Hello from Bombay – A Letter I Wrote to American Schoolchildren

(Some of the earlier letters I had written home from Bombay had found their way to a local school.  The teacher asked if I could write about a typical day in our life in Bombay.  Here is the result.)

April 1998

Dear Friends:

I heard that you were interested to hear about my family’s life in Bombay, India.  I will tell you what a typical day is like.

One of the first things I do in the morning is brush my teeth.  I walk to the sink, take my toothbrush, and get it wet with drinking water from a bottle.   I also rinse my mouth out with water from a bottle.  The water from the faucet here in India can make you very sick if you drink it, so we have to boil it first, then pour it through a filter so it will be clean and good.  Our maid uses a big, big pot to boil water every few days.

When the whole family is awake Our maid/cook  serves us breakfast.  Her name is Patsy and she is from here in India.  In the United States only a very few people have servants, but here many, many people have servants.  Patsy cooks our meals, shops for food, washes the dishes after meals, does the laundry (she even irons my shirts!), and cleans the floors and bathrooms.  My wife I are used to doing things for ourselves, but Patsy gets frustrated when we do the jobs she thinks are hers to do and she says, “No madam (this is what she calls Anita, and she calls me sir), I can do that!”  Patsy is a very hard worker.  She is also very nice. 

For breakfast we eat cereal (they even have Kelloggs Cornflakes in India), toast, scrambled eggs, fruit and coffee, all similar to what many Americans have.  After breakfast our children ride in a van to the American School.  Their classes have 9 to 15 students each with classmates from many different countries such as Japan, Korea, Israel, and Finland.  My children have homework and tests and projects just like students in the United States.

I also ride in a van to the place where I work.  I wish you could see the sights we see along the streets of Bombay.  There are many, many cars, with much honking of horns.  In India it is not rude to honk, but it is a helpful way of telling other drivers, “Here I am, watch out!”  We see Indian women dressed in beautiful saris and other styles of garments with lovely, silky scarves draped around their shoulders. You can also see carts pulled by oxen, poor people lying on the sidewalks, sellers of fruit, or magazines, or toys, or clothes with their wares arranged colorfully and beautifully on carts or in tiny shops.  Colorful and large piles of bananas, oranges, papayas, guavas, and also vegetables like carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers and more, for sale in stands along the road, are very pretty.

One sad thing you see are beggars.  Sometimes when waiting for a red light to change, little children, or women with babies, or men come to the window and tap, tap, tap, on it, begging for money.  They look at you with big, pleading eyes.  Sometimes they point to their mouths and then fold their hands together to indicate how hungry they are.  Some of the beggars really do need help, but unfortunately, some of the beggars work for bad people who make them beg and then take the money away from them.  Sometimes we give them money, but we try to give only to ones that look real.  My daughter likes to have a few coins in her pocket to give to little children.  Sometimes, people selling things tap on the window of your car.  Sellers, of flowers, balloons, magazines, small decorative items and much more, try to sell things to people sitting in their cars.

There are very few houses in Bombay.  Almost everybody lives in apartments.  Bombay is along the ocean which we can see from our apartment window.  There are as many people in Bombay as the entire population of Australia,  so many people crammed into a small place!  Many people do not have a nice apartment.  They maybe only have a small room for a family of four or five.  Sometimes they live in a little hut made of sheets of metal or cardboard.  And many, many people just live outside and sleep on sidewalks at night and beg or work for just a few rupees a day.

One rupee is worth about two and a half cents. You can buy a banana or an orange for 1 rupee.  You can buy a small watermelon for twenty rupees.  Candy that would cost 20 rupees (fifty cents) in the U.S. would cost 10 rupees (a quarter) here.  We pay our cook in one month what someone would pay a cook for two days of work in America.

What do we do for fun?  We can go swimming at the pool where I work or at a local club, even though the water is as warm as a bathtub in this hot, hot weather (it gets up to 95 or 98 degrees every day in the summer).  We take walks or go shopping or see things like famous buildings or temples.  At home we read, watch our collection of American movies, or play Life, Dominoes, cards or other games.  Our family is learning how to play a fun Chinese game called Mahjong.  We have cable t.v. here and can watch CNN, NBC, TNT, The Discovery Channel, MTV, and even ESPN (we have watched a Pacers/Bulls game, but an evening basketball game is on live here at 6:00 in the morning because of the time difference).  A lot of the other stations are in several different foreign languages like Hindi, Marathi or Gujurati.

In the evening we walk in our neighborhood.  We are so new here that we haven’t walked everywhere we could.  Often, we walk to a local park where many, many Indians take a fast evening walk for exercise and breathe the healthy sea breezes.  There are not many other American or European people here and when we are in a crowd, we feel different.   Still almost everybody is very polite and friendly towards us.  Also, many Indians we have met are very curious about America.

I wish you could see Bombay, even for a short time.  My descriptions do not begin to convey the color, the sounds, the smells, and the whole atmosphere.  There is always something happening. There area always people, people, people walking from here to there, sitting around talking, sweeping dirt into ever growing piles, eating, cooking, and doing whatever else people do.

Feel free to write us.  We’d love to hear from you.