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Once the traffic has teased itself out, finally we manage to lumber away down a street surely much too small to lead anywhere? But no; finally to the streets around Dalhousie Square. We turn left and right and suddenly there it is, what I deserve! Like a mirage in the rain sits The Great Eastern Hotel, with its twin fluorescent-lit doors each guarded by a doorman in a white, or whiteish, uniform of Ruritanian cut. "Here! Here!" I tumble out and pay, receiving as change a promising-feeling bundle of notes, (that proved next day to be so worn as to be unacceptable anywhere). But I am home and I walk across the huge red carpet to the thirty foot long reception desk; for I am in the hotel from the Shining or a sub-continental L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad ("ah, les longs couloirs"..etc etc.) I trot behind the porter to a room as big as my London flat; but that isn't big enough; so a bit more investigation and a few more tips land me a room twice as big. OK, I'll settle for that. Home at last; on with the telly, out with the duty free and the fags; but no; I have to eat . A two mile corridor trek takes me to the completely deserted Chinese restaurant where I am waited on by three waiters.
Afterwards I am even tempted into the ball room; a desert of empty tables in the half light, and at a distance of some seventy feet a stage from which an ululating woman and a small orchestra entertain…no-one.

In the morning I find out from my Bombay Times that Durgas in large quantities are on their way to be consigned forever to the dubious waters of the Limpopo-esque river Hooghly. (Indeed, when I go out the next day there are Durgas everywhere, ravishingly sexy out of their sheeting and wobbling to their fate, poor sweeties, on the back of trucks accompanied by comically and touchingly amateur musicians in braided jackets, with drums and bagpipes.)

Fresh off a plane (if fresh is the word for sweaty and stressed and culture shocked) you are, I suppose, partly there, but your concerns for survival make of you something of a startled rodent, scurrying anxiously around, worrying about where you put your luggage check in ticket, which taxis to choose, will a taxi driver rip you off, will you make it to a hotel with all your painfully conspicuous paraphenalia before you get robbed.

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