I am writing today’s essay from a small café in Mumbai — Mary Lodge by Subko, a space that feels designed for the upwardly mobile and gentrified — where queues spill into a narrow Bandra alley, beside a roadside cross with fading Catholic inscriptions, and into a tiled-roof structure that has been reimagined with an interior that seems equal parts Scandi chic and desi cool. The smell of pistachio cookies and espresso is drifting through the air, mingling with the chatter of English, Hindi, and Marathi.
I’ve made many trips to Mumbai over the years, in this “maximum city” as Suketu Mehta described it, and I’ve always felt that if there is a city that contains within itself the contradictions of India it is this one. At lunch today I found myself at Soho House in Juhu, a guest in its rooftop café, where Louis Vuitton bags and Sabyasachi belts brush past each other as easily as conversations about hedge funds and creative shoots. From here, the Arabian Sea stretches gray-green toward the horizon, its surface broken by fishing boats that seem impossibly small against the sweep of Marine Drive’s corporate towers. It is Bombay as commercial capital: cosmopolitan, English-speaking, cortado-sipping, avocado-on-toast-ordering. The kind of place where, if I squint, I could almost believe I am back in London or Singapore, cities with which it now rivals in its glamour, its expense, its appetite for mimesis and reinvention.
Yet, a handful of kilometres south of the rooftop pool by which I sat is Dharavi, one of the world’s largest slums, where over a million people create a largely informal economy worth billions from spaces the size of closets. And at Azad Maidan today, Maratha protesters are out in hordes, bringing the city to a standstill as their leader conducts a hunger strike demanding reservations in public sector education and employment. This is also Mumbai.
But to see only the glamorous Bombay, or conversely, to insist that the “real” Mumbai exists only in its slums and protests, is to miss how these realities don’t just coexist but constitute each other. Mumbai holds the distinction of housing both more billionaires than many European capitals and more people living below the poverty line than entire countries. The wealth depends on the labour and the glamour requires the grit, making what the actor Julian Sands observed true: “The thing about Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It’s an incredible cavalcade of life.”
I arrived here yesterday from Goa, where I had spent a few days celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi with my family. It was the first time I marked the festival in India as an adult, though as a child in Muscat I remember helping to decorate the mandap, fussing over the idol, sneaking jaggery-and-coconut filled modaks when my mother wasn’t looking. To perform the rituals myself this time — the avahan that welcomes the clay deity into our home, the offerings of steamed modaks, the patoli wrapped in turmeric leaves, the garland of marigolds and mango leaves, the 21 sacred durva grasses, and the prayers that invite the divine into mud — felt both tender and transformative. During this time, Ganesha is not a distant god but Bappa, a beloved family member arriving for a brief visit, to be hosted, fed, worshipped, and finally farewelled with chants of “Ganpati Bappa Morya, puddhchya varshi lavkar yaa” — All hail Ganpati Bappa, come back sooner next year!
At its agrarian roots the festival is tied to the harvest, a time of gratitude and renewal. The rituals themselves make this clear. On the first day, the idol is welcomed into the home and is decorated with fresh fruits and vegetables. All the dishes that are made — and the feast is elaborate — are cooked using local produce to give thanks for the abundance, with meals often being eaten on banana leaves. The celebrations are slightly different based on region; in Goa for example, where it is called Chavath, freshly harvested paddy is brought home on the second day of the festival from local temples or fields to be prayed to.
Throughout the festival days, friends and neighbours come to visit, families sing aartis, and the house becomes porous, a node in a network of devotion. In the one and a half days that we celebrated the festival (different families celebrate different days, with eleven being the maximum), the front door to our apartment was never locked, even through the night, for anyone should be able to visit Bappa.
But the festival’s intimacy — a god treated like kin — does not diminish its larger symbolic force. It is also political: over a century ago Bal Gangadhar Tilak transformed what had been a largely household celebration into a sarvajanik (public) one, harnessing it as a tool of community identity and resistance during the freedom struggle, a way to gather crowds to circumvent the British ban on public gatherings. To celebrate it today is to inhabit all those layers at once — family, faith, history, politics — and to glimpse how Hinduism is less a codified doctrine than a way of life that has absorbed, resisted, and reshaped the currents of millennia.
At the end, the visarjan (immersion) is both catharsis and paradox: the god who was so lovingly fed and adorned is returned to water, his clay body dissolving, leaving a sense of anticipation for the year ahead.
Ganesh Chaturthi is at once the most intimate of rituals — the clay idol brought into the home, fed and tended to like a beloved guest — and yet it spills outward into the lanes and maidans of Maharashtra and Goa, into mandaps visited by strangers across religions, and into processions that thunder through the night. It is both intimately private and fiercely public, belonging equally to the household shrine and to the street.
This paradox lives in Ganesha himself. He is the remover of obstacles, the cosmic deity invoked at the start of all undertakings, whose wisdom encompasses the entire universe. After all, one of the famous aartis recited during this time, the Ganapati Atharvashirsha, proclaims:
त्वमेव प्रत्यक्षं तत्वमसि।।
त्वमेव केवलं कर्त्ताऽसि।
त्वमेव केवलं धर्तासि।।
त्वमेव केवलं हर्ताऽसि।
tvameva pratyakṣaṃ tattvamasi।
tvameva kevalaṃ kartāsi।
tvameva kevalaṃ dhartāsi।
tvameva kevalaṃ hartāsi।You indeed are the conscious essence underlying all Truth,
You indeed are the only Creator
You indeed are the only Sustainer
You indeed are the only Destroyer
Yet he is also Bappa, the child-god seated on a mantle in a living room, offered modaks and fruit as though he were a younger brother home from school. He carries the weight of divinity and the intimacy of kinship in the same form — infinite and familiar, sacred and ordinary — without needing to choose between them.
Seeing this firsthand again reminded me how the colonial encounter hadn’t just reshaped the geography but also the imagination of the land south of the Hindu Kush mountains and north of the seas. Western Enlightenment, with its penchant for categorization and its hunger for finding binaries between everything — be it sacred and profane, public and private, monotheism and paganism — struggled to grasp the complementarity at the heart of Indian life. An anthropomorphic god who was both omniscient and childlike seemed incoherent; a family ritual that birthed public festivities appeared suspect enough to be treasonous. What was lost in translation was not just knowledge but a way of being: the ability to hold opposites without being overridden with the anxiety of resolution.
This colonial habit of binary thinking still persists. When I decided to move back, I remember being asked if I was going to see the “real” India, mainly by those who had never been to the country but had consumed a particular idea of it. I nodded, although I knew my idea of real India differed from theirs — theirs was inevitably located in the Dharavi I spoke of before, in poverty, in the “authentic” spaces of deprivation that is exacerbated by the sepia tint Hollywood often gives to scenes from the subcontinent. As though India could only be true to itself when stripped of aspiration.
It’s the same gaze that packages slum tours as cultural encounters while missing how the street vendor who sells you paani puri has long accepted cashless UPI payments with an ease that would astonish, say, British shopkeepers. The romanticization of scarcity refuses to see the India that already exists.
This city for me is the truest mirror, for just as Mumbai and Bombay coexist, so does my own paradox. Between east and west, tradition and cosmopolitanism, roots and reinvention. To highlight the difference or incompatibility in the various selves — the one oscillating between mandaps in Goa and manicured corridors in Juhu, between turmeric-and-vermillion-stained fingers at roadside shrines and kale-and-asparagus salads at Soho House, between chanting Marathi aartis and ordering an oat matcha latte — is to betray the fact that they are not separate, not even opposites, but they overlap, complement, and blur.
What this city teaches me, what Ganesha himself reminds me in his various forms, is that contradiction is not a weakness to be resolved, but a reality to be lived.
The long black I order arrives in a handmade ceramic cup, its glaze uneven in that particular way that signals artisanal intent. I’ve moved cafés and around me, conversations drift between international politics and the mundane everyday lives of neighbours in a strata of society that’s at once individualistic but nosey — “Rishi Sunak advised Liz Truss on economy and then took over from her when she was kicked out,” says a young boy of about twenty with the confidence of a corporate hack; “My bai said they’re having relationship issues because she heard them argue the other day,” tells a girl to a guy on what I assume is their first date — and for a moment I look up from my laptop to take in the surroundings. A woman at the next table switches mid-sentence from English to Gujarati to take a call from her mother, her voice shifting registers with a practiced ease. This linguistic code-switching — what sociolinguists call translanguaging — is perhaps Mumbai’s truest vernacular, where Marathi provides the scaffolding but English, Hindi, Gujarati, and a dozen other languages provide the flesh.
I look around and smile because this space, with all the privilege it brings, feels safe; it feels like just another café in any metropolitan city. And I know I came here not just because I wanted to sip coffee and write in peace, but because I know that by the time this goes to print (so to speak), I’ll be in Ladakh, housing myself in a monastery amidst the Himalayas. At that point I’ll have to tap into that other self of mine, the one that doesn’t need to be in an air-conditioned space where the barista knows the difference between a cortado and a macchiato and can walk me through the notes in the single origin bean he’s brewed.
As I type these trailing sentences and finish my coffee, I am looking forward to stepping out into the Bandra rain, where auto-rickshaws negotiate with Audis, where the smell of fresh vada pav mingles with high notes of expensive perfume. This is the Mumbai that Salman Rushdie almost captured when he called it “India’s New York — glamorous, glitzy, vulgar-chic, a merchant city, a movie city, a slum city, incredibly rich, hideously poor.” Almost, but not quite, because it is so much more.
Ganpati Bappa Morya, I think. Come back soon next year — but also, stay with me as I go, through the valleys and peaks ahead, through all the versions of India and myself that wait to be discovered.
That last line!
Apologies…I seem to have done a bad job of ‘cutting and’!!! I meant to say that you put together some essential points that I think are very important and relevant today …..
Enjoy everything and I hope you have got over the ‘business’ of the impact of high altitude on your physical self! I was not too affected by it apart from mild headaches….for a day or two. I’m not sure where you will be going but I was particularly captured by the spell of Hemis Monastery….go well. Thank you for a great piece of work.