Mumbai Round Midnight

The Arrival .... Asia again at last! I would know with my eyes closed... that dank and mouldy familiar airport smell,rising damp -- monsoon rains sunk deep into the foundations. Quiet corridors, sleeping people, sari-clad women curled up on the linoleum, dozing mustache-iode men, children drapped over their laps, mouths open in slumber.
Finally outside, throngs of jostling people, tin-can taxi cabs, yellow and black. The charred air, warm, heavy,moist. Rattling through the streets, crammed in our tattered taxi, knees touching my chin. The midnight air, waves of aromatic memory, the smokey burnt smell yielding to pungeant fishy aromas, waves of sweet incence mixed with open sewars and rotting fruit. Sleeping people, everywhere --- in the doorways, on the sidewalks, in thier food carts, under parked buses, at the edge of flyovers, in the middle of roundabouts and through the shantitowns, rows of people sleeping on sackcloth by the roadside.On and on through the slums of Mumbai, men huddled on corners, smoking 'bidis', chatting, hustling, homeless.
Finally the streets widen, shacks give way to crumbling colonial buildings, palm, pepul and the dangling roots of the Banyan trees. Frangipani and purple bourganvillia growing wildly round dilapidated colonnades and overhanging balconies. Stray cats and skinny dogs curled up on walls and guarding gateways. Bentley's hotel at last, rest after 20 hours of travel, too late for tea! so lulled to sleep by the whirring ceiling fan and Bombay dreaming.