EXTRACT: …..A few strides further on, I arrived at Leopold’s restaurant, a Mumbai institution, immortalised in Gregory David Robert’s epic novel Shantaram. Here on an ordinary evening eight years later, Pakistani gunmen sprayed its interior with bullets, killing ten diners. This though was just a brief stop off for them as they made their way onto bigger and better things. They then tucked their weapons away and quite nonchalantly walked down the road for five minutes, past my Sea Palace Hotel, and then turned into next door, the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel, where they wreaked death on a grand scale, followed by a siege and more murder.
As I entered the restaurant, it all came back to me, yes, this was the place to be, majoring as it did in splendid curries and chilled bottles of Kingfisher beer, all consumed at tables where conversation flowed, beneath swirling fans. It was a no brainer. I slumped at an empty table and started to quench my thirst, whilst perusing the menu. I was shortly joined by a middle-aged man and his son; smartly dressed, well-spoken in a clipped English kind of way, they exuded respectability.
– I am now writing about this particular anecdote twenty-years on and so the Kingfisher and passage of time makes it a bit blurry. However, I do remember them talking to me about the state of English cricket, about which they had a far superior knowledge. I also remember them asking me about my plans for the rest of the evening. This was a tough one.
As it turned out, I had arrived at the restaurant with very clear plans for ‘the rest of the evening’, although right then and there they were beginning to trouble me deeply. I avoided the question and ordered another Kingfisher, but shortly after they asked me again.
And so, I tested the water. I told them that, somehow or other, I was going to make my way over to the Kamathipura district. It was on my list of alternative Mumbai sights to see, although to be honest that description could cover most of the megapolis.
The enterprises that operate out of Kamathipura are so dark and degrading that if their owners were to open up shop in the Western world, they would get life sentences. Yet here, for many decades, since it evolved under the Raj, the industry has operated without impunity. Here, in the shadows of an amber glow are the cages of Mumbai. This is the city’s red-light district, where on multiple floors, women and underage girls peer out of prison like cells, clutching onto window bars, staring down on to the streets below at their pimps and potential customers……
For full tale see Arriving in Mumbai – First encounters
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