“GOLD SPOT”

FEBRUARY 11, 2022 – I’m in my spartan hotel room, two floors up. Parched, starving, and exhausted, I pull from my backpack a granola bag, open it, and pour a serving into my mouth. Granola never tasted so good—or dry. I drink the last of my “safe” water—a thimble’s worth from my one-liter, plastic canteen, last filled in Perth. I’ve not yet found bottled water and not sure I’d trust it.

I move to the window, wide open to allow oxygen into the non-air-conditioned room. I look down and see . . . a slum village self-contained and half-shaded by the back of my hotel and nearby buildings. I watch residents going about their lives. Near the entry of the closest hovel, a woman in a maroon sari scrubs furiously an aluminum serving dish as two scrawny, half-naked (the easier to pee, I notice) kids splash in nearby mud. The shining dish flashes in the sunlight.

India.

In a sweat, I collapse on the bed and sleep for an hour . . .

. . . It’s now afternoon. Time to venture forth—into Bombay—for a closer look at this foreign world.  First, more dry granola. I’m not about to swallow tap water, and I’m not brave enough to test my treatment method [stay tuned].

At the hotel desk, I inquire about local trains into the heart of the city. The station isn’t far, and I head out the door.

The platform is mobbed. Minutes later what pulls up isn’t a train but a colossal caterpillar made of humans. I watch in disbelief as the crowd on the platform join passengers clinging to every possible outer handhold and foothold of the “caterpillar.” The carriage rooftops are fully occupied. By bursts of brute force, others win a place among the solid block of humanity inside the open doorways. The human caterpillar leaves without me.

Soon another mass of flesh-covered steel pulls into the station. I’m not about to climb onto someone’s shoulders. I emulate people making a running plunge into the doorway of the rickety carriage.

All eyes are “on the white foreigner.” The crush of sweating bodies against my own occurs within a chamber sucked free of oxygen and filled with air too foul to inhale. I strain to hook two fingers around a pole to avoid being ejected from the violently swerving carriage.

I’m on the lookout for “Churchgate” station, but it’s impossible to see past bodies hanging onto the side of the carriage. The people crammed next to me—whose breath is close enough for CPR—are too close to ask.

Three stops and everyone leaps off the train—at “Churchgate.” I join them—in dire need of oxygen.

My second need is liquid. From a street vendor I buy a bottle of “Gold Spot” pulled from a box that looks more like a compost holder than a soft drink dispenser. The orange-like drink is warm and horrid but bottled.

“British or German?” asks the vendor’s next patron. He’s addressing me.

Trouble.

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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson