Mumbai has a zing to it. You clear your mind here. Maybe it is because of the sea," says svelte Sangita Jin­dal, whose last name carries as much weight in India as Carnegie or Mellon would in the States; enough to get Al Gore to flyover for the launch of the children's books she published on behalf of the JSW (Jindal Steel Works) Foundation.

"Why can't Mumbai have a summer festival like the one in Central Park?" demands Sanjna Kapoor, who runs Prithvi Theatre, founded by her English mother, Jennifer Kendal, and Bollywood actor father, Shashi Kapoor. "Mumbai needs thirty Prithvis."
"Mumbai is both the New York and L.A. of India," says industrialist Nadir Godrej as we share fresh lime soda at the posh Willingdon Sports Club (membership wait list: thirty-four years and counting). "It was oriented toward the West long before the rest of India was."

"This city, she sucks you in like a whore, man," announces a drunk as he rests on my shoulder. "So you never leave."
"The amazing thing about Mumbai is how you can cram so many people into such a small space and not have them continually kill one another," says Nagesh Kukunoor, who quit an engineering career in Atlanta to make films in Mumbai. "I mean, there is no shooting, slapping, or road rage."

With eighteen million people-give or take a mil­lion-Mumbai is the most densely populated city on earth. And Kukunoor is largely right. For proof, I ride the Virar local one day. India has one of the biggest and busiest rail networks in the world, and it all began right here in Mumbai in 1853. Today, the city's train system is as complex as ew York's except that each day it trans­ports about a million more people-dreams and sweat intact. The trains aren't for the faint of heart, but the ladies' compartment is tolerable.

As the local leaves Virar, in the northern suburbs, early one morning, women congregate in small groups, dissing their mothers-in-law, singing bhajans, hemming saris, playing cards, and buying everything from bindis to beedis (a thin cigarette) from itinerant vendors. That evening, I watch a woman climb in at Byculla station laden with bags of fragrant farm-fresh vegetables that her cohorts fall on with cries of delight.

At Chowpatty Beach, smiling urchins carrying bam­boo mats accost me. They offer to spread the mats on the grainy sand and bring me takeout from the nearby stalls. "Relax, madam," they say. "Here menu." "These guys weren't here a few years ago," a friend tells me. "But they have figured out that people don't like to stand in queues and pick up food, so they do it for them."
Whether it is a one-dollar chaat (street snack) or a million-dollar transaction, when there is money to be made, Mumbaikars know how to make it. The Mumbai Stock Exchange (the oldest in Asia) invented the badla, which my financier husband tells me is "a home grown over- the-counter carry-forward system" -whatever that means. Matka gambling, a giant numbers-based lottery, possibly the largest in the world, originated in Mumbai. And even today, you can walk into a seedy lane within Chor (the word means "thieves") Bazaar, hand over a suitcase full of rupees, and have forty thousand dollars delivered to your son in Michigan the next morn­ing so that he can make his tuition payment. All the kid needs to do is say acodeword to the guy who shows up at his doorstep the next morning. No records, no receipts; sirnplyword of mouth and trust. That's Mumbai's hawaangadias, or trusted couriers, who transport four to ten million dollars' worth of cut and polished diamonds from Surat to Mumbai. These angadias guarantee safe delivery of the diamonds for a salary of approximately a hundred dollars a month.
"You won't go hungry in this city," says Rajan, who drives me around from dawn to midnight. "As long as Maha Lakshrni [the Hindu goddess of wealth] is here, the money will come."