"Slumdog Millionaire" or "Shantaram" can't do this city justice. How can they? My tourist brochure and guidebook both rightfully fawn over the city's stats and records. For instance, this peninsula city is the second biggest city in the world after Tokyo for population. Half of those, though, populate the biggest slum in Asia. Less than 5km from the slum is the most expensive house in the world. The city produces an unbelievable 40% of India's total GDP and is home to the flourishing art, literature, business and finance sectors of India, if not Asia. Bombay is as famous for her huge cinema industry as she is infamous for her crime. It's a city who's population has swollen beyond the perameters of human decency, yet continues to adapt, housing thousands of refugees and street families that arrive here from all over Asia and the Middle East each day. The facts are fairly impressive and they point to a metropolis that empitomises the Indian civilisation- from the Raj era through to the modern day. In the "land of contrasts" this is truly the capital. I'm at the end of my second stint here, after 5 days total in Mumbai, and have decided it's a city I can see myself living in one day.
From Bhopal, I stepped off the train at midnight onto the empty platfrom of Mumbai's Victoria Terminus - the busiest train station in Asia, apparently - and was hit instantly by the muggy heat that only a polluted inner city can generate. It was also very quiet - where were all the car horns!? Despite the unnaturally large rats on the tracks, the odour carried on the light breeze was not the usual sewage and rotting rubbish, but the smell of fish. This all made a terribly pleasant change, even if the stench of fish in the 30 degree heat isn't the nicest smell either. I got a taxi to a guest house I'd been given the card of by a tourist friend, and was depoited outside a grotty-looking building, in an alleyway where colour clearly came to die. I took the lift to the stiflingly hot fifth floor hostel and took a room. I found it very difficult to sleep.
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