Mumbai Memories,1983 Poem by Max Reif

We slept on the floor at Victoria Station, Bombay,
that old gothic, wedding-cake catherdal of a building
from the raj, my friend Adi and I. He'd started crying

as I'd passed, wearing a Meher Baba button, walking
on the streets of Colaba by the Arabian Sea. Told me

he'd grown up with Meher Baba's nephews in Pune,
they used to steal the shoes of people
who came for Darshan (Blessing) , that he'd

become separated by time and his habit,
his heroin habit, that had him on the street.

He remembered 'B im-Bom-Bay', the Pat Boone
song I sang to him, and I was surprised
it had also been popular over there.

He was a Parsee, looked like he might have
gone to my high school in America, and then

been through a few tough years. You know
how you meet someone once in a great while,
and you both feel like you've known one another before.

In some cases, you may never see one another again, either,
and in this case that was true. My passport had been stolen
as I'd tried to leave the country after my Pilgrimage —
that was the only plausible explanation for its being gone

when I'd come back to the ticket counter, having walked back
across the terminal to pay the Airport Tax I'd forgotten about.


That was an adventure: the thing that gets me
is how unsafe I was, how I survived adventure
after advernture in my youth. Not long after,

I had a dream I was losing blood, and I knew
if I 'lost' much more vital essense through fooling around,

I'd be done for. And here I am at 58,
solid as a bank.