The day before I finally flew to Mumbai, my check-in at KLIA had turned into a bureaucratic farce. I was denied boarding for failing to produce the old passport referred to in my five-year visa. This meant buying a new ticket and, thanks to a helpful tourist from Bangalore, filling in the online arrival and Ebola surveillance forms. Apparently, getting on a plane to India now requires the paperwork of a small military operation.
Eventually, after a three-and-a-half-hour delay and a lousy Batik Air flight, I arrived at Mumbai’s mantra-sounding Bombay Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, expecting another round of officialdom.
Instead, at one o’clock in the morning, I encountered the most cheerful immigration officer I’d ever met. His smiles and chattiness put me at ease. He told me that his screen showed I had made five trips to India in the last three years, proof that I liked India a lot. He then gave me a waggly smile of proud satisfaction and stamped me in. For a moment, I felt as though I were at a ticket booth at a tourism fair rather than an immigration counter in a country that had turned form-filling into an art form.
He didn’t even want to see my old passport or the forms I’d spent so much time completing. I insisted he look at them.
For Ganapathy’s sake! I’d bought a new ticket and nearly lost the will to travel. The least he could do was admire my paperwork.
“Alright, yes, yes. Very good!”
There I stood, like a schoolboy proudly showing his homework to a teacher.
From early Portuguese, English and Persian accounts to contemporary Indian writers, generations of visitors have had plenty to say about Bombay, now Mumbai. So much, in fact, that finding something new or surprising to say about India’s largest city has become a challenge for any travel writer.
Due to its edgy, outsider-made-it-big energy, its position as a trend-setting gateway to a continent-sized nation, and its clout in finance and media, Mumbai is often compared to New York. Deep down, though, I suspect that, with South Asian migration on the rise and the right platform, the globalist crowd, led by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, would very soon expect people to call New York the Mumbai of America.
Mumbai must have one of the world’s best systems for directing arriving passengers to their e-hailing rides. Arrows on walls and painted floors lead you to the lift, which opens onto the right level, where staff in reflective jackets stand ready with signs to guide passengers to the correct lane in the car park. There, you simply wait for your Uber and if you have trouble deciphering Indian licence plates as I did you could simply hand your mobile phone to one of the boys on duty who would promptly type a message “kab time jayenge?” to the driver. The whole operation was impressively efficient and, unlike the usual airport chaos, a genuinely pleasant experience.
The ride to my hotel was equally highly-rated and fast: along broad, new, clean thoroughfares, bridges and flyovers.
Then, just as my mood could not soar any higher, near what appeared to be city centre, at a traffic light, an Ola Bike rolled up alongside my car, its pillion rider flipping her hair like a girl in a shampoo commercial — a thoroughly emancipated Bombay girl, I imagined, in a loose, long-sleeved shirt barely concealing her string top and sturdy legs, her raised rear illuminated by the motorcycle’s own tail light.
The lights turned green, and the taxi veered into an old neighbourhood lined with turn-of-the-century shops and houses. Crumbling colonial facades stood stubbornly amid the showy glass-and-steel structures and greedy concrete.
That pretty much summed up my first hour in Bombay, in the wee hours of a Friday morning, before I arrived at my one-star hotel on Lamington Road and climbed its dimly lit wooden stairs to my small, comfortable bedroom ready to power up for the five hectic days of discovery ahead.
All text and photography copyright (c) Kerk Boon Leng, October 2026
