Turmeric stains on my salwar kameez

In Mumbai airport, in an archaic internet cafe, waiting for our flight to Goa. Very very very tired still from my night of the undead on the non-sleeper train from Aurangabad. A pillow and a horizontal surface would be jolly lovely right about now. It's 35 degrees outside, the traffic was mad coming in from town by taxi- tuktuk mini taxis pretending they move with the ease of a bicycle, children filling every available window in your taxi flogging newspapers and pirated novels, dust, exhaust, honking in all pitches, a free flow of lanes and inter movement with an inbuilt caste system within the vehicles (trucks being brahmin, pedestrians dalit), and a sweet taxi driver who got us here in record time at half the price quoted by the other taxi sleazebags at the railway station.

We came in at 6am on the train from Aurangabad, and Mumbai was asleep until eight. We walked over sleeping bodies and past newspaper boys counting their enorous stacks and strapping three foot stacks of newspapers to the backs of their bicycles and weaving off into the morning darkness, past sidewalk sweepers with their twig brooms, down deserted avenues, and into one of the lone open places for a place to sit and get our brains composed in time for the second leg of the journey. The coffee was hot condensed milk with a few tablespoons of sugar thrown in for good measure, and a few granules of nescafe to add just a hint of tint but no discernable coffee taste to the stained plastic tea cup's contents. I sipped myself into a diabetic coma and watched the sky lighten through the scraggly street trees and outline of a phone box.

The journey from Aurangabad was a non sleeping sleeper train, in non AC second class- essentially the bunkbed dorm class, with as many blue vinyl diner booth padded benches as can be squeezed and stacked into a railway car. I slept a foot below the curved roof, a foot away from a roaring ceiling fan that blew freezing air in my direction all night with great noise, and a flickering fluorescent tube that went on at random times, just above my chest area. I didnt sleep.

Am tired. Must fly.