Ex-pat Wife or Have you eaten yet?: Mumbai

Mumbai is a memory. All I have left to remind me of it are some photos (see below) and a slightly dickie stomach. It is a fantastic city. A welcome change from the neat, orderly, tick-boxiness of Singapore.

Mumbai seems to have been crumbling slowly in the heat ever since the British left in '47. There are the remains of colonial days in the moulding forms of the most beautiful buildings everywhere you go.

How many photos do you usually take on holiday? I'm usually quite a lazy photographer. 30 is a high number on a trip for me. This time I took 115. So often I saw something so beautiful and full of contrasts I had to get my camera out. Not the ordered, architecturally planned, shiny new beauty of Singapore but a long ago shiny and new melting away through lack of maintenance and always strung with washing. And not only in the buildings.

Not an inch of space is wasted. Colour and life are crammed into every corner. Each window you look up to has someone hanging out of it, usually on a mobile phone and of course the obligatory multi-coloured string of washing, like festive bunting. It adds a jaunty verve to the place.

That verve, that energy is what makes Mumbai so appealing despite the poverty. Poverty and prosperity live cheek by jowl. Slums and skyscrapers spring up and are pulled down with equal speed. Life is lived out of doors, probably because there isn't much room at home, so everywhere you go there's a congregation of people and sometimes it feels as though all of them are trying to sell you something.

Well, quite a lot of them are trying to sell you something. You get followed a lot. Now, as a liberal, middle-class westerner I am well aware that I've won the jackpot in the lottery of birth and feel suitably guilty. On the other hand I really don't want to buy any 'scarves, pashminas or handicrafts'. I always feel conflicted when I ignore the cries and walk away but usually this is what you have to do in order to get anywhere. But there is a kind of bravado, showmanship and hope about the people trying to sell you something, or trick you into something, that even while really not wanting to be conned, I liked and respected.

We went to Juhu beach and had street food from the stalls that flank it one evening. It was Sunday and the whole beach was heaving with life. People were wandering through the dark, the women in brightly coloured saris, children running in and out. Often the baby girls are in beautiful, glittering dresses, sometimes with their huge eyes ringed with kohl, making them even huger, even more striking and beautiful.

Everywhere people were selling things: candy floss; enormous balloons, pani puri (mouthsized fried, hollow, chickpea pastries filled with crunchy peashoots and tamarind water, utterly delicious), corn on the cob and anything else that might attract a beach wanderer.

We were approached by an immaculately dressed, rather beautiful girl who I would have guessed at about 14. She had a basket full of carved wooden blocks and henna dye pads. We tried to ignore her and walk on as she pushed her stuff. She followed us down the beach asking the usual hooking questions, 'where are you from?' 'what's your name?' The DFP answered a few and then strictly got rid of her.

Later on as we were coming back we bumped into her again. 'Ah, there you are' she said, as if we were old friends who'd somehow lost each other in the throng and then started chatting to us in the easiest, most self -assured way and in immaculate English.

It turned out that she was 17, not 14 as I'd guessed. She told us the beach was busy because it was a Sunday night, that she had two brothers and a sister. She said she'd stopped going to school at 12. She asked me if I'd been to India before. I said I had, 'when I was your age'. 'Then you must be about 23', she said. 'You're flattering me' I said.

And she was. At the end of the conversation I bought some of the wooden printing blocks for far more than they were worth, a willing victim of her charming manipulation. But I was buying them because someone as intelligent and sparky as she is should have every opportunity in the world. Because when I was 17 instead of walking up and down on a beach selling from a basket on a Sunday night I was doing an exchange with Deli Public High school and visiting India as a tourist, paid for by my generous parents. I had every opportunity in the world and though I don't know exactly what her life is like I think I can make a fairly safe bet that she has an awful lot less.

And that's not fair. I can't make it right. I can't address the huge misbalance of wrongness in the world but little gestures are a start. Unless you open yourself a little, when you can, the world will just stay one big slammed shut place.

The DFP laughed at me and said she had known exactly what she was doing. She'd made conversation and then at the end had put a price on the personal exchange, on the fact that we liked her. I think so too. But I don't mind.

So often when you're travelling what you are really buying is interaction with people, a look into their lives. I saw some breathtaking sites. The Buddhist temples carved into rock on Elephanta Island and in the Sanjay Ghandi National Park and they will stay with me for a long time. As will the crumbling glory of Mumbai's architectural past, it's beautiful Art Deco buildings along the seafront, the old Victoria Terminus railway station and the people hanging off the trains as they pull in.

But I think most of all I'll remember the people: the girl on the beach who should be head of Marketing for some massive corporation with her intelligence and charm; the little boy who ran up to me with a bunch of flowers, a hopeful, cheeky smile and said '5000 Rupees!?' (about £65 - I laughed); the grumpy driver Vjay who completely ignored us when we asked to go somewhere and took us back to the hotel instead; Raj the tour guide with astonishingly little knowledge but snazzy trousers with a silver pinstripe which glinted in the sun and the guard at Elephanta who spoke NO English but took my arm and lead me, very purposefully, around a cave putting my hand on the wall to touch it and into the pools of water.

There's so much I've missed. This could become an opus. But I'm going to leave it there and let you look at the pictures.