Elephant in the room

When you first get onto the beach after fighting your way through from Charni Road station, it could be any other balmy evening at Girgaum Chowpatty, if an absurdly busy one. People queue up (im)patiently for vada pav; kids hurl glo-in-the-dark toys twenty feet in the air; chaiwallahs pour five rupees’ worth of tea into a tiny plastic cup, so full you can’t hold it without scalding your fingers.

The first visible sign that something’s different is that the beach seems to extend much further than usual, the crowds stretching out a long way into the distance. Except the masses of people furthest away aren’t actually on the beach at all: they’re in the sea, they’re slowly, almost imperceptibly getting deeper and deeper in to gradually immerse their idols, and they’re bringing a week and a half of festival to a close in a way that makes “taking down the Christmas decorations on Twelfth Night” seem pretty lame.

Yesterday saw the end of Ganeshotsav, which is essentially an epic annual birthday party for Lord Ganesha, the god of prosperity, good fortune and moral support for anybody who’s concerned that they might look like an elephant. It’s been an entertaining eleven days, with Mumbai jumping to the sound of endless tiny mobile parties. These normally involve a small van, the back doors open with a Ganesha idol looking out, garlanded with flowers; in front there are about twenty or thirty people, a few bashing rhythms on drums, the rest dancing with a delirious, spaced out expression that might be what your parents looked like the first time they took weed in 1965. Up in the cabin, next to the driver maintaining a steady 200 yards an hour, is a guy playing unchained melodies on a tiny Casio keyboard, hooked up to a loudhailer that’s got stuck on the thousand-decibel setting.

And it all ends with the enormous Visarjan or immersion day, when everyone has to find a body of water to dunk old Ganesha. Hence a few lakh people on the beach, and rather a long queue. In many areas of the city people come together with enormous collective community idols, hundreds of the Ganeshas arriving for the immersions on massive trucks and dressed up to the nines, one appearing under a giant frilly orange parasol, another being carried in what looks like a rickety wooden sedan with a large blancmange on top. Apparently the whole process takes till about four in the morning, but in sharp contrast to ordinary Mumbai life it’s bizarrely well-organised and nobody seems to mind taking their turn.

Walking the five miles home (it’s quicker than a cab) you encounter the famous Trance Ganesha inching its way up the road: four flashing coloured lights, one DJ, some massive speaker stacks, three hundred kids off their heads in a slowly-moving outdoor nightclub protected from the traffic by a couple of guys with a rope, and one happy, trippy, elephant-headed god. What a dude.