Another bloody anniversary: a year to the day since two nervous honeymooners boarded a night flight from Heathrow to Mumbai. I'd travelled down on the early morning Megabus from Newcastle; we picnicked in the park behind the Marshall Foch statue at Victoria, spreading newspaper across the leaf-strewn grass; down and outs and foreign alcoholics had taken all the benches.
And then we were walking out of the shabby, deserted airport and into a black and yellow taxi, bumping along dirt roads, rounding people and cows and auto-rickshaws. It remains scorched into my mind: the baking heat, the beggars pressed up against the windows, the menacing pandemonium of it all. We both had exactly the same thought: What the hell have we done?
Hell was the street between our hotel and the train station, lined on both sides with open fronted shacks. Small fires burnt here and there, naked children ran along the edge of what passed for the road, hunched women stared at us through exhausted, vacant eyes.
Thankfully, things got better after that.
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