Bombay and the Elephanta Caves

Bombay/Mumbai. Spice and gin, trains and rickshaws, yelling touts, sea views and colonial mansions - The ride from Delhi to this massive city took 16 hours. There were eight other people in my compartment, our berths crimson, leather covered mattresses. It was a forgettable trip, blessedly easy compared to the horror stories that travelers in Nepal had shared with me.

After passing fields of agriculture, long vistas of new, still rising towers and apartment blocks, and boggy swaths of land, I arrived in Mumbai’s Central Station. In my taxi through the city I saw a zoo of motorcycles and black and yellow taxis, some modern, some looking like antiquated models from the 1950s, long, squat, honking lumps shooting through traffic.

Red buses barreled past my taxi, and a man was loading gas canisters into the back of a truck that was already packed to the brim with cargo.

And there was the usual assortment of mustachioed faces, of men sitting or squatting by the curb or on motorbikes, enjoying a smoke or a cup of chai.

My taxi-driver scooted next to a delivery truck, its rear door half open. Three men were inside, close almost to touch. “Good morning!” they shouted at me.

The Gateway to India, built for a royal visit in 1911

It was 7pm.

“Good evening,” I shot back, sending my taxi driver into a fit of giggling, and starting a three way conversation – back seat to front seat to the truck, sometimes zooming a few meters away, but never too far from our taxi.

The Taj Hotel - this is the one attacked on 11/26, India's 9/11.

A few moments later, one of the men in the truck hurled a paper-wrapped ball into the taxi, a surreptitiously pulled sweet from the boxes they were delivering. There was a cheer from the three men when my taxi driver and I downed the sticky, fibrous sweet, and then our two vehicles veered apart.

(Then my driver tried to charge me three times the normal price of my ride, sort of a wild welcome to Bombay.)

…………….

I decided to skip the long wanderings through the city yesterday, and headed to Elephanta Island instead, one of the many islands off of Bombay’s coast. The island is home to five hollowed-out caves filled with hulking, intricately-carved statues chiseled into the bones of the island between 450-750AD.

The air on the ride over was like a warm, sweat soaked sock, clammy and heavy. The water looked like muddy lead, and the engines chuffed like angry water buffalo. The ferry passed a flotilla of freighters and haulers, and shipyards tucked into islands around the bay.

Escaping the heat

After 45 sticky minutes, I landed at the pier of Elephanta Island. Two boys hurled themselves off of a wooden boat a few yards from shore. A technicolor toy-sized train hauled tourists down the long pier but I walked instead, passing corn roasters and sweet sellers, trinket vendors and restaurants, then up the long, tarp-covered pathway to the island’s caves.

Tourists and trains

There are seven caves on the island, but the first is the one that really stole the show. Outside, children scampered about, and inside, whistles from the many security guards tweeted angrily through the caverns, forbidding tourists from touching the caves’ massive statues.

There are around 15 statues which rise almost six meters high, different depictions of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. (In Nepal one of my guides said eloquently “He is a wrathful god – he never steps on land, only human bodies.”)

The statues loomed above me in the gloomy dark, tantalizing hints of a long forgotten culture. Here Shiva stood as the king of Dance, or of yoga. Another statue was a trinity of three heads, beautifully preserved and untouched by the bullets that the island’s Portuguese occupiers used to shower the statues with back in the 15-1600s.

There were other depictions too, of Shiva’s marriage to his great love, Parvati, and of him killing a demon. But I learned those stories later. During my visit to the caves I just wandered about, staring at the intricate statues, dodging the island’s monkeys, and then finally returning home.