Wednesday 26 November 2008

Mumbai





The news has been pouring in from Mumbai, that most of my Indian friends still refer to as Bombay. The Taj Mahal Hotel, near the Gateway of India was down the same road as our hotel almost two years ago. One of those friends, poet and novelist P, arranged to meet us at the Taj before moving on to a restaurant elsewhere. Extraordinary opulence. Not six hundred yards away people were sleeping in the street. Opposite, the dock from where we took the boat with P to Elephanta.

The Taj is burning as I write, and there are stories of a hundred or so people being held as hostage. Eyewitness accounts keep cropping up.


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