letter from mumbai

Once I landed in Mumbai I had a slow exit from the airport. It was 3 AM and I had been on a plane and more or less awake for twenty hours, because one thing about me is I cannot sleep sitting up. My phone was near death from a nine-hour connecting flight with no functional charging outlet. I needed to power it up sufficiently to fill out an immigration arrival form online, and stand in a queue to speak with an immigration agent, and then take a cab to the place I was renting.

War had broken out. I’d been texting with an old friend from high school in Illinois, who had himself been flown to Mumbai a week earlier for a work conference. He’d been headed back to the U.S., flying out the day before I flew in. During his layover in Dubai, he woke from a nap to find everyone in the airport crowding around TVs. Trump was speaking; screens all over the world were carrying him live. We need to get the hell out of here, my friend said, and very soon after that, the first airstrike hit DXB. My high school classmate and his colleague, both Americans from the Midwest, were now stranded in the Gulf.

My friend’s wife, back in the States, was nine months pregnant. Dubai airspace was closed. Iran, attacked by the U.S. and Israel, was targeting the countries it sees as U.S. client states: cooperative normalizing petrostates, countries with American bases. My friend and his colleague booked a hotel room with another stranded traveler they ran into, pulling their mattresses as far away from the hotel windows as possible, in case the glass shattered. Throughout the night and day, they heard explosions. My friend texted me: drone warfare changes everything. Russia found that out. Now we will.

I told him that if he could get out by road, he should head for Oman. Place of my growing up, yes, but more importantly, a Gulf country that did not have a U.S. base, and that had pursued, more or less, a policy of non-alignment. He’d already been considering this; he agreed that Oman’s airspace seemed less likely to close.

In my present, in the Mumbai airport, there were no outlets I could find between where I was and the immigration line. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport—renamed after a seventeenth-century king now celebrated by nationalists and Hindutva activists—was beautiful and gigantic, and I felt at once serene and delirious, padding back and forth, wondering what to do with my barely-charged phone. I finally found an outlet in the back of a tall LED wall display, busted out one of my borrowed adaptors, and sat on the floor for twenty-five minutes, wondering how something could possibly charge so slowly.

The immigration agent was Maharashtrian, born and raised, and after he took my thumbprints he asked me eighteen questions about how I got my book published. I was running off of zero sleep and any border agent sets my nerves on edge. I was trying to understand this degree of curiosity, or scrutiny, from someone who seemed very much aam aadmi, at nearly four in the morning. I tried to remain impassive as he Googled my debut, asked me what it was about. “Love story hai, bhaiya.” I said, smiling.

After his sixteenth question I asked him, in my lurching little-girl’s Hindi, if he wanted to write a book.

“No, no,” he said, grinning. “But I like Charles Bukowski. And Dostoevsky. Translated I have read them. You know him? You have heard of Charles Bukowski?”

Mumbai at 4:30 AM: air gray and foggy, night sky at once dark and bleached, a sense of radial infiniteness wherever I turned my head. I’m from Kerala, was born in Bangalore, have spent most of my time in India, over the years, in the south. Now I stared, exhilarated, at the extraordinary density of the world whipping by me. Megacity. Maximum city. I saw the gray concrete shells of buildings under construction rising into the haze. Bands of overpasses over dark water. Crows and kites already circling overhead. My Uber driver dropped me off in front of a seedy-looking building in the silvery predawn. I paid him and went looking for my rental studio.

As I lugged my suitcases up the fifth-floor walkup and texted my loved ones that I’d made it safe, I thought about the possibility that World War III had already, actually, broken out in some sense a couple of years ago, that Gaza and Ukraine were its early theaters. I wondered if Iran was in fact a beginning or an escalation. Or something else entirely. It is hard to choose a narrative shape for history while living inside it. In parts of my internet milieu, a narrative is forming online: the end of the empire. I’m not so sure.

I tried to sleep but couldn’t. At around 6:45 AM, I went out for a long walk. I wove through Bandra, and then found myself at its shoreline. The sun skipped above the horizon: glowing fat and tangerine in the gray air. The air was warm, not yet hot. I walked.

Maximum City, as Suketu Mehta termed it in his gorgeous book about the megapolis then still primarily known as Bombay, was once an archipelago of seven islands. The British leveled the hills, reclaimed the land, made of it one unified mass. An estimated 24 million people now live in Mumbai. New York City, for all its swagger, is a modest 8 million.