Four Years in Mumbai

Four years is a significant period of time. The Olympic Games come around every four years. It usually takes four years to complete an undergraduate degree. A US presidential term tends to last four (seemingly very long) years. A horse is considered fully matured for athletic or working purposes once it reaches four. And, apparently, it’s best to wait until the fourth year before fully harvesting your asparagus field. 

Four years seems to be a universally recognised length of time necessary to prepare for something. In my case, four years is how long it has taken to negotiate my terms of engagement with Mumbai and, as a result, I am finally ready to start accepting Mumbai for what she can offer me, and to stop berating her for not being something that she’s not. 

After one year in this demolition derby of a city, I had come to the conclusion that Mumbai is a hard place to live, and I stand by that analysis. Twelve months here had shown me the ups and downs of trying to create a calm, stable home environment for Jasper in the heart of a city intent on running before it can walk. I could see promise and I appreciated the city’s ambition, but I could also predict the shortfalls. I was watching Mumbai closely, but I couldn’t quite understand its logic. While everyone else appeared happy to be swept along, I felt as though I was trying to swim against the current. 

After two years here, I had found my lane and was learning to go with the flow. I was working, which helped me feel less peripheral to the deep cultural dives both Dylan and Jasper were experiencing. I took inspiration from Jasper, with his open mind and innate ability to belong anywhere, and started to find my own version of Mumbai where I could imagine I had at least as much control over the city as it had over me. Working gave me a structure to my days, a purpose for being here, a community and, very importantly, a salary. 

I miss the salary most. I didn’t write about our third year here because that anniversary passed in a fog of failure. Mumbai’s corporate culture poisoned my perspective and broke my spirit and it took me a while to get over the anger. I was angry at myself, mostly: for being naive, for being optimistic, for compromising my values, for trying to mould myself into a shape I am not. But this anger also overflowed out and submerged my tolerance of Mumbai. I didn’t feel as though I had achieved anything in my third year here and as a result, didn’t feel like acknowledging the anniversary at all. In asparagus terms, my third year was like an early harvest — it was impatient and produced a weak yield. Perhaps if I had waited until now before jumping into my first full-time job post COVID, post baby, post Myanmar military coup, I might have stood more chance of succeeding — but then again, knowing what I know now about working here, probably not. In future I will look before I leap into a contract and will definitely ask for a job description!

In spite of that, I made it to the start line of my fifth year in Mumbai, terms of engagement in hand, thinking back over what it has taken to get me here, and the mantras I’ve developed along the way. 

Use Mumbai for what it offers, and get what it lacks elsewhere. There will never be lush woodlands, a photogenic coastline or fresh air. And there may never be a decent butcher, a proper baguette or a steady supply of Pimms. So, I will stop looking for versions or alternatives of the things I love from elsewhere, because whatever poor man's substitutes i find will only disappoint (and often anger) me. Instead, I will focus on the convenient access to every kind of sports class for Jasper, months of uninterrupted sunshine and childcare that makes it possible for Dylan and I to have padel-date-nights without babysitter stress. I’ll eat Indian food, drink coconut water straight from the coconut and enjoy the local rosé. And when we go on holiday, we will soak up the green spaces, devour the barely dead steaks, swim in the clean seas and relish the rules of the orderly driving. Speaking of driving…

Stop focusing on how badly people drive, only on the way you deal with it. There is no point in being surprised when someone merges milimetres from the front of our car, or when someone straddles two lanes for a kilometre down the coastal road, or when a bus decides to let people out in the middle of an intersection. These things happen — all the time. I have obtained a Mumbai driving license but am still too scared to use it, preferring to let Dylan, with his much faster reaction speeds, deal with the endless stream of hazards on our driver’s day off. Instead of being invested in the driving, I assign myself the role of caller in a family game of Bad Driving Bingo. It was truly an exciting day when I got to call ‘Car reversing on a roundabout!’ On a roundabout! (The clue is in the name, surely?)

Stop being a pedant over nomenclature. In the rest of the world a marathon is 42KM or 26 miles. Here in India, the word marathon is used to describe any long-ish run. If you enter a 3KM fun run, people congratulate you on running a marathon. And this has irked me for four years because a real marathon is gruelling and quite frankly, insane, and I didn’t want to take anything away from the very odd people who choose to put their bodies through that. But, do you know what, when in India. I will stop correcting people when they congratulate me on my 10K marathon because this way, I get to run four or five marathons a year and I get to keep my toenails. 

Get it checked. Compared to many other places in the world, medical care is accessible and affordable to me here in Mumbai. I emphasise ‘to me’, because there are, of course, many people for whom the barrier to entry is still too high. When I first arrived, I thought people were being overly dramatic, or were pathological hypochondriacs, given the apparent frequency with which they visited the hospitals. But, four years in, I see the wisdom in this. If I can walk into a hospital after a bad spate of migraines and ask for an MRI to check I don’t have a brain tumour, why wouldn’t I? If I can get an on-the-spot spine X-ray ahead of a visit to a chiropractor in Australia, why wouldn’t I? If I can have a full body medical once a year, just to check it’s all in excellent working order, why wouldn’t I? Whether it’s western medicine or alternative wellness, I am open to it because I have run out of reasons not to be. Not everyone in our family is as up for the voluntary needling (Dylan), but I am taking advantage of all of it because one day, we won’t be able to check our insides, test our poops, or drain our lymph glands whenever it takes our fancy and I don’t want to regret not doing it when I could. That said, I still stock up on medicines when I am abroad because I will never be able to match the scientific names with the correct ailment, and I will never be able to remember the dosage if the pills don’t come with a clearly labelled box. 

Always go to the club. Sometimes I feel like I am spending too much time at the club where we have recently been accepted as members. And by too much time I mean I come here almost every day, sometimes for several hours which I spend running, gyming, tennis-ing, padel-ing, swimming, showering, reading, working, eating cheese naans and drinking coconuts. And then I think about how completely and utterly this club membership has changed our life here in Mumbai and I put myself back in my place. Besides all the sporting endeavours we are able to pursue, I think it’s the sheer expanse of green and blue my eyes have to feast on that has changed my view of Mumbai. Filling my field of vision with sky, trees, grass, water (both pool and sea), flowers, birds and happy, laughing children each day has forced the dense, dusty greyness of the city into the background of the montage that rolls across my eyelids as I fall asleep each night. I should never question if it’s the right choice to go the club, only be grateful that I am able to make that choice. At least, for the next four years until our short-term membership expires and we either leave Mumbai or I fall into a dark depression.

There’s no such thing as too many questions. I ask a lot of questions here — more than I think I ever do elsewhere. And that’s because the answers I get never contain a) the information I requested, or b) any logic. And so I keep asking because if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that at some point, I will arrive at the information I am after, no matter how convoluted a Q&A I have to go through to get there. Take a recent conversation on our building WhatsApp group, for example. I enquired as to whether other people were finding the milk deliveries increasingly late each morning and if anyone knew why. In response, several people messaged me to tell me how much they loved the milk provider I named, how great the milk is, how to contact them to set up delivery and what time their milk usually arrived. Finally, after humouring a few of these people for a good half an hour, asking what elsewhere might be considered an intrusive number of questions about their milk consumption habits, I got to a response from someone about a recent change in the lift access for delivery guys which was slowing down the process and meaning that 6:30AM had now become 7AM. Which was, after all, the response to the very first question I had asked. 

Do the run. A huge contributor to my enjoyment of Mumbai — did I just say I was enjoying Mumbai?! Maybe I am, sometimes. Well, a huge contributor to this enjoyment comes from the fact that a friend and I have somewhat accidentally formed a running club. It’s not your traditional running club, in that we don’t actually ever run together. Most of our members are mums, and every member is busy — too busy to battle Mumbai traffic to go on a drive to somewhere to go on a run with someone. It’s a zero-commitment women’s running club which primarily exists in the form of event links, sweaty selfies and the odd motivational meme sent to a WhatsApp group, but, let me tell you, it’s so motivating! Every now and then a few of us will be entered into the same official running event and we meet, often for the first time ever, at the start line, only to run our very separate races and leave without waiting at the end. Like I said, busy. We call ourselves the TrailblazHERS; we bully each other into signing up for races, we question each others life choices when people train in the summer heat, we ask one another for ideas about how to get enough protein into our aging millennial bodies and have created a group playlist filled with a very eclectic mix of mostly 90s and early 00s bangers. I’ve only met about 20% of the members in real life but it’s a community I feel very lucky to be a part of. 

In fact, it’s this virtual community that has helped me find a place in the bigger Mumbai community. It’s widened my social circle beyond where I live and where Jasper goes to school and this, in turn, has let me in on a secret: the people who I used to dismiss as either pretending to love Mumbai or having lived here their whole lives and therefore couldn’t possibly know any different, are neither of those things. They don’t fight against Mumbai, as I was, but they also don’t love Mumbai unconditionally. They are simply busy people with varied interests who have achieved a balance — the same balance I have now written into my terms of engagement. They take what they need from Mumbai, but instead of letting the city define their experience of life here, they give just a tiny bit of themselves to the frustrations and challenges and instead, design their experience of Mumbai around the things they do enjoy about living here.

And boy, do they look unruffled doing it. Much like how I looked after running (and some walking) my most recent marathon: an 800M marathon with a slightly reluctant Jasper. 

On I go, into our fifth year in this maddening, exhausting, ever-changing construction-site of a city. I hope I'll see you all at the 5-year marker with my head still held high, a freezer full of imported sausages and, fingers crossed, well on my way to a new and very different kind of job. But more on that soon.

Here's a selection of photos from our fourth year in Mumbai.