Bombay: Overwhelmed by festivities
By Miranda Kennedy | September 23, 2009 | India
Eid celebrations are still pulsing through Bombay. The city has been officially renamed Mumbai, but its citizens stubbornly continue to call by its British name. Although I call the city Mumbai when I’m not in it, something about being inside this seething democratic megalopolis makes its affected, politicized name sound wrong. So when Im in Bombay, I do as the Bombay-ites—the people otherwise known as Mumbaikers—do, and call it Bombay.
Muslims only make up about twelve percent of India’s population, but their numbers are much higher in Bombay, the city that beckons migrants from the impoverished hinterlands with a constant promise of work. You may be miserable in Bombay, people say, but you’ll never starve here. The city prides itself on its hard work ethic, which gives it an almost relentless pace. Bombay has suffered any number of religious riots and bomb blasts, including the terrible attacks at the Taj Mahal hotel last November, but a day or two after, the city is always buzzing and churning again.
So Bombay was hardly going to grind to a halt for Eid, even though it has a high Muslim population. Still, its pace has stuttered a little over the last few days. Monday, the day Muslims ended their month-long Ramadan fasting, was a national holiday. This week, Muslims are out and about visiting relatives, hosting meals, and carousing in the streets and Bombay’s beaches eating their fill of street food.
Yesterday the celebrations made Bombay’s legendarily horrific traffic especially bad. The streets were clogged with black and yellow three-wheeled rickshaws, stalled, their idling engines sputtering into the clammy smog. Inside, whole extended families sweated into their Eid finest—the women in black burkas, hands decorated with intricate henna designs, their small sons in carefully starched salwar kameez outfits, hair combed into shape with a spurt of palm oil. Eventually, they all poured into Bombay’s public parks and beaches for an evening stroll. The stretch of urban beach in Juhu, the suburb of Bombay where I’m staying, was packed with roaming bands of young boys liberated from the month of discipline and temperance.
By dusk, the rain started. The September drizzle was unusual—the monsoon season should have ended by now—but it soon exploded into lightening bursts and a full-on downpour. The revelers surged into the main road alongside Bombay’s shoreline; whole families roaring and hooting as they charged through the rain storm. The crowds forced traffic entirely to a halt. Teenage boys scrambled over the roofs of cars and dodged across the street, in packs.
It wasn’t just the Eid revelers whose celebrations were disturbed. This week is also a major Hindu festival, Navratri. When the skies cleared up, temple staff across the city was quickly dispatched to mop and sweep the grounds clear for dancing. Night after night during the nine days of Navratri, Hindus gather on temple grounds and in parks across the city. An hour after the downpour, all the bright lights were back on, and the music was blasting again into thousands of small parks and grounds across Bombay. Groups of carefully-dressed teenagers, these ones Hindu, began gathering under the temple lights. They formed a circle: the girls holding hands, and the boys standing alongside them, their own hands at their sides. To the amplified beat of traditional Gujarati festival music, they pulsed around in an exuberant circle dance.
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