T
HE first thing I hear walking through the halls of Mumbai Airport is an English Christmas carol. “Once in Royal David’s City” rings out amidst the hum of Indian voices and the click of my trolley wheels over linoleum-tiled floors.
“How delightfully strange,” I think, smiling to myself.
I find the conveyor belt upon which my backpack should be dumped and delivered and set my eyes on the plastic flap in anticipation of our reunion. It never comes.
I watch as other travellers collect their luggage and wheel it away, while the everrevolving black rubber mocks me with its emptiness. I wait another half an hour before resigning myself to the fact that my bag with its supply of clean clothes, underwear, shoes, toiletries and books, is lost.
At the flight desk, a prettily made up woman tells me my bag’s arrival is guaranteed, but not necessarily imminent. I’m stranded, in India, with nothing but an aeroplane toothbrush.
Fast-forward 24 hours past a horde of mosquitos and a bed in a seedy airport hotel and I am walking the streets of Mumbai.
My bag is still lost, and I’m wearing the same clothes I’ve been sweating in for the past 48 hours, but I’m too absorbed in the blaring, honking, haphazard world around me to care. Passing a row of parked cabs, I notice a pair of feet poking out of an open passenger door — the driver is sprawled on the backseat enjoying a nap in the afternoon heat.
Men perched on plastic chairs outside their shops, wearing long trousers and button-up shirts, survey their widespread newspapers. The air smells of warm earth inhabited by many bodies. I feel I fit right in.