Mumbai

Actually, let's call it Bombay. Everyone we've spoken with here does. It's true that the Hindu fundamentalists and Marathi supremecists who officially changed the name to "pre-colonial" Mumbai in the 1990s still have enough followers to make trouble. On the day we arrived, Wednesday, small riots broke out in a few neighborhoods when the police arrested a small-bore local pol named Raj Thackeray for "promoting enmity between communities and inciting violence." At yesterday's arraignment of this anti-North-Indian-immigrant gasbag----imagine Tom Tancredo with cadres of thugs---Thackeray's own defense attorney amused spectators by repeatedly referring to "the people of Bombay." And nobody calls the spectacular Victorian gothic railway station near our hotel Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. It is Victoria Terminus, or more often just V.T.

While the city has its zealots, it's still one of the most cosmopolitan places anywhere. When Larry Brown, the ex-Peace Corps guy we met in Munnar, worked in family-planning near here in the '60s, he spoke Marathi, the main language (India has 17 major ones) of Maharashtra state. Our taxi driver the other day was Ali, a Muslim. Last night we shared a cab with Istvan Keul, a German profesor of Eastern religions, who spoke Hindi with the driver. Joe, Istvan and I were on a way to the home of Jehangir and Veera Patel for dinner. They are Parsis---Zoroastrians whose forbears fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the eighth century and eventually found a safe haven in Bombay. The lingua franca of the Patels and other educated Indians is not Hindi but English. English is part of the glue that holds multifarious India together. We hear it everywhere here in India's largest---at 18 million---and most worldly city.

Much about Bombay is not enchanting. Days are oppressively hot and humid. The city's horrendous air and traffic jams are worse then Bangkok's. As you walk around, an occasional whiff of raw sewage reminds you that you're not in Wurzburg anymore. The vast slums we passed on the way in from the airport looked as soul-crushing as any I have ever laid eyes on. Even here in stable, prosperous South Bombay, some people live on the sidewalks. Estimates put Bombay's homeless in the several millions.

Last night we saw what looked like a rat zoo. Behind a decrepit structure that resembled the old Broadway and 72nd Street IRT station, a small fenced yard had been set up apparently as a feeding station for rats, so they would not gnaw at the people sleeping on the sidewalks. A few dozen were hippity-hopping around and helping themselves to pellets that had been scattered for them.

Some of the city's homeless build lean-to's out of sheets of plastic or corrugated metal barriers they filch from roadway construction sites. When you see the squalor India's urban poor must endure, you have to wonder what conditions were like in the rural villages most of these people felt they had to abandon.

That's the harsh Bombay. The Bombay of the non-disposessed can be captivating. The old, planned British part of the city, with its tree-lined avenues, parks, museums, monuments, Victorian-era stone office blocks, high-rise apartment buildings and hotels, restaurants and art deco cinemas is a visual delight to amble around in, especially at night when the temperature drops to 75 or 80. with water on both sides of the city---the Arabian Sea to the west, the harbor on the east---there are glittering long vistas. This is the Bombay its middle and upper classes love. They come out in the evening to shop, hang out, eat samosas and ice creams by the sea wall. It feels like a Latin city then---Barcelona, Palma de Majorca, Rio, South Miami Beach. When they are not underfoot, literally, the city's desperate poor can seem far away.

Bombay is also a city rich in history and culture, and we were lucky to have a first-hand encounter with that Bombay through Veera and Jehangir Patel. We met them thanks to our good friends at home, Don and Ingrid MacGillis. Jehangir and Don were clasmates at Yale in the late '60s, and both became journalists. Don was my editor at The Berkshire Eagle for several years and is now an editorial writer and editor at The Boston Globe. Jehangir puts out a monthly magazine called Parsiana, for and about Bombay's 60,000 or so remaining Parsis. He is the editor-publisher, Veera the marketing director. "I make the money, he spends it," she says.

The magazine is an elegant, literate compendium of Parsi news and opinion. The issues Joe and I read included a piece on the Tata family, India's mightiest industrialists, who are Parsi. They have just introduced the Nana, a $2,500 family car. Charity is central to Zoroastrianism, and the Tatas have set a standard of giving not always observed by other wealthy Indian families.

Jehangir's great-grandfather, Mahadev Govind Ranade, made a fortune in shipping and other businesses in Aden before returning to India. There's a bronze statue of him in a Bombay park and a plaque praising his "services as a scholar, judge, citizen, patriot and social reformer." Veera and Jehangir live in one section of the old family mansion---relatives occupy other apartments---inside a private park, a leafy oasis in raucus central Bombay.

For all their illustrious history, the Patels are a warm and easy-going pair, and like most Parsis, modern and liberal. (Parsi liberalism, in fact, may be its undoing. More Parsis then other Indian religious groups marry outside the faith. ) The Patels' reading and other tastes are small-c catholic. Dinner conversation ranged from U.S. and Indian politics, and from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy to Betty Smith. The Patels aren't so crazy about Bollywood extravaganzas, but they saw and liked both Truman Capote movies. Their daughter is in London doing post-graduate studies in English literature, plainly a source of pride and satisfaction for them.

Jehangir told a funny story about Roy, whose "The God of Small Things" paints a bleak and unforgiving picture of her Kerala hometown, Kovalam. When the book won the 1997 Booker Prize, Kovalam feted Roy. But then some residents actually read the book. (Joe and I are reading it now. Our other best reading in India has been Chitrita Banarji's meaty and flavorsome "Eating India: Exploring a Nation's Cuisine." Because of it, everywhere we went we actually knew what we were eating and why people there ate it.)

Dinner at the Patel's, prepared by their cook, was a luscious spread that included pork vindaloo, chicken curry, several tasty hot vegetable concoctions (Istvan is vegetarian), biryani rice, a vegetable salad, chapatis and some wonderful Parsi spicey chicken patties.

Jehangir generously drove us back to our hotel at 11 o'clock, discoursing in his smart and often witty way about Bombay, as it unfolded and came to life through his eyes all around us.