Hustler's Reward

In centuries past, Bombay was considered so unhealthy that "two monsoons were the life of a man." Bombay is still relatively dangerous to life and limb, but what its citizens feared last week was not malarial fever or dengue but hurtling autos, gangsters, and commuter trains so jampacked that festoons of passengers hang perilously from the doors. "What can we do?" shrugs Mayor Eshakbhai Bandookwala, resplendent in a red turban and seated behind a huge desk topped with black glass. "This city is growing; it leads India. Everybody wants to come here because we have work for them."

Country Swarm. To U.S. visitors, Bombay seems the most American city in India. In a nation that is currently stagnant, both economically and socially, Bombay is noisily on the move, ablaze with neon signs and with a skyline of high-rise office and apartment buildings. Bustling Bombay pays fully a third of all India's income taxes. Its wide harbor handles some 15 million tons of cargo annually, and its burgeoning industry ranges from the traditional textile mills that owe their beginning to the U.S. Civil War, when the Union blockade cut off cotton from the South, to brand-new petrochemical plants. The city's 4,500,000 people are crowded into a narrow, palm-dotted peninsula that has a greater population density than London or New York, and hundreds more swarm in each month from the hinterland, hoping for a taste of Bombay's better life.

The rewards for hustling are there for everyone to see in the ornate homes of the wealthy on Malabar and Cumballa hills. Bombay's sleek women, who set India's fashions, wear slacks by day as they whip about the city in sports cars, and are lovely by night in sheer, gold-encrusted saris. The new and old rich frequent the marble-floored Willingdon Sports Club, where vegetarian diners are discreetly noted by chalk marks on the backs of their chairs, and gather on Sundays for horse racing at the Western India Turf Club, where a sign at the entrance displays an untypical bit of Bombay intolerance. It reads: "South Africans not admitted."

Ringed City. Unlike Calcutta, where long British ownership of the jute mills left a distinctly British tone to the city, Bombay has its own cosmopolitan, fiercely independent stamp. From the beginning, the flourishing textile industry was owned and operated by the Indians themselves. Bombay industrialists were treated by the British as potential customers for machinery rather than as colonial underlings. Textiles spurred the city's growth, but Bombay has confidently gone on to such new industries as oil refineries, fertilizers, synthetic fibers, and assembly plants for Italian autos and motor scooters. The city is ringed by plants making everything from biscuits and pharmaceuticals to machine tools and tires.

There is seaminess as well as glitter in Bombay. Air India's Boeing jets coming into Santa Cruz airport swoop low over miserable mud and bamboo huts, where the air is fetid with the stomach churning odors of cow dung, urine and rotting humanity. The broad, smooth expressway from the airport into Bombay is lined with dismal rows of tenements, where more than a million people are crammed in small, single rooms and share whatever toilets exist with dozens of neighbors. One of every 66 Bombay residents has no home at all--except for the dark undersides of staircases, cattle sheds and sidewalks. Even the wide Marine Drive with its luxury apartments has its own huddle of desperate poor who have taken up residence among the mammoth concrete tetrapods scattered along the beach to protect the sea wall from the pounding waves of the monsoon.

Pledged Daughter. Bombay rivals Tokyo as the world's queen city of vice. Its wide-open red-light district runs for block after block through the center of town, and heavily mascaraed male and female prostitutes try to entice passers by into their "cages"--narrow stalls with wooden barred doors and a single bed. The cage dwellers charge only 42-c- per customer, but there are also upper-class brothels where Anglo-Indian girls receive patrons in high-ceilinged boudoirs with brilliant red curtains. Many of Bombay's estimated 70,000 whores are Devadasis, who practice prostitution in the name of religion. The custom dates back to the 3rd century, and, in its present form, Devadasi parents who seek a particular favor from their deity will vow, if the favor is granted, to make a prostitute of an infant daughter when she eventually reaches the age of puberty.

By law, no liquor can be sold in Maharashtra state, of which Bombay is the capital, and this has spawned the same speakeasies, gangsterism and pervasive corruption as did Prohibition in the U.S. So after 14 years of failure to stop drinking, Maharashtra state has finally given up just as did the U.S., and after April 1 Prohibition will be virtually abandoned. "This gangsterism and bootlegging are just an antisocial manifestation of Bombay's venturesome spirit," says a leading industrialist with genial tolerance.

With typical tolerance, Bombay supports the left-wing tabloid Blitz, which recently published pictures to "prove" that Lee Oswald did not shoot President John Kennedy, and also the right-wing tabloid Current, which flays Nehru and his nonalignment policies. Even Bombay's teenagers have a magazine that features Elvis Presley, twist instructions, and such articles as "Are Kissing Dates Dangerous?" Bombay is headquarters for the nation's movie industry, which turns out some 300 feature-length films a year. A recent and elaborate movie wedding in Bombay drew 10,000 guests, but none of them were considered top-drawer socially. Bombay's society doyens still tend to associate movies with dancing girls and prostitutes, and the movie stars keep much to themselves in their golden ghettos along Juhu Beach, Bandra and Khar.

Black Money. Prime Minister Nehru somewhat mournfully noted that "Bombay is now almost entirely devoted to business, with all its advantages and disadvantages." Most Bombayites can see only the advantages. One newly rich industrialist decided that the proper place to install his refrigerator was in his living room--so every visitor could admire it. At the top of Bombay's business structure are wheeler-dealers who know all the intricacies of "black money," which sweetens a deal by being passed under the table, as well as how to snip through the red tape of government controls. At the bottom are the men scrambling toward the top, ranging from the tiffin men, who pick up hot lunches daily at suburban homes and rush them downtown to office workers, who are thus spared the indignity of carrying lunch boxes, to street hawkers selling everything from tender green coconuts to old shoes and new U.S. auto parts, often stolen from the waterfront.

Bombay's future looks even more flourishing than its present. Nearly half of India's agreements with foreign businessmen signed in the past six months call for new ventures in Greater Bombay; the city's 3,809 factories have doubled in the past ten years, and the reclaimed land in the city's Back Bay area is scheduled to be transformed into a Mafatlal Center by Financier Arvind Mafatlal, who hopes to emulate Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. "There is only one reason for Bombay," says a local editor, "the fine practice of making money."

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