Motor musings

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Very silly mid-off

A few days after getting back to Bombay, I’m strolling home on a Sunday afternoon with a new 999 rupee pair of trainers, my latest doomed attempt to be one of the cool cats. Right outside our block is a fairly busy road with a big flyover above; and underneath the flyover, Sunday is cricket day. There are three games going on – one in between each set of concrete pillars – with about 20 young people involved in each game.

They explain to me that they’re a proper club who play their matches on proper pitches, but this is how they practise – on a concrete strip, no more than twenty yards by fifteen, in between pillars under a flyover. It gets fun when anyone hits it over the low wall that separates the game from the road: a few catches are missed when the ball’s in the air amid the cars and the motorbikes, but then again it’s probably not a very popular fielding position.


Art like a wheel

The art world continues to boom in Bombay, with two new galleries opening in the space of a few days. Being a wine-and-nibbles whore who’ll put on the slap and turn up to the opening of a tin of beans, I’m in heaven. You can tell that the first one is attracting the glitterarti, because the little side street is packed with cars for most of the evening – and, of course, with drivers as well, doing what drivers do best: hang around waiting for that five-minute warning missed-call.

The second opening is all very nice, until suddenly we all get piled onto a shuttle bus to some mysterious ‘annexe’. The secondary site turns out to be a huge abandoned mill, so close to the sea that it smells like Grimsby. In the middle of an open space there’s a hitherto working car, half a dozen sledgehammers and about fifty art lovers, taking it in turns to beat the living foglights out of the motor. It’s strangely compelling, not least for the sight of nice respectable gallery-goers quickly turning into a violent, destructive mob. “Kill the beast! Bash him in!” and so on.


Truck festival

There seems to be a festival on more or less every day at the moment, but tonight’s looked especially fun. After yesterday’s immersion of idols in the sea for Dashera, today we’re worshipping Durga, and she’s popping up all over the place. The roads late at night are jammed with large trucks going nowhere, pumping out devotional music to a throng, some of whom are on the back of the truck, some of whom are covered in coloured water, a large goddess watching over the whole scene appreciatively. It’s all very loud and chaotic, and does mean that some young men with multicoloured faces have to become impromptu traffic cops, but somehow – as always in India – it seems to work.