Crash Test

Life in Mumbai is perfectly balanced… until it isn’t.

Some weeks, Mumbai sets out to test us. And this is one of those weeks. It has actually been longer than a week—twelve days and counting, to be precise. I know this because it was twelve days ago that our driver crashed our car, disrupting more than just our morning commute. 

Before you worry for our physical safety, it was a very minor crash in which he rear-ended someone else’s car within our apartment complex, at (what should have been) snail’s pace, with no passengers inside. It’s more the collateral damage that continues to cause me a headache. Like dealing with the threatening nature of the owners of the other car, who also live in our complex; the search for a new driver; the fact that we are all reduced to taking taxis everywhere—something I won’t let Jasper and his nanny do alone which makes me the chaperone; the favours we keep having to ask from friends and Jasper’s classmates to avoid me spending all day in various taxis; the fact that I have to run my own errands and the admin of making an insurance claim. 

Actually, that last one isn’t entirely true. As could only be the case in India, I am exceptionally fortunate that the owner of the cricket team I played for last year happens to be in the business of cars: trading cars, fixing cars and brokering insurance for cars. After Dylan, this guy was the first person I called, once I had grasped the gravity of our car’s injuries: the crumpled bonnet, bruised bumper and re-angled headlights. As bad luck would have it, Dylan was out of town when the accident happened, but I was happy that by the time he was met at the airport by a remodelled car and a sheepish driver, I had an action plan for how we were going to handle things. 

The car has been in my friend’s body shop for almost two weeks now, mostly because some of the parts took a bit of time to order once the insurance surveyor had approved the £1000 claim, but also because there was quite a lot of work to do. This has left us without our usual form of transport. In most other cities, living without a personal car is not only do-able, it’s the norm. London buses, the New York subway, a Beijing bicycle, the Taipei MRT and the Shanghai Metro have all ferried me around at one time or another in my life, with taxis reserved for special occasions or emergencies only. But not here in Mumbai, and not now that I have a small child to consider. Public transport is sadly inconvenient, uncomfortable, unpredictable and in some cases, unsafe for women. I certainly wouldn’t take Jasper on a local train or bus because of the stir he would cause and the prying hands from which I would have to defend him. This puts us at the mercy of taxis and my goodness are they a mixed bag. 

When I say ‘taxi’, I really mean Uber. There are regular taxis—an endless supply of black and yellow tin cans, all vying for the world record of how many people can fit across the back seat—but the chance of me being able to communicate where I want to go in one of those is slim to none. But when I say Uber, I don’t mean peoples’ nice cars that they use to earn a bit of extra cash. I certainly don’t mean the Tesla one of our friends once Uber-ed in Hong Kong. I mean a fleet of average cars in varying stages of decay, and chauffeurs to match. Some days, the interiors will be clean, the air freshened by the scent of jasmine, and the driver will be quietly wearing a shirt and shoes. Other days, I barely dare to touch the door handle for fear of making contact with some unidentifiable grime; I try not to breathe in the mixed odours of curry, sweat, tobacco and engine oil; I wish the driver wasn’t sitting with one bare, cracked foot folded under the other leg and I hope he’ll stop shouting into his phone and start concentrating on the quickest route. Some days the car arrives on time, within however many minutes the app has promised me it will take. Other days, the little avatar spins on the spot in the app for minute after impatient minute, with the driver ignoring my calls, not moving any nearer, until I finally give up and try to rebook another one. On those occasions where the ride is accepted but the driver gets no closer, we deduce that they are at a public EV charging station directly under our apartment complex, but that doesn’t make it any easier to convey (in words, rather than huffs), to an increasingly agitated Jasper, why we are still waiting 25 minutes later. And it certainly does nothing for my mood if the vehicle that finally arrives is a cess pit. 

To preserve what’s left of my sanity, I have slashed all non-essential trips from my schedule and Jasper’s. This has both curtailed his very active social life and put an unfortunate dent in my training schedule for a 10K run which is looming in early May. The event itself will be a road run, in the early evening when the heat and humidity will still be fierce but at least the bite of the sun will be gone. I am not confident to run alone in the evenings, and I am not working during the day, so my training is taking place in the blazing heat of unshaded mornings—which I suppose might give me an edge if it doesn’t kill me. With a functioning car and alert driver, I was doing quite well at squeezing in long-ish runs at the racecourse or Marine Drive immediately after school drop off, with my many bottles of electrolytes waiting in the car for me as reward for (and recovery from) my efforts. Without a car, and therefore without my mobile hydration station, my fear of exertion-induced migraines makes me reluctant to run anywhere I need to taxi back from. My migraines tend to affect my vision and ordering an Uber while essentially blind would undoubtedly lead to even more frustration than usual. Instead, I am reduced to scampering round and round the cadence-hamperingly geometric garden area of our complex in a dizzying dodge of strollers and zimmer frames. I am quite sure I am nobody’s favourite addition to the regular morning plodders. As for Jasper’s social life, I try to encourage his friends to come to ours to avoid having to chaperone him in taxis to theirs. The trouble is, our home has also been compromised by Mumbai’s mean streak this week.

Marine Drive morning run

Not for the first time, we have been without water. The entire tower has had restricted or no domestic water supply for three days. The self-elected Residents’ Committee who manage the tower has been switching off the water for hours at a time, in an effort to respond to issues on the supply side. The trouble is, by announcing that there will be no water, they have been causing mass panic, resulting in bathtubs, buckets, pots and pans being filled by each and every household which, naturally, increases the water consumption even further. The less water there is, the more people hoard, and the quicker the taps run dry. I am aware that many, many people in Mumbai live without running water and that the poorer neighbourhoods and slums only receive water once a day from a tanker. And I agree with a conservative with dishwashing, laundry loads and even toilet flushing during the hot season, but having to shower in a bucket is not the lifestyle the owners of these flats have bought into. I am just a renter, and a visitor to this country, so I can see the intrepid side of things. But if I had spent a million pounds on a home with a parking space big enough for my Bentley, I would be raging at the suggestion I should share bath water every time the outside water supply is disrupted. Last time this happened, the cause was a burst pipeline somewhere on the outskirts of Mumbai; this time it was a strike by the water tanker union. Regardless of the reason, with the very hot heat of summer poised to trigger the annual draining of the city’s reservoirs, the so-called water management skills of the Residents’ Committee look set to entertain us with many more humbling days of questionable hygiene in the coming weeks. 

To add insult to odour, today our tower had no power too. It took some alignment of the stars for the power line maintenance to be scheduled to coincide perfectly with an already agitated (and somewhat grubby) residential cohort. Valid fears were expressed for pets, fridges, pensioners and newborn babies (in that order). And from the look of the mass exodus from the lobby (of which were were a part) at the allotted time for the power outage, most people found other places around the city to wait out the stifling five hours it took the power people to do whatever needed doing. 

It’s days, weeks, fortnights like these that remind me of how easy it is to feel unsettled here. For all the care I take to keep our life running like a well-oiled machine, it doesn’t take much for it to break down. The simple removal of the cog that is our car has impacted every other aspect of our life in some way, right down to Jasper’s morning porridge. The bananas in his porridge, to be precise. Usually, banana buying is done on the fly, because the best bananas are the ones you can spot from afar: vibrant yellow and piled high on a vegetable cart of no fixed address. And this task usually fell under the driver’s remit, along with other errands such as printing passport photos and sourcing nuts and bolts for broken furniture. An Uber driver isn’t going to let me stop for bananas, and nor can I trust delivery services to know the quality I am after. So, it’s now my job to wander around our neighbourhood in the scorching sunshine, sniffing out a banana cart. Even as I write it down it seems like such an inconsequential edit to have to make in my routine, but not having the right kind of bananas can send Jasper off the deep end before I’ve even had my coffee, and starting the day like that drives me, quite literally, bananas. 

Hope is not lost, however. Our car should be ready to collect on Thursday, just in time for two very important family visitors (Grandpa Clive and Auntie Lala - as Liv is known to Jasper) to enjoy its services next week. I have a promising lead for a new driver and have even acquired myself a Maharashtran driving license—although I am less keen to experiment with driving now that our car is essentially brand new again. I have found a reliable banana vendor very close to where we live. Our water issue appears to be fixed and the power is back on at home. The experience of having to ask friends for help transporting Jasper (and me!) has confirmed to me that we do, in fact, have some very lovely friends here. I now know how car insurance works here. 

And above all, I can forever count my lucky stars that our driver only pranged a bashed-up old Toyota, and not a Bentley.