It is raining. It rains here in fits and spurts superimposed on a general background of rain. Broken cobbles punch through tattered streams of water on the streets.

The streets are cobbled here. It’s one of the things I like so much about Bombay. Not just the picturesque bits of Bombay, though. Everywhere, up to about the middle. Many of the rooftops that you can see from flyovers are tiled, like in a village in France. The streets meet at circles, where pie-slice buildings rise up past the over-arching flyover, some with rich people in duplex apartments, and others accommodating the poorest of the poor amidst their cramped spaces and common toilets.

It will always be Bombay for me, though. Bombay brings to mind a city where the air is thick with dreams- a city where poor students rub shoulders with criminals on the trains; where irritable Parsee grandfathers look out alone from their balconies, waiting for their antique circular-dial phones to ring. In Bombay there is a place for everyone-every budget, every profession, and every idea.
Mumbai is, well, bomb blasts and extremist Hinduism.

There’s a temple here, and across the road from it a middle aged woman sits on the pavement, with a cow, and some bundles of grass. People who come to the temple pay to buy a bundle of grass to feed her cow. She has a large umbrella, a plastic stool to sit on, and cheap shoes. As I watch, she takes out some plastic gloves from her bag, the kind we use at the hospital to place IV lines, and puts it on. She gathers up the cow dung on the pavement, strips the gloves off of her hand around the dung with the ease of long practice, and tosses it into a large garbage bag marked with a biohazard symbol, off to one side.
That’s Bombay, man.
It’s something.
Bombay, you bitch, why do you make me love you so?