie could see, as they parked the taxi, that the harbour was peppered with bright ferries tied together in groups, bobbing up and down, their red lifesavers strung along the sides like open mouths.
The boats took tourists on short trips around the harbour, Pinto said, or to Elephanta Island to see the famous Hindu caves.
‘Should I go to the famous Hindu caves?’
‘Ma’am, you should go where you want, but there are more better caves in Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Not Hindu, but Buddhist, from when the monks live there many long time ago. We can go there one other day.’
She and Pinto separated to go through different security gates — his and hers — to enter the concourse in front of the Gateway.
He was right: the ferry-boat rides didn’t start till nine, so there was barely another soul there.
Annie stopped to take in the Gateway itself, which — with the vast empty concourse in front of it and the harbour behind it — seemed somehow otherworldly to her. At twenty-five metres high with four square turrets on top and an elegant arch in the middle, it was a staggering sight, although at a slightly odd angle to the rest of the city.
‘The politicians run out of money to build the good road all the way up to it,’ Pinto said. ‘This is also sometimes the way in Mumbai.’
To their right, in a fenced-off square surrounded by lush flowering bushes, was a towering statue of a man on a horse. This was Chhatrapati Shivaji, Pinto told her; the great Maratha king from the seventeenth century.
‘Very good fighter Hindu king, ma’am. We do not care about him so much in Jammu, but he is very popular here in Maharashtra state. The airport as you know is named Chhatrapati Shivaji now, and so is the train station. I will take you to the train station after.’
Annie walked up to the Gateway. Security guards prevented anyone from walking through the arch, so she walked around to the front of it, where the Arabian Sea stretched into the distance.
The ferries were impossibly jolly, fresh out of a children’s book about little boats that could, while container ships and industrial vessels slid mysteriously across the water further out.
She could hear the sea slapping against the rock of the landing in front of her, and the distant call of one ferryman to another out in front somewhere, but otherwise it seemed impossibly peaceful. This gentle haze was as far from the India she had imagined, when she had ever thought to, as she could possibly get. The slum had possessed a mad sort of beauty or charm, which was a surprise, but still matched her expectation of chaos and commotion. Here, though, she could sense a kind of serenity that she had not believed a place like Mumbai, a country like India, could ever possess.
Pinto emerged from behind the Gateway, flicking his cigarette butt onto the ground. Annie wanted to tell him not to smoke or litter, but had to remind herself that he was a grown man and didn’t need mothering. No one she knew needed that, it seemed.
A couple of Indian women, sisters perhaps, walked in front of her, smiling shyly. The older woman had a sari on, red and orange in a modern pattern, while the younger one had a bright-pink tunic-style dress with a blue scarf that the breeze had picked up and was lifting out behind her like a sail.
They both had black shiny thick hair caught up in loose buns at the back, and they stopped at the edge of the jetty to look at the majestic building to the right of the Gateway on the sea face that curved to the north. It was a grand construction, almost gothic in style, with small turrets on each corner and a large one in the centre.
‘This one is Taj Mahal Palace,’ Pinto said following her gaze. ‘This is very famous hotel in Mumbai. Brangelina stay here. And Oprah.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Annie said, as a little girl ran up to the woman in the pink tunic and clutched her legs.
The girl was about four, with a cute bobbed haircut, wearing a white halter-neck dress with plump red strawberries on it and a frill around the bottom. She had a row of tiny pearls around her neck, an armful of bracelets, and yellow sandals with flowers over the toes and around the ankles.
When she looked up and smiled, full of mischief, Annie smiled back, thinking her heart might just break. She wanted to tell the woman in pink that this gorgeous little vision would one day grow up to ignore her mother’s emails and turn septic if there wasn’t the right
sort of hummus in the refrigerator. She wanted to tell the woman in pink that she should try and cling onto who she was before she had the little strawberry princess, because when sequins replaced the strawberries, she would struggle to remember. What she, Annie, wouldn’t give now to have a child seek her out, to cling to her like that. Children grew up so quickly, she wanted to tell the woman in pink. Before you have the chance to relax and truly enjoy them — poof! — all of a sudden, they are gone.
She watched a man walk along the sea face in front of the hotel balancing a tray of nuts and a pile of mangoes on his head. He dropped something out of his pocket and slowly lowered himself to the ground — back ramrod straight — to pick it up, effortlessly rising again and moving on.
The vast space in front of the Gateway was starting to fill with people, Indian families mostly, and couples comparing pictures on their phones, holding hands, sharing iPod earphones.
‘Part of the Taj Mahal Palace looks newer than the rest of it,’ Annie said to Pinto, pointing to a section to the left of the middle dome.
‘Yes, ma’am, this happens after India’s 9/11. The bad terrorists hit many places at the same time and kill many people.’
This must have been what Hugh had been referring to when they first arrived in Mumbai, but Annie was ashamed to not know more, so she didn’t press Pinto for further details other than to ask who was behind the attacks.
‘The bad peoples in Pakistan probably,’ he said, with a shrug.
‘What have they got against India?’
‘Ma’am, this is very complicated for you, but for me when I go back to my village, my old friends sometimes they are mean to me because I can pay money to my family and now I have a nice shirt from driving my taxi in Mumbai. Sometimes I think Pakistan is like my old friends.’
Annie thought she could quite well ask Pinto to explain the iCloud and Keynesian economics. He seemed to have a knack for distilling the most convoluted matters into an easily cracked nutshell.
‘OK, then, where to next?’ she said instead.
‘Since we talk about Chhatrapati Shivaji I take you to the train station,’ he answered.
The traffic in the city centre was getting worse, rising with the temperature from a comfortable level to something verging on unpleasant. Still, Annie found herself distracted by the buildings in this part of Mumbai. Some were broken-down, all but derelict, with damaged shutters, peeling paint and shattered windows, while others were staggeringly beautiful: graceful, ornate and clearly well looked-after.
These unlikely bedfellows nestled next to each other on wide roads choked with buses, taxis, cars, bicycles, handcarts and pedestrians. At one intersection, Annie jumped with fright as a goat leapt onto the hood of a limousine parked on the road beside them.
Be it buildings, cars or people, Mumbai was a mish-mash of opposites.
Nowhere was this more apparent than when out of the mayhem of downtown Mumbai rose the gloriously gothic Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus with its spikes and domes, its central clock, its collection of columns and turrets.
‘Wow’ was all she could say as Pinto slowed in the moving traffic for her to get a better look. ‘Can I have a look inside?’
‘Yes, ma’am, but I must stay with taxi or police will want my money.’
He pulled over, ignoring the honking behind and beside him. ‘Go to booking hall, ma’am, and have a look at train platforms, but please to not get close. There are many peoples there at this time of the day and some of them like to do full body massage on the womens.’
‘I’ll be five minutes,’ she said, getting out of the car.
‘I will be here,’ Pinto said. ‘And do not forget to look up.’
The station was across the street so, head down, Annie ventured into the sea of people coming and going from the busy terminal, moving like pebbles in a shallow tide, dragging her across the blue stone floor of the extraordinary building.
By comparison the booking hall was relatively empty, most of the commuters veering off to go straight to the platforms.
She looked up. The grace of the space was in the height — maybe twenty metres, she thought, standing with her back against one of the hall’s red marble pillars and following its smooth surface up to the curved ceiling, its ornate trusses meeting in the centre like stars; the arches around it covered with carved foliage and tiny gargoyles.
Through one of the lower porticoes opposite the ticket windows she could see the trains arriving at two of the platforms, the ceiling on that side of the building low, the signage modern and ugly, the commuters moving, moving, moving.
But there in the near-empty booking hall, the world froze for a moment, quite perfectly, and Annie, a small speck in a sumptuous vault staring over into a sea of workers, felt a sort of snapshot brand itself on her memory. As a tourist she would never really know what it felt like to come from here, to be part of this throbbing metropolis, but she would know more than anyone who had stayed at home. Or in her hotel.
I’ve changed, she thought, as a group of little boys ran past her, shrieking, an old man brandishing a walking stick bringing up the rear. In a short time in a strange place, she had changed.
Pinto was waiting anxiously outside the taxi when she emerged from the station, clearly relieved to see she had not been sucked up onto a local train and delivered somewhere out of his reach.
‘Do the locals call it Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus?’ she asked as they merged back into the traffic.
‘No, ma’am. They call it VT after Victoria Terminus, because otherwise by the time they say Chha-tra-pa-ti Shi-va-ji Ter-minus the train has gone.’
She laughed. ‘Now where?’
‘Now, ma’am, I show you something quick on the way to something else very special. This something quick is not for me so good, but for the tourist madams, they like this a lot. Oh, no! Not again!’
He clapped his hands together in prayer pose, resting them on the top of the steering wheel. ‘Oh, my god, please what have I done for you to put me behind another madam driver?’
Annie quite liked being behind another madam driver as it slowed Pinto down, if not for long.
‘Oh, she has no idea. She goes this way and that.’
The madam driver didn’t seem to be any more haphazard in her lane-changing skills than anyone else on the road, but Pinto was determined to get around her and did. If there was one reason to avoid madam drivers it was because their very existence seemed to bring out the worst in the otherwise mild-mannered Pinto.
Annie shuddered as they careened close to another bus, her hands balled in fists at her side, but her heart no longer lurched at these near-misses. If she was getting used to Mumbai traffic then she had changed even more than she thought.
They crossed a cluttered bridge, after which Pinto pulled a U-turn in front of a delivery truck, but so unfazed was the truck driver that he didn’t even honk.
Annie looked out the rear window and saw a snake of other taxis doing the same thing behind them.
They slowed down to pass a railway station far less spectacular than VT, and on the far side of it Pinto pulled over to the side of the road and turned to look at her.
‘Did auntie at the funny yoga say to you at Dharavi that once you see this slum you will never again say your house is too small or your work is too hard?’
Annie nodded.
‘Now, when I show you this thing, you will also never say that you have too much laundries to do.’
He jumped out of the car and she followed him over to the concrete railing on the side of the bridge.
There, below her, stretching between the familiar ramshackle corrugated-iron rooftops to the skyscrapers beyond, was a scene of industry that her eyes could barely decipher.
Washing lines stretched from building to building, hung with hundreds of white shirts in one direction, blue in the other, green in the distance. Great swathes of printed pink and purple cloth stretched over square concrete pools that were a patchwork of different
shades of white-to-grey water.
In one pool a small boy was swimming, in another a large man was lathering himself in suds, above them, on a rooftop, a blueturbaned wallah was spreading out sheaths of bright-red fabric in piles like ketchup.
The closer she looked, the more she saw.
Down to her left, another turbaned man was beating his washing against the side of a concrete tub. To the right, yet another launderer was stripping off and jumping into a milky-looking bath. Piles of wet whites sat on one rooftop, wet oranges on another, layers of blue pants flapped in the breeze between.
‘The world’s biggest outdoor laundry,’ Pinto said, pleased to see her jaw drop. ‘Most of the clothes come here from all Mumbai and from your hotel, too.’
It was mad. And beautiful. Like a beehive.
Her eye would catch the slightest movement, and on closer scrutiny she would see something being wrung out or twisted or beaten or soaked. The lines weren’t even, there didn’t seem to be a system, it was laundry mayhem.
And yet …
‘They never make mistakes,’ Pinto said. ‘They never give the womens back the black pants if she gives them the white pants. Dhobi wallahs, we call them. This is good job.’
‘Better than a taxi driver?’
‘No, ma’am, and the dhobis stay in the family. So your father is a dhobi and then you are one, too. Hard work, but good work.’
‘And you can go for a swim at lunchtime.’
‘Yes, ma’am, although I think this is not the best thing for laundry.’
Annie thought of her washing machine at home, and the dryer that she used more and more. Once upon a time she had dried everything outside, just like this but in two neat, tidy rows, not two thousand. She remembered pressing her face into Daisy’s little onesies as they hung on the line, soaking up the delicious sunshine smell. She had stared at her daughter’s little dresses hanging up for hours at a time when she was a baby; the wonder of having produced such a perfect specimen.
Ben still brought his laundry home when he visited: two bags full of funky socks and underpants, sports gear and sweats. She loved doing it for him, but she didn’t marvel at it hanging on the clothesline.