As with any house move, be it down the street or across the world, there have been challenges in settling into our new life in Mumbai. I expected some of them, such as needing to find a shop that sells something other than the apparent industry-standard,1-ply toilet paper and getting back into the habit of boiling the kettle for the washing up after the luxury of 6 months with a hot tap in the kitchen. Others, like the difficulty of buying a dining table that is not marble, surprised me. I had berated my husband for having prioritised TVs over furniture during his solo 6 months in Mumbai, but now that I am here, I can kind of see why he gave up on some of the functional essentials. 3.5 weeks in, and Jasper still has the only seat in the house. That said, last weekend we abandoned hope of trying to ‘buy local’ and ordered a table and chairs from a swanky new West Elm store in the even swankier Jio World Drive mall. It’s made from mango wood, and mango is the National Fruit of India, so perhaps that counts for something? We are now counting down the days to when we can finally sit down at the same height to eat as a family. To celebrate the installation of a new oven and microwave which arrived after we’d spent 2 weeks on a hob-and-takeaway diet, I roasted a chicken last weekend, which Dylan and I ate off an upturned laundry basket, grovelling at the foot of Jasper’s high chair. It was a family first (and hopefully last), to say the least.
What makes the lack of furniture bearable is the environment into which we’ve moved; both the physical surroundings as well as the community. Mumbai’s traffic is notorious and while some people commute for hours every day, others are lucky enough to choose to live close to where they work. I would put us in the category of exceptionally lucky, not only because Dylan’s commute is a 10 minute taxi or a 20 minute walk, but even more so because of the apartment complex to which the location of his work led us. Within the compound we have swimming pools, squash courts, a football field, tennis courts, cricket nets, a gym and a poolside restaurant. There are indoor and outdoor kids play areas and a spa-salon. There are ball-shaped statues all over the place (the owner or architect clearly loves globes), to Jasper’s intense excitement, and hundreds of beautiful frangipani trees for me. Jasper and I are basically on an extravagant holiday. Every day.
In between my hectic swimming and ball games schedule, I am busy trying to establish a functioning household, which, in Mumbai, means a lot of googling. The other day I overheard someone saying “whatever you haven’t even thought of, it will be available here”. And to date, I can only agree. I feel sure that India’s tourism tagline is soon to change to ‘There’s an app for that’. This is such a huge contrast to Myanmar, where looking for anything had to be done physically, in person as you’d find little information of use on the internet. And, as a primarily impulsive shopper for whom about 90% of purchases are probably peripheral to what I actually needed, I am still getting used to it. What you gain in convenience from never having to leave your house, you undoubtedly lose in serendipitous acquisitions (also known as ‘accidents’).
There are a couple of high end supermarkets not far from our home that sell a lot of imported brands and organic local produce. They can be overpriced, and on first impressions, we aren’t going to need many, if any, imported products here. India has everything; from the obvious spices, to coffee, to wine, to fresh dairy, to natural skincare, to organic baby foods, to sports equipment and clothing. In some cases, I have had to get my head around the language in order to work out what I need, but now that I know my maidas from my attas (processed plain flour vs wholewheat flour), and that dahi is essentially yogurt, just made from curds rather than fermentation, I feel like I am on the right track as far as groceries are concerned.
Everything comes to us via an app or website, paid for digitally. We have our milk delivered at 6am every 2 days from Sarda Farms, our wine from Living Liquidz (not as frequently, I should add). Big Basket’s express delivery sends urgent groceries within 10 minutes, and Pescafresh brought us our roast-able chicken on ice, the same day I ordered it. Even an IKEA purchase comes with an appointment for an assembly team to come in and save you the trouble. I am still in the market for fresh bread, croissants, cheese, filled pasta, sausages, bacon, a hindi teacher and a tailor, but it’s more a matter of finding the time to trawl through the plethora of options than struggling to find suppliers.
On top of the fact that deliveries are just so convenient, a recent attempt to visit a physical store to look at fancy, hand-painted wallpapers (yes, I am that person) has put me off exploring Mumbai for a while. We had hired an Uber for a few hours, to visit a very different, low-rise, labyrinthine neighbourhood called Bandra; Dylan, Jasper, Jasper’s nanny and I. Jasper’s nanny was tasked with assisting with taxi directions, as well as minimising toddler damage in any stores we visited. After two disheartening visits to the Freedom Tree and Pinklay ‘experience stores’ which carried less than a quarter of the range that was available online, I made a last attempt at salvaging the mission (and coming away with something to show for our time in the taxi) by requesting a final stop at the Kalakaari Haath studio. As I say, I am an impulsive shopper, and I was hoping to come away with more than was already in my basket on the website. Sadly, it was not to be. Meeting roadworks blocking the obvious route to the store, I suggested an alternative that appeared, on the map, to loop round to our destination. We turned off the main road, and into a market street lined with carts and tarps laden with brightly coloured stacks of coconuts, pineapples, oranges and dragon fruit. As Jasper shouted loudly at the fruit ‘balls’, the street suddenly grew narrower, and despite the taxi driver having apparently been given the all clear to keep driving, increasingly unappealing. With centimetres between our taxi and a crumbling wall which divided street from railway, we followed the road round a sharp bend. There were cars parked on the roadside in front of shops and houses where it was wide enough, which felt encouraging, but our car was brushing scooters and pedestrians as we crawled along. I was already trying to make myself smaller in the back seat, with an animated Jasper wriggling around on my lap, when we saw that up ahead we were coming up to the other end of the street with roadworks. And at this end, it was nothing but rubble and scrap metal. We stopped. On our right, we could reach out and touch a broken scooter and the wall to the railway, on our left, our front wheel was raised against an ancient-looking banyan tree. After 5 minutes of a wheel-spinning 100-point-turn in the dirt and unhelpful head shaking from pedestrians clambering over the rubble to squeeze past our car, the driver realised he had no choice but to reverse the whole way back down the street, back round the narrow bend and back through the crowded market street. I don’t know quite how it went, because I was too busy watching David Attenborough with Jasper to keep him quiet, and pretending I wasn’t there. There is nothing like a toddler expressing his displeasure to add fuel to an already stressful fire. Needless to say, though we emerged unscathed, it has deterred me from any future family shopping trips. As soon as we got home, I completed my online order and accepted that I will almost certainly never see the inside of that particular studio.
I haven’t failed every time I have left the house. On the road parallel to our home I have had more success. On foot, I should add. During my early quest for a non-marble dining table, my search led me to Magnolia Furniture, which happens to be only a 10 minute walk away. Even a 10 minute walk is an experience when it’s 38 degrees, there are no pavements and you therefore have a 10.8kg toddler strapped to you, but before we found his lovely nanny, where I went, Jasper went. It certainly makes for decisive shopping, having to baby wrangle at the same time. Not only did we order a custom armchair upholstered in a jungle fern motif for Jasper’s room, but we discovered Cotton and Satins across the street, from where I am now awaiting a wall mounted fabric panel with matching sofa cushions for the living room. I can feel my brain rewiring itself to make the most of shopping in India, where colours are everything, beautiful design is everywhere and customization is the norm. It’s no longer about finding what I am looking for, it’s about finding someone who can help me make it. My only issue will be narrowing down my choices.
Of course, all this shopping wouldn’t be possible without home help. (Oh, and a hard-working husband, as he’s just reminded me.) It has been a big readjustment to return to a world of outsourcing the running of our life, as we were fortunate enough to do in Myanmar. Besides Jasper’s nanny, we also have a ‘house boy’, who runs basic errands, pays bills and manages deliveries as well as doing the cleaning and laundry. It feels ridiculous, to be honest, when I know that it’s possible to raise kids without any of this help in the UK and Australia. But it’s expected here. Our neighbours and the other mothers in the community responded to our hiring a nanny two weeks after our arrival with “oh, finally, Jasper has a nanny”, and I am frequently asked “do you have a cook yet?”. We don’t. But we probably will soon - someone who is already working in the compound who can come in for a few hours, two or three times a week, to fill our fridge with delicious meals to reheat. We are an anomaly in having help who doesn’t live in. The majority of families here have a 24 hour nanny, a houseboy and a cook, all of whom live with them in the apartment. While I can’t quite imagine fully outsourcing my parenting, I can see how it’s justifiable if you want to work and have a social life. And people here are exceptionally busy with both of those things.
Another big adjustment has been to Jasper’s routine. I wouldn’t say I stuck rigidly to a sleep schedule in the UK (although my Jersey family might beg to differ after spending 6 months with me there), but I definitely followed a structure that had, at its core, the aim of putting Jasper down at 7pm and not seeing him until 6 or 7am the next day. Mumbai has a far later night culture than the UK, however, and since being here Jasper’s bedtime has already shifted back to 8 or 8.30pm. This is partly due to Dylan getting home from work at a time when our old schedule would have prevented him from seeing Jasper, and partly due to the fact that all the other children play outside until well after dark, and it’s just so nice for Jasper to socialise. The fact that the evenings are balmy and calm compared to the heat of the day doesn’t exactly make it a hardship either. The only issue with this new, later bedtime is that while we parents don’t start our evening until 8.30pm, Jasper is still waking up at the crack of dawn, which is something we need to work on if we are all to present our best selves every day!
All in all, it’s been a very enjoyable first few weeks here, and despite many missions still to accomplish, it’s beginning to feel like home.
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