This week’s travel dream: Busy, chatty, ‘impossible’ Mumbai

“There are few places in the world where people talk as much,” and “as eloquently and passionately,” as in Mumbai, said Gary Shteyngart in Travel + Leisure. In India’s most populous city—an “impossible, ridiculous, and addictive” place—it’s apparently considered rude to keep your opinions to yourself, and on a recent two-week visit, I had to get used to a barrage of such opinions, often spoken by strangers who didn’t care that I don’t understand Marathi, Gujarati, or Hindi. Like the drivers stuck in the constant traffic who tap their horns every other second, it’s every local’s way of saying, “I’m here.” Here in “Bombay,” that is. During my stay, I heard the city’s official name, Mumbai, spoken “exactly zero times.”

Did I mention that Mumbai is a funny city? On my ride from the airport, I spotted a sign describing the symptoms of malnutrition hanging just outside a Porsche dealership. Disparity is everywhere. The trains pulling out of the city’s main terminal look like “prisons on wheels,” yet the station itself, formerly known as Victoria Terminus, is “truly stunning,” a mix of Gothic Revival and Mughal architecture “whose scale and detail have no earthly equivalents.” One can get used to the contrasts. At the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, where I stayed, the staff still spoke solemnly of the 2008 terrorist attack there, but the hotel also “does a preposterously good job of tuning out the steamy world outside.” When you’re gazing down the “Escher-scape of its infinite staircase” or swimming below the hotel’s Victorian cupola, “the world feels better than it should.”

I found plenty of nightlife and fine meals in Bandra, a rising neighborhood that’s been compared with Brooklyn. To me, it has more of a Santa Monica feel, owing to the nearby Bollywood studios. But I was curious about the past too, so for my last stop I climbed Malabar Hill to Banganga Tank, a holy lake that welcomes worshippers and waterfowl to its green water. Around the small lake, kids flew kites against a backdrop of pastel-colored buildings. The call-and-response of religious chants put a hush on the scene, and in a brief interval between prayers, I heard a Mumbai rarity: silence.

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At the Taj Mahal Palace hotel (tajhotels.com), doubles start at $176.