Mumbai

Hot, hot, hot. 

Bus stands burn under the sun. Smoke and sweat and salt drift in the air, steered by the breeze from the sea to the promenade. The pavement throws sizzling rainbows into brown puddles while the rickshaws stoop under the weight of ripe clouds. A downpour will soon come. 

The cars are beetles, braving the city’s unforgiving highways as they crawl homeward an inch a minute. Menacing glass structures over thirty storeys high cast blue shadows on pedestrians and hawkers as they skirt around the mouth of the road jam. A honk is heard, then two. Soon, a full-blown orchestra explodes into the air, along with the temper of a few hundred drivers. Squalid slums that stretch with the road sleep with this heat every day, inured to the constant yelling, singing, cussing. A stray dog and a lazy cow watch from behind an electric pole, munching on bits as their daily soap plays out in front of them. Somewhere a woman with a svelte briefcase bites into a watery snack between shifts. The spices melt in her throat, so she pays the vendor for another plate until her tongue is alight. Then she walks back into her air-conditioned world. 

The sun is now larger, sleepier. 

It makes the sky start a war. Pink attacks orange, splashing red and violet onto the heavens, but a dark night coaxes them away. While the orchestra is over, the beetles continue to crawl. The warm, young buzz of nightlife swims past gold lights into stray windows, where buttered naans are being prepared, a Bollywood dance breaks out on TV, and a drunken man slips into a dreamless slumber.