Mumbai

The first city of our tour was Mumbai. I’ve no idea why its name has been altered and de-romanticised. I much prefer the old name, Bombay, and I don’t think the Indian film industry would do well to change its name to “Mumbywood”.

On arriving in the rather comfortable Trident Hotel hotel at Nariman Point (at four in the morning) we were thoroughly and tediously scanned for guns and bombs before being shown into a plush reception area. There, we were given glasses of fresh melon juice, a garland of marigolds around each of our necks and a bullet-hole sized blob of deep red bindi in the middle of each of our foreheads. We all looked like we had been carefully shot, then decorated with funereal flowers and resurrected in a tranquil place with highly polished marble floors, ethereal background music, giant potted palm trees and a view through large windows out to a vastness of sea and sky. While not actually dead, most of us felt like we might as well be and our most urgent need, after the unpleasantness of economy-class long haul flight, was sleep – lots of it.

I woke up at dawn, or possibly dusk, in my 15th floor room and pulled open the curtains to reveal a beautiful panorama of deep misty purple half-light all the way Westwards across a bay to Malabar Hill and Chowpatty Beach. What lovely names these places have! I watched as the skyscrapers along the opposite sea front – some six miles away – gently lit up with the crimson sun and slowly shifted colour from purple through orange to yellow, then white. Thus, I reasoned, it was dawn, not dusk …and time for breakfast.

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I have had one or two truly great breakfasts in my life and can always remember them in vivid detail. My best ever (and still unbeaten) was served to me in Tokyo in a 47th floor luxury hotel room. The meal was brought in by five women in white and artfully set out around my vast bedroom on several linen-covered temporary tables. Under domed silver covers were exotic Japanese delicacies including morsels of sashimi made from the flesh of endangered species from all around the world. Coming a close second to this was my first Indian breakfast in Bombay, the highlight of which was a delight called masala dosa. This is a large but very thin pancake made from ground rice and lentils with a mild potato curry rolled up within to make a giant golden brown cigar shape. It is served with a couple of chutneys, one of which is almost always made from coconut. I don’t think a day of the tour went past without my eating a masala dosa – usually for breakfast.

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Full to bursting with not just the dosa but several delicious dahls and curries and a mountain of fresh fruit salad, I went back to bed and slept for another five hours or so before enthusiastically leaping out of bed to seize the first day of the tour. At this point I was lucky to meet up with Peter Furniss in the hotel lobby. Through our shared Indian experiences, our interests in photography, obscure forms of music, art made with “found” objects, and curry, Peter, a clarinet player, and I have become good friends. We stepped out of the hotel, blinking in the brilliant sunshine and headed into a seething mass of vibrant life.

My first impressions of Bombay were of vivid colour everywhere, hilarious horn-honking chaos on the roads and crowds of people on the pavements – some vertical, some horizontal, some animated, some still. Huge bundles of stuff were being constantly moved around in vans, on bicycles and carts or human backs and heads.

I’ve never been in such a photogenic place. In a frenzy of snapping I shot almost everything I saw and found, to my relief, that Peter wasn’t ahead waiting impatiently to get to the next place on some assumed sightseeing itinerary, but was right there with me, clicking away at more or less the same thing.

We soon settled into a photography routine whereby I would see something extraordinary which needed capturing and would rush straight at it to catch the best moment before the scene changed. Peter would then try to get a better shot of the same thing by getting between it and my camera. Having messed up my shot he would then try to shoot almost the same thing himself, always just after the “moment” had passed and always with the wrong settings in his camera. In this way our progress through Bombay and subsequently all the other cities was always very slow but extremely enjoyable.

Most days I think we shot some two or three hundred pictures each; so many that to avoid running out of space we had to copy them all into a large disk drive in my laptop each day. I made some space for Peter’s pictures in a folder which I named, “Peter’s Shitty Snaps”. I did this not so much to help him but so that I could take pleasure in deleting them all at a later date. To be fair to Peter, he did make up for in enthusiasm what he lacked in his photographic skills and by the end of the tour his photography had improved a lot. I think he actually got a recognisable one of a big blurry aeroplane at Delhi Airport just before we flew back to London.

That first evening we met up with a Greg Knowles, an old friend from my London Sinfonietta days back in the early eighties, and also the S.C.O. trumpet section, in a famous seafood restaurant called Chetna’s. None of us had ever eaten pomfret before and we all ordered it on the recommendation of the waiter. I wasn’t expecting it to be all that special but the large pieces of beautifully moist, steaming white fish straight from the tandoor were as delicious as any I’ve ever eaten before. Seeing how impressed we all were one of the waiters brought in a shiny fat pomfret to show it off to us. The beautiful thing looked like a short chubby midget dolphin. It wasn’t twitching but it looked extremely fresh. The big dark grey crabs hanging from the waiter’s other hand, on the other hand, were animated enough to put on quite a show for us, slashing and snapping the air in a frenzied last dance – the habanera, i think. A few seconds later they were taken to the kitchen, dropped into boiling water and then brought back to us pink and delicious with some chunks of lemon and freshly baked oily flatbread.

The poverty in Indian cities, outside of the notorious enclosed slums (of which I saw nothing except from the outside) is pretty much on show everywhere. Many poor people live, eat and sleep on the pavements and they beg without inhibition. Children make particularly persuasive beggars as it’s almost impossible for the untrained to resist their beautiful big brown pleading eyes and huge smiles. We were warned not to give anything to them but everyone in the orchestra succumbed, if only just the once. The result was always the same, immediately more pleading and the sudden appearance of many more beggars. Telling them firmly to go away didn’t work. Giving them more money only spurred them on to greater efforts. The only way out was to run for it, which felt pretty heartless.

On our way through Bombay Airport, heading for our next city, Calcutta, we were treated to an extraordinary floor show. Ten or so groups of about twelve models each, dressed in matching eye-catching air-hostess outfits were positioned around the concourse. There were groups in all the primary colours and some dressed in exotic saris. All had small matching wheeled trolley cases and were being herded around into a variety of different starting positions for a TV advert. Somebody with a megaphone shouted and the various groups set off in different directions at a brisk walk. Some of the groups walked right through each other, to curious visual effect – their suit colours merging for a moment, while other groups strutted off the scene and away into the distance. Suddenly, two white boat-sized objects on trolleys appeared, rolling right through the middle of everything, ruining the take. These were the the two flight cases containing the S.C.O.’s double basses. I managed get a photo of all this from a balcony overlooking the scene. Peter tried too but was holding his camera the wrong way around.

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February 8, 2009 | Categories: hornplaying | Tags: Mumbai, Peter Furniss, Scottish Chamber Orchestra | Leave A Comment »