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she was not likely to repeat. She was elbowed and shoved and her breasts were squeezed like oranges for juice by half a dozen hands. She would have fallen off the platform and on to the tracks if she hadn’t grabbed on to a coolie hurrying past.
    Bombay was crowded, Leela concluded as she dusted her salwar kameez off with what was to become her trademark equanimity. And it wasn’t anything like a Bollywood film, she admitted to herself with a sigh. She took another look to be ‘double-sure’.
    Where were the white mountains, the shiny red gaadis , the yellow-haired firangs ?
    Which way was Marine Drive, where did Amitabh Bachchan live, and was it true this was a city where women drank side by side with men and men wore shoes crafted from the skin of cows fattened on ‘Lundun’s’ greenest grass? (‘Accha where was Lundun? What do they wear there?’)
    And yes, Bombay smelt. Not in the manner of the Meerut cantonment with its profusion of giant, flowering neem trees, their branches shooting out like the fingers of a ravenous dayan , witch. Back home, when a woman stepped out of her house and into the courtyard to dry her freshly washed hair, the breeze carried with it the scent of Chandrika soap and Amla Shikakai. And when a father was clever enough to marry his daughter off well, the air scooped into its arms the aroma of the finest vegetarian delicacies and of garlands of marigolds and gajras of jasmine.
    Not like that at all!
    Bombay smelt of shit. And everywhere she looked, from the train tracks, where people were strolling like they were in a park, even laying clothes out to dry, to the hillock that sloped into the opposite side of the tracks, between the neatly plotted lines of the spinach and potatoes someone enterprising was growing, all Leela saw was shit.
    How her eyes smarted!
    And that tatti smell combined with all the other station smells—of sugarcane juice and vada-pav , fresh fruit and flowers, fish spiced and fried, and of the hot, steamy fragrance of milk being poured into a giant utensil of freshly brewed masala tea—made her giddy.
    In the midst of these thoughts, Leela was accosted by a woman who enquired in a kindly tone if she was lost and on hearing her story, commiserated. ‘Let me walk with you, beti ,’ she said. ‘Of course, I know where Night Lovers is, so famous it is, and only ten minutes away. No, don’t argue! You are like my daughter only.’
    But despite the woman’s familiar appearance—her coin-sized gold hoops, the umbrella sticking out of her shiny pleather bag—she was, Leela would soon discover, a brothel madam who pumped her business with runaways from the ‘chiller room’—children’s homes run by the government’s child welfare wing.
    She took Leela to her brothel. It was a kholi, crowded, filthy and shrill with the sounds of a baby’s cries. Under threat of scarring Leela’s face with acid that she stored in a baby feeder, the madam forced Leela to have sex with several customers. Four days later, striped with bruises, Leela jumped out of a window and escaped. She eventually found her way to Night Lovers.
    Leela was not surprised by what had happened to her. She was relieved.
    ‘Had that bitch not caught me, a policeman would have,’ she said. ‘And he would have stuck me in the chiller room in Mankhurd. Do you know what they say about that place? That it’s a brothel for Bombay’s mantri log , politicians. The police act as pimps. Why? Kyunki police ko sirf paisa chahiye . The police only want money. They round up orphans and runaway girls and then call the mantri log , “Please sirji, sahibji, come na , pick and choose.” The mantri log fuck the little girls and afterwards tip the manageress, “Thank you so much madam.” They are men, and that’s what men do. But she’s a harami danger- log ! A bitch, a dangerous one. She’s supposed to be a mother to the girls, but during the day she makes them weave baskets and at night she cracks apart their