When meal time rolls around and I think, "Oh yeah, I have to eat…." or , "Oh geez, Emily's gonna' want dinner soon…." or "I have to eat again?" things are far from normal.
In fact, many things don't make sense. But this is one of the biggest.
I love Indian food. There is no shortage of amazing, flavorful foods I have on my mental list to try. But I just can't sometimes.
It's too much. It's too heavy. You would think a man who ate his way through Greece like a champion could skate through India. But so many of the dishes have these heavy, oily sauces. If they don't have sauce they have rice and bread, or fried bread, or stuffed and fried bread.
Sometimes, I'm five bites in and I feel like I can't go on. If I don't feel that way and I have a meal I can just eat and enjoy fully, then it's guaranteed I won't want the next meal.
The vegetarian places are ironically worse. With heavy beans and paneer (curd cheese which I love) for the main protein sources, I fill up even faster.
Emily and I have thus agreed to only one Indian meal a day for me (we usually eat two meals a day) – at least so long as we're in Mumbai and have a choice.
Two days ago I actually said, "No, it's okay – I can do this. I can eat Indian for dinner…" I didn't see it coming.
But it's not just food that weighs us down. We both have felt amazingly tired in Mumbai. There's no real reason – we get enough sleep, we walk around, our lives aren't that strenuous. Then I realized – it's Mumbai itself. In the course of going about our day and doing the various things we do, we focus in on what we're doing. But what's going on around us – constantly – is absolutely overwhelming. Everyone and everything is doing something somewhere quite near to us.
I remember the sense of exhaustion I had leaving Kathmandu my first two visits. Well, we did four weeks there and then jumped into Mumbai. While this city makes a lot more sense to me on many fronts, perhaps I've been too busy celebrating sidewalks, thoroughfares and systems that work to recognize that it's still nuts.
Yesterday, for example, our taxi was stopped at a light. Some guy carrying about 12 large canisters of propane almost ran over two people crossing the street just seconds after our taxi stopped just short of him. But instead of reacting, I just go, "Wow!" as if i'm watching an action-adventure movie. Because that's all I can do.
It's not terribly different than when I lived in Bangkok and an elephant walked by my apartment – and I didn't think that was particularly strange.
But in truth, if I could freeze-frame everything going on around me in any given moment, and take the time to look at each person and what he or she is doing, it would be fascinating. Every single moment, on every single block, there must be at least 100 people in plain sight and there's something bizarre and interesting about at least 50 of them.
This of course discounts trying to look at the shops, businesses, homes and sights. Mumbai is packed with interesting and fascinating.
Unfortunately, it's all too much for the brain to fully absorb, so you just take what you can. Still, I think our brains try to capture everything and although we may not be conscious of it all – the result is exhaustion. Our senses are literally overloaded by the end of the day.
As our taxi was stopped yesterday at yet a different signal (same taxi ride), a man came around to the car windows begging. His arm jutted straightforward, parallel to the ground and his elbow faced upward so that his forearm curved up toward his head. in his arm's resting position, he could touch his head. I just put that one on the shelf to process later. Polio? Birth defect? Bizarre double-jointed trick for begging? I don't know – but was just one of many images to ponder that day.
You just can't absorb it all as quickly as it comes.
Of course people on the street aren't the only people challenges. There are heavy accents. We deal with people who speak English beautifully but whom we often can't understand. Some of it is word choice – Indians definitely choose some different phrases and expressions than we use. Some of it is just heavy Indian accent. I imagine our ears will adjust with time, but sometimes I feel so badly when we have to ask someone to repeat something they said when nothing was wrong with it.
There are also the communication issues that have nothing to do with accent.
At a restaurant yesterday.
Emily: "Does your restaurant have filtered water?"
Waiter: "No, Madame."
Emily: "Okay, then I'll have a bottled mineral water."
Waiter: "And for you, Sir?"
Eric: "I'll also have a water."
Waiter: "Would you like bottled or filtered?"
Eric: "Do you have filtered water here?"
Waiter: "Yes, all our water is filtered."
Eric: "Okay, I'll have that, then. Thank you."
Emily: "Can I have that too?"
You could chalk that up to an honest miscommunication that can happen anywhere. Only it happens all the time here. We do a lot of rephrasing and re-checking to make sure we're getting the right information.
Mumbai is sort of controlled chaos. Things work. It's a functioning city in most of the ways Americans and Westerners judge a city. In fact, it's rather impressive in a lot of respects.
But it's still India – colorful, chaotic, and fascinating. But it can also weigh you down – heavy food, heavy accent, heavy content. Nowhere else I've been has the entire spectrum of life in every block.
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