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Other arrivals: The plane banks for landing; I watch the wing tilt from above to below the blur of the horizon. The green light at the tip drops like a falling star through lit villages scattered across the desert. The lights knot into larger groups as we sink through layers of every-warmer air towards the spangled constellation that is, or conceals Cairo.

The decrepitude of the airport, teenage soldiers with outsize boots and obsolete Russian weaponry guard the smeary plate glass exits. Airport employees shuffle across the perfunctorily swept concourses in broken plastic sandals, I manoeuvre my way out to the rank of battered black and white taxis; the plastic canary dangling from the rear view mirror, the dashboard lined with nylon fur, Om Kalthoum wailing on the radio. Settling into the exhausted upholstery I give my address: Roxy. Roxy, Heliopolis, City of the Sun.

In Calcutta I arrive at eleven in the evening and emerge from the relative order of Arrivals out through sliding doors into the mayhem of a hundred touting taxi drivers and a violent rainstorm. As I am the only person who seems to have no transit plans and as I look so hesitant and green all the drivers want me; so you would think that I would manage not to choose the two wideboys with an Ambassador cab clearly on loan and parked as furtively under a tree a very wet walk across the airport forecourt. My ride downtown hotel-less and at night was already a dubious venture. So it would have helped if these two guys were not sharing a joint and, er, also sharing the driving, and when I say sharing it was one doing the pedals, the other steering. We lurch through roads that could surely never be the grande route from airport to downtown, even in Calcutta. But eventually we get to bowl along with the rain thundering on the tinny roof of the Ambassador; but not for long; for an old and epically dented tram cut across our bows; and from the left another taxi and from the right a flatbed truck; immense klaxonage, of course. I look out through the rain and in the fitful street lighting see an erect form lashed to the truck, bound in black plastic sheeting, snapping in the wind; but wait what is this? For out of these wind-torn folds emerge hands, exquisite, supplicatory hands, loving hands, downcast hands, hands holding things, jubilant hands; in all ten hands; the ten hands of the goddess Durga. And so I sit in my little cab, with my two simultaneous drivers and their shared joint, gesticulated at pluridextrously by an immobilised, PVC trussed Hindu goddess, listening to the defeated clanking of a very old tram, a growing chorus of horns and the offer, from one of my drivers, to put up my fare because of the delay.

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