The Crook's Tour By Mark Jenkins Special to The Washington Post Sunday, November 2, 1997; Page E01

That, of course, was not my original plan. I had read the hipper guidebooks, so I knew that, for example, I was supposed to negotiate a rate before I got into a cab. (None of the guidebooks mentioned, however, that negotiations would inevitably be reopened at the end of the ride.) I stayed clear of hustlers, rebuffing various guides, pimps, beggars, vendors and snake-charmers who wanted a few rupees to photograph them with their cobras. As a veteran of Washington's streets, this wasn't too hard, although I had never before snubbed a man carrying a sack of venomous serpents.

After about a day, however, I began to feel that I was not likely to get much deeper into the city than the shops of the Taj Mahal Hotel, the upscale hostelry where I was not staying. Although Bombay is superficially an easy city for an English-speaking traveler to negotiate, information is hard to obtain and not always reliable. The national tourist office doesn't offer a single brochure; national English-language newspapers are vague about local activities; and when representatives of the local hospitality industry don't profess confusion, it's because they have a particular piece of disinformation to impart. (One cabbie insisted that the airport bus wouldn't be running at the hour I wanted it, although all other sources contradicted this.) One day into my adventure, it seemed that almost everything I knew about Bombay I had read before I got there.

Perhaps everyone really is confused, at least geographically. The local government has renamed most of the streets and other landmarks, and the new names are indicated on signs and (sometimes) local maps. Most inhabitants use the old names, however, shopping at Crawford Market (officially Mahatma Phule Market) and directing tourists to the restaurants and hotels of Colaba Causeway (Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg). In fact, after reading many imploring signs posted by the local government, I came to a dislocating realization: I wasn't even in Bombay. The city's name is now Mumbai, although few outside the region have recognized the change.

Once a string of lightly populated islands off India's central west coast, Bombay became the property of Britain's East India Co. in 1668. Massive landfilling created today's peninsula, which is home to some 13 million people. India's city of commerce, Bombay first boomed during the American Civil War, when Indian cotton became a valued commodity. It also owes its prosperity to its reputation for tolerance and calm. The mix of ethnicities and religions is diverse even by Indian standards, and the city long avoided internecine strife. (In late 1992 and early 1993, however, some 800 people died in brutal Hindu-Muslim clashes.)

Bombay has spectacular temples and mosques and numerous imposing reminders of British rule, and it's the home of the world's largest film industry. Still, the city attracts mostly business travelers; Western tourists tend to be passing through on their way to less crowded regions. Because of the availability of liquor and sex, apparently, Bombay does draw many vacationers from the Gulf States. (The register indicated that my hotel was patronized mostly by visitors from Dubai.) As for me, I was seeking both the exotic and the everyday.

Within easy walking distance of Colaba Causeway, I found a few notable curiosities. I saw the sometimes bizarre collection of the Prince of Wales Museum, seemingly unchanged since the British left 50 years ago. (The hall of paintings includes a bad portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and all the signs are in English.) I walked by many military installations, some guarded by soldiers with bolt-action rifles. (If World War I breaks out in Bombay, these men will be ready.) I visited the massively bureaucratic post office, whose arcane requirements for wrapping packages have spawned a whole colony of entrepreneurs who sit across the street, ready to prepare your parcels properly. I attempted to slip through the city's arcades, ideally designed to protect pedestrians from sun and rain but now clogged with vendors' stalls.

Leaving the tourist office empty-handed, I was ready to turn to just about any source, reliable or otherwise. That's when a middle-aged man in subtropical Bombay's sensible version of office wear (no jacket or tie) struck up a conversation. His name was Alex, he said, and he worked for an airline. He asked me a few friendly questions, and seemed genuinely interested in the minutiae of my flight to Bombay (which was not on the airline he named as his employer).

Across the street from the tourist office is Churchgate Station, one of the sites of a Bombay marvel: lunch. Every day, hundreds of thousands of lunch pails are prepared by wives and servants in the city's residential districts and transported downtown by train. Alex pointed out hundreds of such pails, ready to be ferried to offices by bicycle-riding porters. "Take picture," he said, with new-found authority. The next thing I knew, he was hailing a cab and asking if he could show me the city. I had hired a guide.

This, I recognized, was a reckless thing to do, at least financially. Negotiating beforehand would surely save me money. So far, however, being cheated in Bombay hadn't been painful; when a street vendor had stopped to contemplate how much to overcharge me for a soft drink, he had still came up with a price equivalent only to 10 cents. Besides, being in control hadn't gotten me very far beyond Colaba Causeway. I decided to find out what Alex thought I'd want to see.

We headed north along the railroad tracks, past postage-stamp parcels of rail yard where whole families, the children usually naked, had set up housekeeping. Bombay is India's boomtown, but appalling poverty is ubiquitous. It was strawberry season, and every time the cab stopped vendors pushed boxes of the fruit through the windows. Other men sold used magazines, or just their own misery: Beggars displayed missing limbs, presumably lost to accidents.

We turned right into a dense neighborhood, and the frenzy of downtown Bombay turned into chaos. Our path was blocked by a cart, pulled by a cow and transporting a corpse. The mounds of debris that were an occasional downtown feature became larger: whole houses reduced to heaps of rubble, piled where they had collapsed. With so dense a population, real estate would seem to be at a premium, yet no effort had been made to reclaim the dozens of plots occupied by the remains of these structures.

This didn't seem like much of a tourist destination. Then we turned a corner and I knew where we were.

The street called Falkland Road (no longer its official name, of course) is home to "the Cages," display cases for scores of prostitutes. Amsterdam's red-light district looks like Disneyland compared with this. I had read about Falkland Road, and had no plan to visit. Alex seemed delighted to be showing it to me, however, and insisted on telling me everything he knew (or thought he knew) about this district and its trade. (Subsequently, an article in the Nation told me much more.) The clogged traffic guaranteed plenty of time to gawk. "Take picture," Alex said.

I resisted, not sure what offense I might give to the people who eyed me suspiciously. I seemed to be the only foreign interloper, although Alex assured me that the street was popular with visiting Arabs. Finally I snapped a few shots, hoping that it might encourage Alex to move to the next attraction.

Instead, he commanded the driver to make a U-turn -- no small accomplishment -- and drive back down the street. He wanted me to see the transvestites on the other side. They, he explained matter-of-factly, catered principally to Sikhs. I must have looked unconvinced, because the driver nodded vigorously in agreement. "Yes, yes," he said.

Bombay is a cosmopolitan city, with a Hindu majority but significant populations of Muslims, Jains and Parsis. In recent years, a Hindu "fundamentalist" party, Shiv Sena, has grown in influence, and there have been ugly incidents. The provincial government has established Marathi, the local language, as the official one. Hindi is the national language of India, which has some 15 major tongues, but in the Bombay region it's considered the language of the religious minorities.

While I was in Bombay, it was announced that Marathi would become the language of the province's courts; where the language was inadequate to deal with modern phenomena, English rather than Hindi would be required. Apparently the language of the oppressive colonialists is less disagreeable than that of the local Muslims.

Alex's nonstop (and sometimes incomprehensible) patter revealed him as a Hindu, but not a fundamentalist. His understanding of the city's minorities seemed simplistic, but not hostile. We were now heading up Malabar Hill, an affluent neighborhood with many Jain and Parsi residents. Alex applauded them for not having too many children. He had only two, he said, which he claimed was also the Parsi average.

We arrived at the city's best-known Jain temple, where we took off our shoes; Alex gave a "donation" to a man who paid nominal attention to the assembled footwear. Inside, women were praying, but my chaperon insisted that they wouldn't mind our presence. At least I was sure that the worshipers wouldn't react fiercely to the intrusion. The Jain are obsessively nonviolent; the most fervent don't wear any clothing, except for veils to prevent them from accidentally harming insects by breathing them in.

"Take picture," Alex instructed as he conducted a breakneck tour of the temple's garish sculptures and paintings.

I couldn't tell how much of Alex's patter was practiced, but he seemed genuinely interested in my hasty impressions of his country. He was surprised to hear that I had eaten Indian food before arriving in India, although he was aware of one Indian restaurant in the West. "President Clinton has eaten at an Indian restaurant," he boasted.

The next stop was the Tower of Silence, sacred to the Parsis, who are descendants of Persian Zoroastrians. This landmark, I'm not sorry to say, is completely off-limits to non-Parsis. It's the world's most urban site for sky burials, in which corpses are ritually prepared to be consumed by birds. (Any other method of disposing of bodies would be unclean, Parsis believe.) There's little to see here except the building, some hovering carrion-eaters and the adjacent Hanging Gardens.

Alex directed the cabbie to head back toward Churchgate. We stopped at a fenced-in complex that, Alex said, had a Muslim cemetery on one side and a Hindu crematorium on the other. We looked at the cemetery; there wasn't much to see.

Then Alex headed toward the crematorium, an outdoor facility with a row of fire pits. At the end, a group of men stood around a burning corpse.

Alex went ahead of me, passing the gates confidently. I stayed behind. He waved for me to follow, urging me to pass a prominent sign at the gate. The sign read, with what I considered to be admirable clarity: "No Foreign Tourists." Beyond it were men paying final respects to a friend or relative, watching me with sidelong glances.

Alex insisted I enter. "Put away your camera," he suggested. I already had.

Alex and I were soon joined by another man, who walked with us outside the crematorium and around the corner. He showed me a small notepad listing foreigners' names, countries and the size of their "donations." Visitors from Sweden, Britain and Japan had paid heavily for their embarrassment at being dragged past the "No Foreign Tourists" sign.

This was the tour's last stop, so subtlety was no longer required. I gave the man all the rupees I had, which necessitated one more stop: I had to cash a traveler's check to pay the driver. Alex had yet to mention money, but I felt he was about to.

The final negotiations were classic. Alex refused to say what he thought was a fair price for the excursion; instead, he listed each item separately. As the price mounted, the cabbie started giving me amused looks.

Ultimately, the entire invoice -- Alex, cabbie, "donations," something for Alex's children, his ride home -- totaled about $50. That's more than the two nights I spent at a new, well-designed downtown hotel that was entirely agreeable. Still, $50 was considerably less than my night at a hotel on Juhu Beach, a fairly tawdry resort area north of the city. And in Western Europe or Japan, $50 can barely cover lunch. In Bombay, it had bought a hurried tour, but also two hours of folk wisdom, a few shakedowns too outrageous not to be amusing and a certain sense, however brief, that I really was in Mumbai.

Mark Jenkins is a Washington writer.

DETAILS: Bombay

GETTING THERE: There are no nonstop flights from Washington to Bombay. Air India, British Airways, Air France and Northwest are among the airlines that offer service from this area; round-trip fares start at about $1,700, with restrictions.

WHEN TO GO: Like much of India, Bombay has two seasons: wet (May to October) and dry. High temperatures are in the eighties and nineties; the coolest months are January and February.

WHERE TO STAY: Bombay boasts the world's most expensive office rents, but other prices are mostly low.

One exception is the luxury hotel room. Staying in a Western-style downtown hotel like the Taj Mahal or the Oberoi can cost upward of $200 a night, thanks in part to the luxury tax applied to upscale hostelries.

Because so many international flights arrive in Bombay after midnight, most overseas travelers spend a least one night at funky, polluted Juhu Beach, which has the hotels closest to Sahar International Airport. These include the Ramada Inn Palm Grove and the Holiday Inn, where prices start at about $150.

But there are many cheaper options. I stayed at the clean and new (if indifferently maintained) Regent Hotel, around the corner from the Taj Mahal Hotel, for less than $25 a night.

INFORMATION: Government of India Tourist Office, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 1808, New York, N.Y. 10020, 212-586-4901, http://www.tourindia.com.

-- Mark Jenkins