A Mumbai Dawn

So, a new dawn breaks, my first since Heathrow so many hours and coffees ago, and I’m in India. There’s a mist across the sky but it won’t stay for long. Taxi horns and chirping insects provide the soundtrack, as well as the hubbub of the early morning crowd, milling, chatting, selling. In some ways this could be just about any international airport forecourt – the brands on display are the same as ever – but the smells, the air, is different, and for me at least, pregnant with possibility.

My sketchily arranged plans have somehow fallen into place, and it seems like I’ve got a place to crash for the next few nights at least. I’m pleased at this, and feel that my laissez-faire attitude isn’t entirely out of place here. Even the coffee-cups seem infected with this form of passive optimism, the message on their sides proclaiming, “Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” Whilst this attitude has got me into trouble in the past (essay writing, job applications, in fact almost anything bureaucratic or involving a deadline…), I think it will be much more at home here.

Various Western writers and travellers have been frustrated by the lack of a goal-oriented efficiency involved in this ‘let it be’ attitude (I’ve been doing at least a little research – my reading list has been exclusively Indian-written or about India for the past few months). Some have seen it as a kind of fatalism, one buttressed by the Hindu belief in reincarnation, whereby any individual life is only one among many, but I’m not sure there’s anything fatal about it. Maybe it’s actually a positive thing, allowing life and its varied happenings to intervene, rather than trying to force our plans onto the world at any cost. There’s a surrender of control, yes, but it’s in no way morbid, more something which contains a bit more humility as regards one’s own influence. The world is very big and very mysterious – facing it with any degree of certainty is perhaps a little arrogant.

Whether this is true or not, or whether I’ll soon be wringing my hands over diverse inefficiencies, remains to be seen. Still, it’s how I’ve been feeling for a while, and I enter this journey wide-eyed and open-minded, not really knowing what to expect. I think I’ll let this function as my pre-trip disclaimer for basically blundering my way around the subcontinent! Though if I don’t know what’s coming next, I guess it makes it that much more fun.