Sex on The Beach

I had only been in the city a short time, when I went to the far north end of Mumbai, to a slightly touristy seaside resort called Uttan. After a late afternoon shack-meal, I went to rest on the beach where lots of local people were also milling about, enjoying the waves, at the end of their working day.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I realised that there was something unusual (unusual for me, anyway) going on. And then I realised – although lots of women were in the water, none over the age of ten was wearing a swimsuit or bikini. Nearly all of them were “swimming” in their ordinary clothes. This was new to me.

Later a European girl came to the beach, pulled off her sarong (revealing a bikini) and plunged into the sea. This sight so pleased a group of men that they stood in a clump near her clothes waiting for her to come out again: a diverting way to pass the time for them, with a sort of show to come, I suppose. Sadly for them, she must have been a fitness freak, for she hadn’t come out after fifteen minutes, at which point they got bored and wandered away.

So… I first came to learn – bikinis and swimsuits are not a common sight even in hip Mumbai. Modern and modernising it may be, a huge tourist destination too, but the city has not yet embraced the female swimsuit.

But questions remained.
I suppose the thinking is that bikinis invite unwanted male attention/lust, so are women on the beach, in fact, much less lusted after if they wear clothes? (It’s not such a daft question – see further down).
What happens at public swimming pools? What do women wear? The same thing?
And, where are Indian women at in the evolution of swimming-as-fun? In many countries, sea-swimming is just seen as plain stupid (what, they ask, is the point of it anyway?), while in the Far East, a woman, fully clothed or not, who went swimming would be very badly regarded. Mumbai is very feminist compared to many places – so how do women here feel about swimming?

(Of course, this is not to forget the Big Question – are swimsuits so great anyway? Looked at objectively after all, they are mostly designed purely for the Male Gaze, and not much else. Having said that, all the girlfriends I’ve ever had say they like the sense of freedom and the tan possibilities that bikinis provide.

But it’s also as well to remember that it’s not just Europeans that have revealing clothes. Women’s ordinary clothes in India can be provocative to a European, even if Indians are not aware of it. A woman in a sari or chaniya choli – a combination of a skirt and a very tight breast & shoulder-hugging blouse, that leaves much of the trunk naked – may not be aware of it, but to a Western man her body can be eye-poppingly sexy, even when she is thinking she is being modest. It’s all about what you are … not ... used to! Ironic, isn’t it?
Women from minority religions like Christianity or Islam are much less likely to wear stomach-revealing clothes of course.)

Onwards!

Now, the swimming pool test is fairly easy to answer, as there are two huge water-parks in Mumbai – Water Kingdom in Gorai and Suraj Water Park in Thane. At these both, the rule is simple – “Woman Must Wear Swimwear….”
In other words, whereas in England you would have a rule against wearing swimsuits that are too skimpy, here women have to be ordered out of day-clothes and into swimwear! For an Englishman like me, this was a surprising and curious reversal of the usual instruction.
This rule however can still cause confusion and embarrassment, so the parks go even further – and say the “swimwear” must be composed of nylon or lycra fabric. This has now stopped all the women who wanted to turn up in cut-off jeans.

So, what (say all the non-Indians) are women wearing then?
The answer is that they wear a compromise - an outfit of sleeved T-shirt and cycling shorts (or what look like cycling shorts), which in essence efficiently covers up much of the body.
Both the main water parks do quite nicely out of this confusion, as they sell a “designer” version of this combination for a nice price to anyone who turns up with the incorrect apparel. If you are keen on buying a similar outfit yourself, they have hit the high street, and you can buy them on Mumbai's so-called “Fashion Street” (near Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus).
Now, I never quite got the bottom of this (ho ho), but it’s unclear if bikinis are frowned upon or not. What is clear is that all the women I spoke to would never wear one anyway in a such a “public” place as a water park – first and foremost because of the unwanted leers of the young men, who, they say, would gather round them in numbers and maybe start to display that kind of behaviour known here as "Eve teasing".
However, in hotel pools – both luxury and family ones – I have seen bikinis. I presume that this is because there are less likely to be leers, and a greater sense of “protection”, in hotels.

Which leaves us… where….?

Well, the T-shirt & lycra shorts combination is: clearly the most efficient swimming gear (a similar outfit is worn by professional swimmers after all); is obviously better protection against the sun; and serves quite well to ward off too much staring. Some women I spoke to have also remarked that in bikinis, they feel they are being “marked down” if they have less than perfectly fashionable bodies, so they opt for the shirt&shorts as a way to escape all that nonsense.
In other words, the combo makes sense. It makes special sense in India, even if it has not got to the beach yet.

The bikini, on the other hand, is not meant to be sensible anyway. It is really a kind of personal statement, and, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, has – in an obscure way – become tied in with women’s equality, in that woman can now feel they can wear what they want, be as sexual as they want and behave as they want. The bikini says “I can be as sexual as a man”. However, it is an odd way to have to say it. The bikini is at the end of an odd and slightly random evolutionary strain in the women’s personal freedom movement in the West. It may or may not ever be “needed” in that way in Mumbai.


What do you think?

**

Just a Final Thought…
One of the main reasons for all this discussion is the presence of testosterone-driven young men who can make life so difficult for the women who are the objects of their desire.
But, sadly, you can’t seem to stop testosterone.
It almost doesn’t matter what women wear or don’t wear, because the beach or waterside is a fun place, and young men’s lust-levels will always soar in such a place.
Bikinis, head-to-toe one-pieces, burkhas – they only makes degrees of difference in warding off the male gaze.

A friend of mine wrote the piece below after going to Goa – where he too observed young women bathing in full clothes in the sea. As you’ll see though, it did not stop him “appreciating” what he saw.

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The Beach
The older sisters, dressed in full shalwar kameez, stand out in the ocean – up to their thighs – stiffly monitoring their excitable young siblings, who rush near them and
back to them in the playing waves. To my foreign eyes, it’s a surprise: only those who wish to secretly commit suicide, or those who are absent-minded to the point of eccentricity, would want to walk into the sea fully clothed.
Even from this distance, their clothes shine electric blue and dazzling red against the grey-ish water.

Sometimes though, the yank of the sea’s undertow pulls these dignified young ladies with it, and these women feel their knees being twisted by the force and their bodies sucked sideways, and, resist the water as they will, they are still toppled down into the spume, are lost to sight a moment, and then re-appear - shock and embarrassment and pleasure alike on their dripping, emerging faces, not sure if their position has been offended or just joked with.

But they have undergone a sea change. Their hair, previously in dry, untidy strands, is transformed - now sleek and sable-shiny-black and pasted to their glistening, salty skin. Their blouses, before shapeless and billowing, now stick to them like seaweed to a nude rock; and their white teeth shine from damp, excited smiles as their little brothers and sisters tease them.

But do these decorous young women know how each curve and run of their nubile bodies is now revealed by the clinging wet-tight material they wear?
What was a concealing cover, hiding what should be hidden (bare shoulders and the shapes of breasts and the firmness of her belly), now seems suddenly over-stretched, straining to hold in the breathing bodily forms beneath. Her new appearance belies her.It says: this is no shy modest young woman, but one abandoned to pleasure.
The sticky wisps of hair that fall coquettishly in her confusion further betray her.

This is also the Bollywood transformation... from virgin to seductress, instantly, in a shower of rain, yet not requiring an inch of nakedness.
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Links: Suraj Water Park


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Telephone incommuncation

As you go around in a different culture, many things that were puzzling to you at first either become explained or … well, you just get used to them. You accept them.
In fact, you accept them so much that you forget you had to learn them.
And yet, it’s just worth remembering what some of these things were… and here’s one.

The telephone greeting

When the phone rings, an Englishman will pick it up and say: “Hello”.
The word hello is here not just a greeting but also a way of establishing that you can be heard, and that you are ready to converse, and that you now expect the person to explain why they have called.

But in Mumbai, at first, it just led to confusion.

This was the sequence…
•    Usually, the person who has phoned will respond to my first hello with their hello.(I now expect them to tell me why they phoned).
Instead, there is silence.
•    I break the silence by trying to be encouraging and I repeat: “Yes… hello!”
This is a mistake, as the voice at the other end is thrown by this, and seems to question the air around them, with a very odd and vague “Hello?” back again.
•    Of course, I am now thinking that the connection is very poor and that s/he can’t hear me properly, so it is my turn to be puzzled: “Yes, can you hear me? “Hello… hello…”
•    Guess what… My caller says (you guessed it), nothing at first, and then tentatively says “Hello? Hello?”
•    At which point, I used to think I was dealing with a crazed call-centre employee with nothing better to do – and I put the phone down.

The right way to say hello

For a long while - as this dialogue occurred time after time - I thought I had a dodgy phone; and I even called the phone company to ask if there might be a problem with it.

What was even odder is that this phone-etiquette misunderstanding was often with tradesmen, that is to say, men who surely must survive by their ability to use the phone.
(So, my second interpretation – that it must be someone illiterate or unused to the phone who was going through this odd dance of greeting – was in fact quite wrong.)

It was a friend of mine who had to put me right.

The sequence - they told me - should be that, after the first two hellos are said, it is then up to me (yes, me) to say: “Yes. Tell me!” and only then will the phone-caller reveal why they have rung you.

I don’t know why the form of phone-greeting is so different to that of England.

All I know is that this is how it is in Mumbai, and that is now how I do it.

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Bollywood vs... Hollywood?

It’s hard to explain this, but sometimes one gets tricked by Mumbai’s own description of itself.
Mumbaikers, rich or poor, are so, well, self-conscious of their place on the globe, and so aware of the fact that their city has such an international profile, that you get slowly into thinking – yes, this is indeed an International City.
After all, the English-language papers more often that not feature world news on the front page, the big poster hoardings are more often than not featuring global brands such as Levis etc, and the huge new skyscrapers make the place resemble Chicago (on a hot day!).

And then suddenly, something happens to bring you up short and make you reconsider that view… And then you realise that Mumbai is not just like other places. In Mumbai they do their things their own way (sometimes). It is unique.

The incident that made me think this is quite trivial really – but telling.
The Hindustan Times was carrying a piece on racism against black people in the city, and quoted theatre director Alyque Padamsee as saying “I blame Hollywood films – they portray black men as uncultured cannibals living in trees.” This was such a bizarrely wrong-headed statement that I thought I had misread it. While Hollywood definitely has issues, this was the statement of a man who surely has not seen a Hollywood film in fifty years! What recent film do you know that portrays black people that way?

Now, how could this be? Padamsee is not only a cultured man, he is also media-savvy too, with a background in advertising. How could he have come up with such a skewed idea of American films? I now prefer to think he must have been quoted “out of context”; but then arises the thought – how could the paper have allowed such a muddle-headed remark to be printed anyway?

We talked about this in a bar, and, after much talk, we think we may have solved the conundrum.
And here’s our answer: Indians, generally, and unlike the rest of the world, don’t really count Hollywood large on their horizons. So their image of its films might well indeed be vague.

After all, it is interesting to reflect that India might well be the only country left in the world where Hollywood does not rule in local cinema halls. Across the country, Hollywood plays a poor second to India’s own film industry, aka Bollywood.
(Of course, Hollywood is making certain inroads, particularly here in Mumbai where multiplexes are springing up; American blockbusters are beautifully suited to the multiplex environment with its sensurround experience. However Bollywood too is now turning out some beautifully crafted and tense films that can beat Hollywood in that multiplex strategy.)

You see, what I thought was that, because Mumbai has the reputation of being an international city, that then you’d get to see here all the world films that you’d get in say Manchester, or Berlin or Tokyo. But I’ve often been astonished at how hard it is to see a “decent” or important international film here. For example, even “Borat”, which I was much looking forward to, has not got a release here, while the chances of seeing a foreign-language film are virtually nil.
In fact, Bollywood rules, because the cinema mangers know that that is what audiences want to see.
And, in this area, film going, Mumbaikers rarely look very much outside their own indigenous movies.

Please don’t think that I am making a value judgement. In fact, I think it is rather pleasing that Mumbai’s filmgoers are bucking the globalisation trend. They prefer homegrown movies, and that’s fine (if unexpected).

So, to go back to the point.
How could a reputable commentator like Padamsee be so wrong about Hollywood?

"Well, because in this city" – said my friends in the bar – "Hollywood is the outsider. Bollywood is what matters! Hollywood is an interesting diversion, but it's not the main interest for Mumbai film-goers, not by a long shot."

And that - probably - explains it.

**
Links: Hollywood and Bollywood Compared (Blog)


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Spooked by the Suburbs

Mumbai – whatever you think of it – can never be described as sterile. Most of it has all the life and hustle of a city bursting at the edges, and is almost overwhelming.
But then one visits the district of 'Hiranandani Gardens'. By contrast, it can seem spooky… and a little discomfiting.

It was when I went to Powai, one of the Mumbai’s northernmost suburbs that I came across the elite district of Hiranandani Gardens, which lies off the main highway there.
At first, it was hard to believe my eyes. Hiranandani Gardens is about a mile square: a square mile of pristine urban development. It looked like a huge wedding cake made of marzipan straight out of the shop; or like a combination of ancient Rome and a modern shopping mall.

There were huge, pastel-coloured buildings adorned with neo-classical pillars or Grecian pediments. There were wide, clean uncluttered roads (with no potholes!). There were luxury shops. There were road signs requesting that motorists desist from using their car-horns (and people were obeying…). There were landscaped, tidy public gardens. There were street-names like “Central Avenue” and “High Street”, and, behind imperial gates, there were dazzlingly bright apartment blocks called “Olympia” and “Tivoli”.
I have seen something like this before. But it was in the gated communities of super-rich America.

Though HGs is in Greater Mumbai, it does not seem like Mumbai. There were no rubbish piles. There were no pavement dwellers. There was no one sleeping on a wall. There were no street-side vegetable vendors. The roadside drains (four feet deep!) were unblocked and empty of debris. I didn’t see a rickshaw, or a rat.
At night, the happy inhabitants can sally out to spend their money in the numerous international shops and restaurants, and at the well-heeled entertainment centre.

Where on Earth was I? This was surely not Mumbai.
Mumbai, love it or loathe it, is filthy, squashed, vibrant, decaying, noisy, diverse and, above all, chaotic.
You can guess at my amazement.

The internet tells me that this district was created by the Hiranandani brothers, who are both very rich indeed. They flattened the hills that dot this area, and then built this impressive small-town to cater to their fellow rich.
I learned, not to my surprise, that they are also involved in building in the huge 23-Marina building in Dubai.

It was also they who brought in India’s hardest-working architect, Hafeez Contractor, who brought with him his trademark faux-Italian arches, cornices and domes. (Poor Hafeez is in that strange position of being incredibly popular with his clients, but despised by some of his more sniffy peers, who compare him to the deadhead populist architects in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.)
But even if you think Hafeez is the best thing ever, you do have to ask the questions - why do the buildings have almost no relation to the shape of the lands around them? And why are they so un-Indian?

A man who was walking round with me hissed his displeasure. “Look at this! The people who live here are lots of NRIs and Americans who don’t want to know they are in India… They want to pretend they are in London or Milan!”

And then, even more bitterly, he said: “Why are the street-names in English? Where are the Hindi or Marathi street-names?”
He carried on: “And Where are the mosques, the temples, the roadside shrines… the cinemas?!!”
I suddenly realized he was right. No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find any religious institutions or film-houses. In a country where religion and Bollywood are second nature to the vast majority, it was spooky to observe a complete absence of them.

But the poor are still there. My companion took me to the edge of the district, where suddenly, round a corner, you hit a jhopadpatti. The black liquid of untreated sewage spreads along its alleyways, and the ragged children play in the dust.
Now, it’s not unusual in Bombay to find this contrast of rich and poor – in fact it is common – but having seen what I had already seen I had assumed the poor here had been “moved on”, as they often are in this city.
I was told that a legal battle to resist eviction by the slum-dwellers had turned into a political contest, so – for now – they were staying. But its clear the facilities of the town do not extend to them.

What is one to make of all this? I wandered some more.

I went into the public garden (called “Nirvana Park”), which is a copy of a Japanese-style space with pools full of carp, little half-moon bridges across the water feature and ultra-tidy lawns. The young courting-couples were obviously at home; they seemed happy. And yet, as I looked around, I saw nothing Indian at all in the features of the place, not even the face of a Ganesh or a swastik.

A hundred yards away, there is a tall black obelisk - in HGs’ “Central Square”. Now I must admit I didn’t quite understand all the images at its base, which are not explained, but I could make out the gist of one. It shows a contented paterfamilias who sits and reads the paper as his children play ball behind him. I guess it was trying to sum up the area: reinforcing the idea that this is a Happy Community.

**

That night I watched that spooky movie ‘Stepford Wives’ on the TV – that’s the one where the “perfect” community is created by the men there, who also turn their beautiful wives into absolutely submissive robots.
And it rang a bell for me. The fake classical architecture of Stepford, the “happy community”, its disturbingly spotless streets – all reminded me of… Hiranandani Gardens.
But – that’s a film.

Maybe the Hiranandanis are right?
After all, what’s wrong with cleanliness and order? On their website, the brothers even list one of their achievements as being the first builders to bring copper plumbing to India. You feel that they are trying to clean up India, which is worthy enough.
And, you know, Mumbai has had enough of inter-communal tension and strife – maybe their brand of money-led secularism is the way forward instead? Will their new-rich make India Shining?
And, following that line of thought - why shouldn’t therefore their new India look more international than Hindustani?

I’m still thinking about this.


**
Links: Hiranandani Gardens, and Hafeez Contractor’s website, plus Stepford Wives


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