Our train, a line of brown carriages and barred windows, approached the platform. It slowed – men ran at it, grabbed hold – and stopped. The carriage entrances, wide, divided by a single, much clutched pole, were a mess of brown skin and hard packed, wiry limbs. Men shouted. Forced between bodies, the individual shouts echoed and merged. Men pushed and came out, narrow, ragged, luggage swaying above their bent heads.

I wavered, but Claire, my girlfriend, moved, past one, two, then three carriages. All, she said, were impassably full. The shouts stopped, the echoes faded, and, behind us, new cries were assumed. Again, men pushed. I was caught in their momentum and, at the gap between carriage and platform, was forced to leap into a squash of bodies, a somehow penetrable space.

Claire, on the platform, carefully aside, immobile, said I should get off. I couldn’t, I had immediately been pushed back – and still people continued to board. The train screeched, then limped: a slow unsteady pace, but forward, imposing a decision. Hands, the hands of the five people hanging at the entrance’s three person width, extended out. Claire grasped two, the hands of different men, and was pulled up, a sixth person in the three person width – then pushed through the carriage to stand beside me.

“Where you going?” a man asked. I could not, anywhere on the carriage, see women. The man’s head was immediately beneath my chin, I could not look at him to respond. “To Victoria Terminus,” I said, “V.T.”
“Go in, go in,” said the man.

V.T. was the final stop. The man was suggesting we somehow move further into the carriage, because we would be amongst the last to get off. The train turned a soft, swinging arc. Handles, unheld, clattered against the rusting roof. A grip, I discovered, was unnecessary: we were supported by the press of flesh about us. I thanked the man, but ignored him.

I could see nothing but bodies; they obscured the scenery at windows and doors. The men wore short, oiled hair and singlets – perhaps their shirts were tucked away, protected, because of the inevitable rub against a neighbour’s sweat. White eyes, bright so near to black moustaches, studied us: we had enlivened the unpleasant commute.

I could smell our progress – a sulphurous, enveloping pong, burning plastic, manure, its slow final mingle with spicy food – and later, happy reading a book on the same route, above Indian heads, measured the journey by these smells.

Officially, Victoria Terminus is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the epicentre of Mumbai. Above the platforms, hands tic-tocked slowly through the face of a large, Roman numbered clock. The clock, inconclusive evidence of our arrival at – according our guidebook – “the city’s most exuberant Gothic building,” had been superseded: at every platform, digital displays choreographed the arrival and departure of Mumbai’s throngs. Old, white-bearded Muslims, in white robes and white skullcaps, stumbled toward trains, leaning on sticks. Chubby women shuffled, and made bright saris swish. Young men swaggered in tight trousers, swinging skinny hips. People appeared, boarded, and disappeared, obeying the bright yellow numbers displayed against black. Victoria Terminus was, quite obviously, Mumbai’s many-ventricled heart, and the digital displays dictated its pulse.

Two girls, hip-high, possibly sisters, pursued us through the station, insisting we distribute rupees. The eldest fingered soft hair, opened a mouth of gleaming white teeth – her dress, by immediate contrast, was extravagantly dirty – and stuck out a confident hand. We gave a few meaningless coins.

Outside, our guidebook’s description was justified. A four metre high toga-ed figure called “Progress,” resembling Manhattan’s “Liberty,” stood above the station’s brown-bricked, broadly Gothic building. I say broadly Gothic because it was a mishmash of Roman, Hindu, Gothic, Venetian and Damascene arches, all of them time-blackened and industrial.

A three pronged radio antenna extended beyond Progress’s crown. It was a small sign, besides the soot, that this was not 1887, and Victoria Terminus had not just been built. The station became Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in 1998, two years after Bombay became Mumbai; but it is still referred to as V.T., just as Mumbai is still referred to as Bombay.

We walked south through a subway, below an impassable road of red, double-decker busses, yellow-black taxis and shrill, incessant hoots. At a distance, the Victoria Terminus was symmetrical and perfectly confident, a statement of Victorian certainty. Near Mahatma Ghandi Road we forked right, and slowly passed the Oval Maidan where cricket was being played in perfect whites. We entered the confusion and stacked paper of the city’s High Court. Barristers dressed in British robes, but forgot the silly wigs. Next door was Mumbai University, a palm fringed transplant from Oxford, built to imitate “14th century Gothic.” We lingered at the journalism department’s newspapered wall; front pages remembered men on the moon and the assassination of two Ghandis.

At last, through Colaba, we arrived at the Gateway of India and could walk no further: a harbour full of fishing boats began. Beggars, fishermen and balloon sellers swarmed at the Gateway’s base. Next to it stood the Taj, a luxury hotel in a Mogul influenced concrete tower block. It made the Gateway look small. J.N. Tata, an industrialist, had the Taj built because European owned hotels denied him entrance: he was a ‘native’.

The Gateway had no walls. It was a notion, a magical portal, that could perhaps transfer people into a magical world. But the magical world had limits, and the limits, like the Gateway’s narrow arch, were British made. It was the beginning and end of British India. British troops arrived here, after long months of sea, and it was through the Gateway, on 28 February 1948, that the remnants of British government ceremonially left.

This is part of an article originally posted to oldworldwandering.com. You can read the rest of the article here.

More by this author:

• Who You Are, Where You Are: Travel and Nostalgia - September 10th, 2009
• A Total Solar Eclipse over Asia - July 15th, 2009
• Puja, Pilgrims and Pandemonium: Chamundeshwari Temple, Mysore - July 7th, 2009
• This Is China: A Handbook - June 25th, 2009
• The Excelsior, Hong Kong - June 15th, 2009

About the Author:  Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, Iain lives in Shanghai, where he more or less intentionally arrived after a much longer than planned overland journey from London. (The story of that can be found at Old World Wandering.) He now edits Holiday Fu from home, where he battles against his ayi's banter, amongst other distractions .