Mumbai is the ultimate Asian city — big, vibrant, brash, unequal. You can love a city in a way you don't love a village or a nation. It can get under your skin and have you hooked, for its energy, its buildings, its markets, its bustle, its scamsters, even its yellow and black taxis, which buzz up and down like bees. So it was with Mumbai when I first swooped in over the improvised slum shelters and landed at the airport near Juhu on my first visit to India, aged 19. At once I was overwhelmed by the magnificence of this abominable city, the most extreme place I had ever seen. For me, as for millions of others from India and across the world, a city that was not my home became an incidental part of my life, laying down vivid memories each time I visited.
They remain with me now: the fabulous street snacks, a friend's apartment on Malabar Hill so large you could play cricket indoors, shops sealed in the wake of riots and political unrest, the improvised firework displays at times of celebration. I remember at New Year standing by the Gateway of India, the triumphal arch by the sea in Colaba, and watching a gang of men make a bonfire in a crowded street. They threw firecrackers into it, which exploded at all angles; rockets shot along the road and into the air; a rotating firework smashed into a hut. It was terrifying, but the crowd loved the excitement.
Unlike many other great Indian cities, Mumbai does not have a history stretching back into antiquity. It was a colonial creation, made when the British gained a trading port from the Portuguese. Bom Bahia meant simply 'good bay' in Portuguese. It was not until the 19th century that a massive land reclamation project filled the mud flats, breaches and malarial marshland to create the crab-claw shape you can see when you drive down the slowly curving road that overlooks the bay.
Behind this, a new city is pushing further and further inland. So rather than being only a thriving port, Mumbai feels like a financial centre with a busy, industrial city attached. Two hundred years ago, visitors were advised by a guidebook to avoid the place altogether, since they would have to consort with 'disreputable soldiers and sailors and low-class clerks and others of the same kidney'.
Mumbai is now home to some of the world's richest people. It displays capitalism in its roughest and most dynamic form. In the heart of the city, the population is denser than anywhere else in the world, and in the shanty towns the authorities give every door frame its own number. Each day smartly dressed people emerge from these surroundings and go to work.
One of the best experiences I have had in Mumbai was spending a day being a dabbawalla — one of the busy white-capped men who take metal tiffin carriers around the city. Each day they deliver 200,000 dabbas containing people's lunch, using only bicycles, handcarts and local trains.
I worked with a dabbawalla named Vittal in the suburb of Andheri. He had to visit 33 residences and collect a dabba from each one, hook it to his bicycle and ride to a railway station. Some stops were easy: Vittal wheeled his bicycle to the front door, took a container from an unseen person and attached it to the bike. At another place he ran up flight after flight of steps to reach an apartment, shouted 'Dabbawalla!' and found the meal was not quite ready. While the dal was put in one bowl, the rice in another, and the vegetables in another, he knelt down and painted a code of coloured letters and digits on the lid of a new container. As he rushed down the stairs, he was called back: the housewife wanted to slip in a note for her husband. With Vittal's bicycle heavy with dabbas, we proceeded to the station. After taking a train to Churchgate, the codes were analysed and thousands of dabbas distributed to handcarts. We wheeled them to offices and delivered them in time for lunch.
The dabbawallas claim an error rate of one in 16 million and follow the slogan 'work is worship'. Some analysts believe they offer a new model of Indian management. Like other communities in the huge and ever-expanding city of Mumbai, the dabbawallas are close-knit. They are extraordinarily efficient; like the city that is their home, they work fluently and make the seemingly impossible come together.
Patrick French's book India: A Portrait (£25, Allen Lane) is out now. British Airways flies to Mumbai from London Heathrow. Visit ba.com.
