Early days

The flight from London to Bombay/Mumbai was far from pleasant. After the first few hours I was longing for it to end; I was uncomfortable in my seat, my mouth was dry and the air felt warm and processed. For the first time in my life I had unnerving thoughts about flying. It suddenly seemed unnatural to be in a metal tube hurtling through the air at how-ever-many tens of thousands of feet above ground. The food was good though.

Arrival in Bombay was straightforward and unmemorable, but what has stuck in my mind is the view from the window as the plane came into land. Now, I wrote my thesis on poverty in Bombay, so I expected to be exposed to deprivation while passing through the city. Of municipal Bombay's 12 million inhabitants, just over half live in slums and tens of thousands eke out an existence on the city's pavements. But I was still struck by the sight of mile upon mile of small square roofs of plastic sheeting, wood and corrugated iron stretching into the distance, visible for the last five minutes of the flight. The slums dipped and climbed with the topography, reaching up to claim the high ground of small hills and only kept at bay near the airport by a deep trench and barbed wire topped concrete wall that surrounded the grounds. In the last minute or so of our descent the wing of the plane seemed to almost touch the roofs of the nearest shacks, suggesting disaster for 30 seconds before the plane passed rapidly over the trench, wall and short grass before the runway.

After negotiating the crush at arrivals, we made contact with one of my colleagues and paid a huge amount of money to be driven five minutes from the airport to where we were to meet. We manhandled our bags into the back of a 1950s model black and yellow taxi and left the airport with a minimum use of the horn by Indian standards. We ended up outside a block of flats off a windy, narrow road overhung by shrubby trees and lined with street stalls; the edges of the road giving way to broken pavement bricks, muddy slicks of water and tattered remnants of household waste. It felt like the suburb of a larger city; quiet but teetering on the edge of importance. Later that evening we were to leave from this place for the train and Ahmedabad.