First impressions of Mumbai

A wall of heat hit me as I stepped off the plane, accompanied with a smell that I had expected an Indian city to smell like. Heat, people, rubbish, fumes merged to create an ‘aroma’ that was quite different to Delhi.

But Mumbai is a much neater city. It has a prettiness that Delhi doesn’t. I thought, having read City of Djinns, that Delhi would shock me with the conditions people lived in, but it really wasn’t apparent, a few roadside tents, but nothing that I felt extreme from what I have seen in Saigon, Caracas or Bangkok.

I thought the initial impact of Mumbai would be of shanty towns in my face, but it was more like approaching Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.