Mumbai Meri Jaan.............NIkaal Di

2:50 am and the train was entering Mumbai, which was going to be my home for next couple of months/years!!! Dad woke me up to get ready for the new adventure.

By 5am we were settled inside the Movie Time guest house which I had thought would be fun for its name suggested of being a movie hub. I was close enough. It was in a building very near to a popular theater called Movie Time 

By 12pm, I and dad had left for a Mumbai survey to find a (affordable) residence for me somewhere in the vicinity of my office (which was in Mumbai central). We had taken instructions from the caretaker and another temporary resident of the guest house who was searching a flat for the last 15 days. We planned to do a combing operation (I like the army like feel of the words) starting from Bandra and moving towards Borivilli. Between these 2 ends there were 7 more stations; Bandra being the closest affordable place to my office; this was suggested.

“This is Manish over here for an enquiry of a property for rent” was my opening line of the first call to a broker as soon as we landed in Bandra.
“1 BHK or 2”.
“Of course 2.”
“What is your Budget?”
“Between 10 to 15K”. I immediately thought shit…..should have said 12K to keep the negotiation margin.
“Haa….Uwon’t get that in Bandra”
“I am sorry”
“The rate here is 35K to 40K for a 2BHK”
Dad was buying a cigarette and just missed my expressions.
A sleeping cell in my brain suddenly awoke and said – Sorry! I was sleeping. By the way, Mumbai is among the top 5 costliest cities in the world as far as the real estate rates go. You read this fact a couple of years back and I stored it and went to sleep. I didn’t know you were in Mumbai
Okay!! Thanks!

I called a couple of more Bandra realtors who corroborated the fact and then some small time agent’s trainee outside a pan shop suggested me to check out in Andheri.

But I wanted something close to my office and got off at SANTA(‘s) CRUIZ(S)E.
But Preeti didn’t want a house without a cupboard and wood work (which I later came to know was a fantasy in Mumbai) and I didn’t want a house with a kitchen having standing space enough only for Kareena with a size zero. So me and dad did a on the foot survey of the Santa’s cruze only to finally understand that the rates here are 25K+.

Andheri was no better. Rat houses with crumbling buildings and no natural lighting. I had a booking till 30th in the guest house so planned to give another shot to Andheri for the next 2 days and called it a day at 7pm.
By this time I had called 12 real estate agents, met 5 and had seen total of 5 houses.
It was a Sunday and the local trains seemed to me quiet a convenient way to commute.

Monday the 18th was the real experience of Mumbai Local trains. Though it was a 1st class, a misnomer, anyone lesser than 5.5 ft would have died of suffocation in the armpits of the people riding on one another’s foot. Amazingly enough some were still managing to catch a reading.
Luckily the office was closer to the station but by the time I reached office, I had spent more than 24 hours in Mumbai and the experience was no where closer to satisfying; forget gratifying.
I just wondered what lay ahead.