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Each morning to reach the HT office I follow the same ritual. Firstly, I wait to cross the road, but am not allowed to stand still. No, I have jump around and avoid all the auto rickshaws and motorbikes, which are heading towards me. The autos often screech up next to me, wrongly thinking I want a ride, thus preventing me from crossing the road even more, and the motorbikes just head straight for me, as do the black and yellow cabs, dropping off passengers. It’s up to me to get out of the way, or get run over. I am not standing on the road – I am at a parking lot waiting to cross the road. There is no pavement to stand on, as it has been encroached by a pani puri stall, a Xerox stall and a vegetable vendor. Various huge white Mercedes cars park up in the parking lot. At one point they are still, but you have to keep your wits about you, as all of a sudden they will randomly reverse directly at you and into you, unless you move…the drivers are usually rich woman, very bad drivers, who don’t bother to look in their rear mirrors as they reverse.

I wait for a gap in the continual onslaught of traffic, watching motorbikes with families on, sometimes none of them wearing a helmet, so that I can cross the road, to reach the taxi rank.

Once I am there, my chances of getting a taxi are no higher. Usually the drivers parked at the cab rank look away, when I say ‘Mahim’, which means they are refusing the fare.

They think the journey isn’t long enough to make it worth their while, especially since they claim they will have to come back ‘kali’ (empty).

But their claims don’t make sense, as there are always hundreds of people in Mahim, trying to flag cabs unsuccessfully too. There, the cab-wallahs act as though blinkered, accelerate and drive past if they see a passenger on the street trying to flag them down.

What I usually do in the mornings is I hang around the cab rank, until a police officer shows up, to scare them into action, or more frequently, wait for a ‘running cab’.

This morning an elderly cab driver parked at the cab rank did not refuse my fare, rather he jumped at the chance. This was unusual since I was only going to Mahim, so I should have smelt a rat. But since it was hot, I stepped in.

Then I noticed that the elderly gentleman was in the front passenger seat and next to him was another man in the driver seat. The cab took off before I could demand one of them stepped out. It soon became clear from my rudimentary Hindi that their intention wasn’t to rape and murder me, but that the one in the driver seat couldn’t drive, and his 90-year-old friend, in off-whitish kurta pyjamas was teaching him how to drive. So as we stopped and started chugging along at 10 miles per hour to Mahim, he would say “Now break” and “Now change gears” in Hindi.

Of course there were no seatbelts, as there never are in Indian black and white cabs. But funnily enough, I wasn’t too perturbed, as the learner driver was driving as though he was a five-year old in a bumper car, who had clearly never stepped in a car before, which wasn’t nearly as scary as having a seasoned Kali Peeliwallah – they drives through Mumbai like a maniac as though the words ‘car accident’ and ‘death’ never featured in their vocabulary.

As we reached the office, I asked the cabbie, how come there were two of them in the cab. “I’m a teacher, he’s learning how to drive,” he said. Interesting that they thought nothing of using me, the firang as the guinea pig, for the driving lesson. “Does he not have a licence?” I asked “Oh, yes he has a licence, it’s just that he doesn’t know how to drive yet” the 90-year-old replied with a straight face.

This is just one example of how Mumbai is baffling, but endearing at the same time.
On another occasion last week I was in the back of the cab, doing what I always do en route to work – applying my make-up with a hand mirror – and the cab came to screeching halt, “What are you doing?” I asked, as my mascara went half across my cheek, and my lunch box was thrown out of my bag, against the rear of the front seat.
“I thought you wanted me to stop while you did your make-up,” he said.

India baffles a westerner. But some times we get the hang of things, and then we see how much easier it is doing things the Indian way.

One example is understanding “deals” and “relationships.” These two concepts pretty much sum up how India works, in all areas of life. (Be it the government offices, the vegetable vendor, the workplace, your GP, the hospital specialist, it goes on..)

So, to give a mini example, when I first came to India, it wasn’t just the mornings, I used
to spend an hour every night post work flagging down cabs on the main road to return home…most refused as it was too short a journey. That was until I discovered that there were a string of cabs waiting outside the office, the same ones, in fact, and if you ’struck a deal’ with them they would take you home every night. Each person’s deal is individual. In my case, it involves chatting in Hindi to the driver all the way home (this seems to give him great pleasure) – the conversation usually goes “When are you getting married? How are your cats?” I respond there are no decent men on the scene, and offer him a cat. He then freaks out saying he doesn’t want the cat and the banter goes on.

When we reach, I pay him slightly more than the meter rate and the next day he takes me home again.

I soon worked out it was far preferable to pay him some extra rupees and not spend all night flagging a taxi home, as my time too is money, after all… The same driver now takes my cats and me to the vet. I pay him a lot for that, but he waits while I am there and then takes me home and prevents me being stranded on the roadside with two cats in the heat waiting an hour for a cab.

He also comes with me to pick people up from the airport; you get the drift…its all-little deals.

My local corner shop owner now rarely charges me the marked price. Of course I insist on paying it but he seems to always, rather than short change me, undercharge me, so if I buy a pouch of whisksas for Rs 50, he asks for just Rs 45…and if a chocolate bar costs Rs 25 he says “Just give me Rs 20″…I can’t work out how to force the full amount on him, or why he does this, but he seems to be more than happy with the set-up. Perhaps he’s pleased I actually walk into his shop, as everyone else seems to phone him up.

In fact, he seems to be constantly answering the phone. I have never fathomed how he can decipher the notes he makes – he doesn’t have a proper pad, far from it, he has scraps of paper, littered across the products on the counter, that he writes down in scrawly illegible writing what someone wants, usually on the corner, on top of some other writing. He does all this, while serving me, and giving me an Rs 2 discount.

Even the newspaper vendor brings my newspapers whether I have given him the coupons or not. The cable TV people never seem to come to collect money – I have rung their office, requesting them to collect their dues, but still no sign of them, and my TV still works. I asked an Indian man to show me a cat carrier he had for sale. Since my cat wasn’t happy with it, I decided not to take it.

“Oh please keep it one night. Your cat will grow to like it,” he begged.
The next day I rang him up and asked him to collect it, as my cat didn’t like it.

Six months later, the carrier was still in my living room, and he had not come to retrieve it. Nor had I paid him a rupee.

Another baffling aspect is a supermarket. Once you have finished shopping, unlike in the UK, where you have to pack your shopping, here the staff packs all the shopping. But first they create a huge mess all over the counter, in random order. To me it’s unclear what has gone through the till and what hasn’t. If I could pack it, it would be done so much more quickly…

I used to volunteer to pack. Now I just stand there and send texts and let them do it their way…. Magically they seem to know what has gone through the till and what hasn’t..and hand me my shopping.

It’s also baffling how you can get botox, drink a wine from the Salvatore Ferragamo estate or a single origin coffee, buy a retro coffee machine and New York apron in Mumbai, but still not have running water in your flat, or be able to cross the road safely.

I also find it baffling what people protest about in Bandra – so for example people protest to save trees and to stop noise at Diwali but they don’t lobby for zebra crossings, strict hygiene regulations of street vendor stalls and restaurants, for better ambulances and emergency routes, improved mental health services and adequate free clean drinking water.

Another baffling aspect, is that, of course Indians don’t like it when you criticize India, but nor do they like it when you praise the country.

I wrote an article recently in which a wine tasting professional had found an Indian Sauvignon Blanc to be better than an imported Sauvignon Blanc (SB). I got a very snotty email from an Indian reader very angry that we had said an Indain Sauvignon Blanc could be better than an imported one.

“I have tried many Indian brands, they are mostly not worth a second sip,” he wrote.

I responded that I found Sula and Zampa SBs to be both excellent.

“If you found Sula and Zampa Sauvignon Blanc to be “excellent”, I am afraid, you have not tasted even a “good’ Sauvignon Blanc yet. It is more like the case of the bootlegger’s Black Label which our brethren in the country gulp down in gallons, not knowing what a genuine Black Label is…..” he wrote.

Being a European, I have drunk many varieties of SBs, since the age of 18 and I can say that some wines in India are as good as the ones at the same price in Europe. Yet, I am told a south Mumbaiite wouldn’t dream of serving an Indian wine at a dinner party. Why? It baffles me.

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