The Way We Live In Mumbai

The longer we live here in Mumbai — and it has already been four years — the more our life here becomes the norm. When something becomes the norm, I find myself forgetting to notice it. And if I don’t notice it, I forget to write about it. But I should notice and I must write, because compared to the life we might be living in Jersey or Australia, our day to day existence here is most certainly not normal. And when we leave, I will undoubtedly look back and wish I had paid more attention to the details which make it what it is. Those details which can be anywhere from extravagant to unpredictable to illogical. Those details which see me using a phrase like ‘Jasper and I are also OK with the speedboat/chauffeur option and no, I am not bringing a nanny’, without even flinching. 

Allow me show you how not normal a typical day for us can be. Imagine it’s a Thursday in mid-October.

We are up at 6 AM, as is our norm. While I prepare Dylan and Jasper’s tiffins (snack + lunch for Jasper, lunch + various grazing options for Dylan), the boys get busy building or unbuilding their latest magnatile creation. At around 6:30 AM, Jasper trots to the front door to do his very important job: checking if the milk has been delivered. (In a glass bottle, right to our doorstep, every day before 6:30 AM.) It has! So he brings the fresh bottle to me in the kitchen and returns to his creative project.

After a breakfast of fresh fruit (mostly chopped by our housekeeper the day before), banana porridge for Jasper, toast for me and cereal for Dylan (this sounds normal but at over £11 per imported box, it’s less so), we get ready to leave. This involves me chasing Jasper from room to room in an attempt to dress him, brush his teeth and apply mosquito repellent and/or sunscreen. Dylan takes over the chase once he is dressed and between us, we usually succeed in leaving the apartment at 7:30 AM. 

Sometimes we encounter a neighbour on our exit. We greet them, and they never greet us back. Sometimes a friend of Jasper’s will be in the lift with us, although he often can’t remember their names which is a little embarrassing when they sing out ‘Morning, Jasper!’ Then we meet the lobby team, the security guards and the valets. By the time we are outside the building, we have probably spoken to around seven people which can be something of an assault every single morning. 

The assault is led by the valets (definitely not normal), who dress smartly in black waistcoats, black dress trousers and pressed white shirts, the effect of which is somewhat spoiled by the way they scatter themselves disruptively around the lobby and porte cochere. They drive like over-stimulated toddlers playing at Formula 1 and yell at one another like drunks across a crowded bar. There is nothing worse than when one of them has a whistle. We have never used the valet. This is mainly because we have a driver and the driver takes the key from the valet, before going to the carpark to fetch the car. This must seem extravagant, but for Mumbai, it’s completely normal. He then brings our car to the lobby where we launch ourselves, at speed, into the back seats. I would say we take fewer than five seconds to get ourselves and our bags into the car each morning, at which point our driver sets off, vacating the space we were in.  And yet, even with us operating at this level of skill and speed, we will be honked at by the car behind. This is something illogical. The driver behind can see that we are rushing; perhaps he even sees that we are comparatively efficient. Experience surely tells him that by the time his unnecessary honk has dispersed into the morning’s humidity, we will already be on our way. But still he honks. 

Our first stop on the morning commute is at Dylan’s work: a small lane made smaller by his cement deliveries, water trucks and endless foot traffic of construction workers, security guards and, although they don’t necessarily stand out as such, troublemakers from the unions or local gangs being just obstructive enough as to get Dylan’s attention but without alerting the local police. They want money, of course, without actually working for it. The construction industry is, at best, murky here in India, and although Dylan officially doesn’t know the half of it, he has enough of an idea to know when to look the other way. Some of the things he officially doesn’t know about would definitely fall into the not normal category. 

From Dylan’s work, Jasper and I head south towards his school. I really have no benchmark for normality as far as schools are concerned as the entire world has shifted on its axis a few times since I was 4 years old, and I have never educated Jasper anywhere other than Mumbai. Our drop-off protocol requires cars to empty their cargo on the road outside some gates. The cars then have to drive off and hide somewhere to avoid being photographed and fined by the traffic police, while the students and their guardians head past the apartment building that occupies the front of the block, to the junior school behind. A large red gate opens at 8 AM, allowing the children into the garden to romp around and shake their sillies out before the bell goes at 8:20 AM. While the children burn their morning energy, the mums congregate and its honestly hard to say who enjoys this time more. The mums are certainly the slower cohort to disperse once the bell goes. 

This is one of two campuses between which Jasper’s school is divided and it hosts children up to Grade 1. Despite having now been in formal education for over three years, Jasper is still two further years away from reaching that almighty starting line of Grade 1. Even with my lack of benchmark or comparative experience, I think perhaps this is not entirely normal elsewhere in the world? 

Drop off done, I head out for a run along the brand new Coastal Promenade. ‘In some time’ (which is Mumbai speak for ‘nobody really knows when’), the Coastal Promenade will offer an uninterrupted, hazard-free stretch of around 7.5 KM to walkers, joggers and cyclists. For now, there are two short and as-yet unconnected sections open to the public and one of them happens to have an access point right next to Jasper’s school. It offers an incredibly concrete, entirely grey scenic backdrop to a morning run, but I tell myself that the warm wind blowing in off the Arabian Sea is marginally less bad for my lungs than the smog hugging the buildings on the other side. Still, it’s over 30 degrees by 8:45 AM and I rarely last longer than half an hour before my water and my enthusiasm are depleted.

The driver takes me home. He then has nothing to do for until it’s time to set off for Jasper’s collection at 2 PM, so I ask him to go and buy me some bananas from the nearby fruit market to help pass the time. I have about an hour of silence before our housekeeper arrives and I relish this like the rare and exquisite luxury it is in Mumbai. The only disturbance is the driver ringing the doorbell with my bananas. Our housekeeper comes every weekday from about 10 AM to 5 PM and while it’s wonderful that my laundry, my dishes and my floors are kept clean without me having to lift a finger, I wish I could find a way to prevent her interrupting my every thought with questions or chatter. Often I have to retreat from the living room ‘office’ to the desk in my bedroom, locking the door as a clear symbol that I am busy. You’d think the lock is a step further than is necessary, but if that door is not locked, she doesn’t seem to notice it’s closed and on the conversations roll. 

This morning, when she arrives, I ask her to listen out for the doorbell because I am expecting a couple of visitor. As part of an ongoing investigation into my migraines, I am required to do some blood tests and so I have booked for a roaming phlebotomist to come and extract my blood in the comfort of my own home. While I’m at it, I think ‘Why not assess my gut health too?’ so the man doesn’t only leave with a vial of my blood. These testing services are available from shop-front laboratories in cities all over India and are extraordinarily efficient. Within a couple of hours, I receive an email and WhatsApp message from the pathology lab with my blood and poop reports. Of course, the downside of this is that I then waste an hour googling whether or not I am dying based on results that I am definitely not qualified to read. (NB/ A visit to the doctor a few days later confirms that I am not.) 

My other visitor is far more aesthetic in nature: she is a flower lady. That is to say, she is a lady of somewhere between 70 and 80 years old who delivers flowers to a friend of mine and who has now agreed to bring an extra couple of bunches for us. For years I have been trying to set this system up and it was only when I started visiting this particular friend at home and spied her collection of vases, bursting with fresh, bright blooms that I finally achieved my dream! I had been buying flowers from a place near Jasper’s school, paying anywhere between £12 - £15 a week for a couple of stems of lilies and some support-act flowers; enough to fill two vases for a few days before they all turned brown. This new system I’ve hijacked gives me four vases-worth of whatever seasonal flowers are available and they last all week! In fact, they last longer than a week. I know this because in an involuntary conversation the other day, my housekeeper told me that since she planted one of my discarded stems at home and it has grown new leaves and is well on its way to a new life. The one downside to my new flower lady is that she is somewhat unpredictable (it’s a theme here). She doesn’t have a phone, and has about as many teeth as I have words in Hindi, so we really struggle to communicate. Some weeks she comes when the housekeeper is around, like today, but mostly she arrives on a Saturday morning, when I’m alone with Jasper. On those occasions, I smile a lot, nod a lot, say thank you several times, and then pay her the agreed £6 for her trouble and off she goes for another week, give or take a couple of days. Never in all the countries I’ve lived in have I had fresh flowers delivered to my doorstep by someone old enough to be my grandmother. I will certainly miss this. 

Jasper taking on the duty of watering the flowers (despite them already being in water)

Drop-off, exercise, medical and flower services complete, I move onto meal prep for the day and this begins with grocery shopping. I already have the week’s menu written out on the fridge and for today’s dinner I have planned to make spaghetti bolognese. I can’t make a real bolognese on account of beef being illegal (and therefore unavailable) here but I have learned that mutton mince (which is actually probably more likely to be goat) laced with two of Knorr’s finest intense beef stock pots (imported from the UK), makes for a not-too-offensive substitute. Plenty of people swear they can get beef sent up from Goa, but in my experience, it’s flavourless buffalo and for some reason, I’d rather celebrate my 'adaptability' by using goat-masquerading-as-mutton than kid myself that I am using beef (pun intended). I brief the housekeeper to chop some onions, garlic and carrots as part of her afternoon routine and to cook spaghetti before she leaves. This streamlines my own cooking responsibilities enormously. In all honesty, it's probably been six months since I last chopped my own onion.

The one thing I can’t order online from the quick delivery apps is tinned tomatoes (I have no idea why), and as poor planning would have it, I am out. But that’s OK, because there is a small, massively overpriced ‘international’ supermarket nearby. After a quick lunch of leftovers from yesterday’s Mexican dinner and a brief exchange with Jasper’s nanny who has arrived in time to have lunch with the housekeeper before she sets off to collect Jasper, I grab my coffee cup and walk to the supermarket. I am very upset to find out it’s closed. It shouldn’t be, according to the internet, but it appears to be decked out for a photo or video shoot and nobody thought to alert possible patrons via Instagram, or WhatsApp (despite them sending me daily promotional messages). My onions are being chopped, my mutton is already partially defrosted and I hate having to pivot on dinner. Historically, whenever I do have to pivot, I start my culinary adventure from Google and there is nothing Dylan likes less than coming home to some western recipe I have decided to try making with poor quality or, more often than not, missing ingredients. 

(Photos from a monsoon trip to the supermarket with Jasper)

I have a back up plan. Inside our apartment building — not just the complex, but inside our actual tower — there is an even smaller supermarket. It’s more of a convenience store, really, but it styles itself as a supermarket. I make a quick pit-stop into my regular coffee shop on my way back home. I have recently discovered that they sell loaves of their signature sourdough and brioche — two additions to our weekly carb rotation that now occupy two of the three podium positions in my Mumbai bread rankings. So, after stopping to pick up bread and coffee, I head to the 5th level of the carpark under our tower, where you might not expect there to be a supermarket. Somehow this tiny, poorly lit, rat-attracting corner of a multi-storey carpark has more items I want to buy than all the other Mumbai supermarkets put together: mexican wraps, English Breakfast Tea, dosa batter, cardboard sandwich bread for Jasper’s toasties (not even in the top 10 of available breads for me), pasta sauce, stir fry mixes and, today’s dinner saviour, tinned tomatoes. What stops me going there more often is the aforementioned rodents which are more than a little off-putting. Still, I don’t see any as I grab my tinned toms and I’m back on track for dinner. 

Once I get home, I only have to wait a short while before my little tornado bursts through the door, bringing with him a swirling cloud of verbal debris from his busy, activity-filled morning at school. Sometimes a friend of his will come home with him, escorted by his or her nanny. On some days I invite as many as four school friends round to play for the afternoon. The children are one thing — racing around the apartment at a significant pace in the randomest of directions. But it’s the four nannies who accompany them that really clutter the place up. Including me, our housekeeper and Jasper’s nanny, the one-nanny-per-child way Mumbaikars do things mean there are a total of seven adults and five children in the house on these days. I definitely have to lock the bedroom door to get anything done, leaving the nannies and housekeeper drinking tea at our dining table while the children run amok. I’m quite sure they talk about this odd foreign lady who literally hides in her bedroom during playdates but I cannot think of anything worse than trying to share the living room with all that chaos and I really don’t want Jasper to grow up thinking nannies should be made to sit on the floor, when there is a perfectly good set of table and chairs going unused. In general, I schedule Jasper’s choice of nanny-chaperoned playdates on weekdays, so I can hide and leave them to it. Then on the weekends, my mum friends and I dictate the playdate terms and our children just have to fall in line. 

Today, Jasper brings the fruit delivery with him. I have a ‘fruit guy’ who happens to operate from a roadside stall just near Jasper’s school. I say ‘happens’ because I was introduced to him long before Jasper attended this particular school — back when we lived in our old apartment and he delivered fruit to the residents there. I kept him on as my personal fruit guy after we moved, sending him Whatsapp orders twice a week and then waiting for him to find an appropriate delivery route into which he could add me. Now, however, I ask the driver to collect the fruit while the nanny waits for Jasper. It’s very efficient, as you can imagine, and I usually only lose one banana to Jasper’s hungry tummy on the way home. 

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Jasper has a football class inside the apartment complex. Today is Thursday, so after our catch up and his snack, off he goes to the football pitch. This is something I know we will all miss when we don’t live in Mumbai — the proximity and availability of classes. Besides football, there are classes for cricket, swimming, roller-blading, cycling, hula-hooping, taekwondo, drawing, dance and who knows what else, all within the apartment complex. Usually, some particularly organised mum brings in a teacher and then asks around to fill the class. I am happy for Jasper to be some boots on a field, but I can absolutely do without the hassle of arranging something like this and for the fact that I can dodge that bullet, I am eternally grateful. Right now, we are only doing football classes for the very important reason that they are fun. We tried cricket and swimming but the former was too, well, boring and the latter was as close to child cruelty as I’ve ever let Jasper get. Needless to say, we abandoned both. 

Jasper's football class

While Jasper is at his class with his nanny pitch-side as his personal waterboy, the housekeeper winds up the last of her questions and goes home, leaving me alone again in my blissful solitude. Sometimes I even take a moment to sit down and read a book (an indulgence I could never pursue while someone chops my onions or irons my clothes), other days I do some writing or work on my new pursuit of a coaching qualification. 

When six o’clock ticks over, I get started on dinner. For today’s one-pot wonder, with its pre-chopped ingredients and pre-cooked pasta, it’s not long before it’s in the oven, leaving me with a last half hour to myself before Jasper returns from his post-football play in the gardens downstairs, hungry for dinner and tired enough not to fight bath or bedtime. Meanwhile, the driver has arrived at Dylan’s site to pick him up and, on a good day, Dylan is home for his dinner at 7 PM. 

As bad luck would have it, just as Dylan arrives home, so does the tailor. I am in the throes of a very exciting but most probably highly unprofitable experiment with Christmas table decorations and, having made the original prototype by hand, have now outsourced the sewing to my trusty tailor. He has a sewing machine, and a small team, and is happy to come to my home in the evenings to discuss my latest creative whim and, happily, agrees to give it a shot. Even with Jasper’s nanny translating (once she has put Jasper to bed) it takes a while to explain exactly what a ‘cracker’ and a ‘stocking’ is. He is very confused by the stocking and asks what we wear it for, given its cartoonish dimensions, so it’s long past 8 PM before Dylan and I sit down to dinner. 

Still, all in all, its been a productive day. With only one trip in the car, and one short excursion on foot, I have managed to replenish our milk supply, do the school run, exercise, test my blood (and poop), buy and arrange flowers, shop for groceries, buy bread, buy fruit, do some writing, get Jasper to a sports class, cook dinner, get Jasper to bed — fed, clean and exhausted, meet the tailor and have dinner with Dylan. All while my home tidied, washed, and ironed itself ready for a new day tomorrow. Oh, and the car has a fresh tank of petrol too. 

Like I said, not normal.