Bandra
I Did Not See Any Bollywood Stars - That I Know Of
I walked away from the Mumbai airport under an expressway. Traffic zoomed by. Rickshaw drivers shouted at me. There were stagnant pools of water filled with trash and emanating a distinctly Indian odor. Everything around this first leg of my 2025 Indian experience seemed to represent all of the negative aspects of India that I described as overwhelming (link) the previous year. The family experience I was so looking forward to had fallen through. I was going to be staying in hostels in a crowded Indian city, and building an itinerary from scratch.
Strangely, I wasn’t feeling down about it like I had the night before as I struggled to come up with a plan that seemed like it could never measure up to what I had imagined. I guess I had reached acceptance. I was feeling cheerful as I walked along the mucky road. I just decided I was going to have a good time there. I would to see the tourist sites. I would eat good food. I would meet other tourists in the hostel. Maybe I would even see a Bollywood film. There are fun things to do everywhere, and I was going to find them. I pictured the actors dancing in the closing credits of “Slumdog Millionaire,” the only film about India I even remembered seeing.
It is amazing how deciding something can be fun can make it so. I decided I would embrace the experience of the filth next to the glamour; the grimy buses and trains taking me to Marine Drive and the Taj Palace Hotel. I was going to laugh at the pushy vendors. Mostly, I was able to do this, and it turned out to be a fun stop. I even kind of had fun getting scammed. Yes, I got scammed once. By that I mean I fell for a scam. I pride myself in being pretty good at avoiding them, and I do have a decent repertoire of tricks and knowledge for avoiding them. But as you will see below, I fell for one.
I decided that I was just going to walk around and see my neighborhood, Bandra, on my first day in Mumbai. I didn’t really have a sense of how long that would take. I knew that there was supposed to be a fancy beach with a line of shops and restaurants near real estate owned by many of the Bollywood actors. Maybe I would see one – not that I would know. There was also a ruined Portuguese fort at the far south end of the neighborhood, as well as a Jesuit retreat center that some had recommended as a place to stay. There was a colonial era church. There were some things to see. So I set off walking south.
There are actually two beaches in Bandra, separated by a little point. My hostel was at the far north end of the neighborhood. Just to the north lay a full on Indian slum, and to the south lay some of the world’s most expensive real estate. The first stretch of coast I encountered was lined with shanties. One of the food bloggers I read reminisced about what Bandra was before it became “gentrified.” If this was gentrified, I would have hated to see what it looked like before. There were two floor shacks with corrugated tin roofs held down by piles of garbage. There was a man on the beach laying out laundry to dry on a commercial scale. There were animals milling about, along with their accompanying waste. There were piles of trash. I knew there had to be more to Bandra. There were no Bollywood actors living here.
To get to the second beach, I had to cut through a section of the neighborhood. This was a bit more upscale. I passed an old Portuguese church, then emerged onto the Carter Road promenade and saw the more expensive real estate. This was the nicer spot, though I never got the impression I wasn’t in India.
(Continued)
Not long after I began walking the promenade, I was approached by an 11 year old girl claiming she was hungry. I never hand out cash to people begging, but I often offer food. This kid was not even asking for money. How could I go wrong buying a kid some food? I was told a story about a deceased father, and an extended family living in a shanty along the coast. I had no problem walking with them to a grocery store and buying some staples. Heck, I’d load them up. The family seemed to grow a little bit as we walked to the grocery. Mom joined us. There were a lot of people who needed food. This was roughly translated from Hindi, because their English wasn’t great. They actually couldn’t read the translations on my phone, either. I had to play the computer generated audio for them.
Once we got to the store, they began by just getting packages of rice. That seemed legit. They got a few other basic items, sometimes a lot, but it didn’t seem bad. They asked about some milk. I didn’t mind buying milk, but I wondered how they planned to keep it cold. Around then I noticed the store clerks giving them some peculiar body language. I couldn’t tell if it was because the store didn’t like beggars, or if they thought something else was amiss. They picked up some shampoo and laundry detergent, which again didn’t seem egregious. But then the started grabbing giant sacks of pistachios, almonds and cashews, which are just as expensive in India as they are in America. At that point, to put an end to the damage, I started paying for the items. I didn’t want to make a big deal of cutting them off, but the bill was going to be significant. They seemed to get the picture, and didn’t force me to verbally make an uncomfortable situation.
There were a few big bags of items, some of which were pretty heavy. I asked how we would get them home, offering to carry them. It seemed they had originally arranged a rickshaw to help them haul off the trappings, but had made the call to allow me to help them haul the stuff back to their shanty. They had just gotten me to buy almost $100 in groceries. They saw me as a potentially bigger fish and wanted to reel me in with a bit stronger appeal. At this point, I was in some combination of suspicion and curiosity. I wondered if there was some kind of foul play involved, but wasn’t convinced I couldn’t help somehow. I wanted to know more about the situation.
I spent about an hour visiting with them in a very clean seaside shanty. Retrospectively, I’m not really sure anyone lived there. Mom gave me a very professional presentation about the deceased male family members, complete with laminated death and voting certificates of a man who was the correct age. If there was a computer, perhaps they would have had a PowerPoint presentation to go along with it.
The presentation crew was an eleven year old girl, a twenty year old purported cousin, and a forty-something mom. Sometime along the way it occurred to me that they appeared a lot cleaner than most of the other starving people I had seen in India, whether or not they were begging. They clothes were clean. Mom was even well made up and had on some decent looking jewelry. I am sure it helps to be attractive. Although mom was by no measure a knock out, she had a very nice figure. Most Indian women I have seen wear some kind of saree that exposes some midriff, regardless of body shape. Mom subtly reached back to pick up documents a few times in ways that exposed her lean abdomen and emphasized the contrast with her well proportioned breasts. There was nothing flagrantly sexual, but she was clearly intending to make herself appealing to me. The saree covered everything it was supposed to. She gave me a soft, subtle, Mona Lisa smile. She was working me. It was all part of the scheme. I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, but I was pretty sure by now that it was a scam of some kind.
During the course of the presentation, I was given several other opportunities to help. They never asked for money, always just the item itself. This hinted at some kind of legitimacy, but it just didn’t all add up. These kids told me about what they learned in school, but couldn’t even read Hindi. Where was the milk going to go? The shanty didn’t look very cluttered or lived in. They were a little too clean and bejeweled. What destitute person keeps a file of laminated supporting documents? I figured out ways to avoid providing a mobile phone, or any other big ticket items – or anything else for that matter. They gently tried to persuade me to stay and hear more about the sad story, or other opportunities to help but were never pushy. A couple of times, mom pulled one of the kids back from a more aggressive pitch. She was reading me pretty well. She knew I had a heart to help, but also was seeing some red flags.
I walked back toward the promenade, but decided when I was out of sight, I would veer back to the grocery to see if I could learn any more from the grocers about the funny body language. They knew something. So I walked back in and bought a Coke Zero. The store owner spoke a little English. I asked him if he knew the people I had bought the groceries for. He bade me wait a minute and went to fetch his fluent son. The son explained to me that those people have a contract with several other, less scrupulous groceries to provide whatever grocery items they can convince gullible foreigners to give them for resale at a lower price. That’s why the rickshaws were there. All of my groceries were prearranged to be sold at another store. Mom was just immediately reselling everything, and was doing all of this on a commercial scale.
My 11 year old scammer friend commented about how rarely they got to eat special foods as I was walking away from the seaside shanty town. I mentioned to her that at least they could feast on cashews and pistachios this afternoon. She didn’t really seem know what they were. In the moment, it could have been a term lost in translation. In retrospect, though, she may have not known what a cashew was. She certainly wasn’t going to eat any. No wonder she seemed puzzled.
I wasn’t mad. They had taken me for a pretty good haul. I had only given them groceries. I felt no guilt over that. I won’t do it again. Mainly, I’m just saddened that I cannot even feel confident in eschewing cash and giving out staple food items. I also find it quite sad that so many people are willing to capitalize on another person’s benevolence. It’s one thing to use someone’s greed against them. It’s quite another to use someone’s generosity against them. Very sad. I looked at the whole thing as a kind of tourist tax – a “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,” situation. It won’t happen again – at least not that one.
(Continued)
I did at least figure out where I could buy a Coke Zero. I sipped it as I walked off to the south again to see the rest of the promenade and the fort. I ate lunch along the way. I walked by a retreat center run by Jesuits. It is a kind of off-line hostel where may missionaries and other workers stay. I was unable to contact them, but will know how in case I am ever back in Mumbai and want to use it.
Bandra Fort wasn’t all that impressive. It also wasn’t open when I arrived. I waited alongside a nearby temple for close to an hour. I was hit up by begging children again. I took a few photos with strangers. I drank a Fanta.
Once the fort park opened up at 4:00, it didn’t take long to see. There were a few interesting ruins interspersed with trash and a nice view. I walked through all of them. I enjoyed the shade as I strolled through an area of toys where children were playing. I tried to use the toilet, but it was closed and locked. No problem, I had seen a pay toilet a few hundred yards outside the gate that I kind of wanted to try.
Why would I want to try a toilet, especially if it required payment? Take a look at the sign. It was apparently an A/C Super Deluxe toilet. I was kind of curious what a super deluxe toilet might look like. I found out on the way home. Apparently, a super deluxe toilet does have air conditioning. It also costs 10 rupees to use. A super deluxe toilet does not, apparently, have a seat or toilet paper. I had to squat and then use the squirter.
I had about four or five kilometers to cover to get back home. I stopped to sit and rest now and then as I backtracked along the promenade. I saw my begging friends again, but didn’t reveal my knowledge. I just waved. About halfway home, there came a sudden downpour. It was monsoon season, after all. I found a small awning. This shelter eventually attracted a crowd of people getting out of the rain. A few of them called taxis or rickshaws and left. Most of us just waited it out. I visited with a few locals in broken English. I people watched.
By and by, the rain let up and I continued toward the hostel. I found some Pepsi Zeroes and a box of mango ice cream on the way home. It wasn’t a standard day of tourism, but it had been a full day. I had learned some things and visited with some people. Sometimes you see and learn a lot just by being “OWA,” out walking around.
