Bye-bye Mumbai - the inbetween bit.

Having only just emerged from rural India I am behind on the news. Now where was I?

It turned out that I was wrong. The Brit girl with the itsy bitsy teeny weeny skirt was not fresh off the plane. In fact she had just spent a month teaching theatre to the slum children of Jaipur (a very conservative area) and was well aware that a mini skirt showed more flesh than was usual in India. But she didn’t care, she said. An aspiring actress, she was used to being stared at.

Having now put something back into society by sharing her craft with the poor children of Rajasthan, who no doubt will be much better off in life knowing how to pretend to be a tree, she was taking part in a Bollywood movie, but was more than keen to go home. Mumbai, she said, had “no culture or history” and if it hadn’t been for the Bollywood opportunity she wouldn’t have bothered to stay.

But India had changed the way she thought, she said, because now she would really appreciate any of the hotels her parents took her to on holiday. Like many travellers to India she didn’t know what to feel about the people. “Do you like the Indians?” she asked, hesitantly.

“Yes,” I answered honestly.

“I don’t know whether to trust them,” she said. This is a common feeling among travellers who feel as though they are seen as walking wallets. And yet, she revealed, she had been helped out by a complete stranger when she was unable to withdraw money from an ATM. A lad at an internet shop had lent her Rs5,000 (a tidy sum here), no strings attached, and told her to send him the money when she could. The memory of that one act of kindness did make her pause for thought.

And so she set off to be in a film with “Someone really famous, supposed to be the biggest Bollywood actor…Am, Am…”

“Amitabh Bachan?”

“That’s him.”

There are probably middle aged women all over India swooning at the very mention of his name.

And I headed off to Dadar railway station to nearly miss my train. “It leaves at 8.30,” a guard told me, looking at my ticket.

“No, isn’t that reporting time of 8.30 and departure at eleven minutes past nine? It says 21.11.”

“That is the date, madam,” he said patiently.

Along with my backpack, that seemed to weigh heavier than usual, I was still carrying a feeling of lethargy, wondering what I was doing in India. And yet I began to slowly cheer up. Before the train arrives, station platforms have a real air of anticipation, with men, women and children sitting on the ground with their luggage, vendors and hawkers prowling up and down, whole extended families turning up just to say goodbye. And even though I was on my own, I was not alone. Once on board, an elderly lady adopted me for the trip, and then when it was time to sleep I simply plugged myself into my MP3 player so I didn’t get disturbed when my neighbours began trumpeting in the night.

But used to men being annoyingly attentive I did feel a little ignored and decided that maybe I was finally over the hill. But thankfully, just when I began to feel as though I has lost my sexual allure I was hit upon by a little, quite elderly, booze-reeking man with stained teeth. He approached me in the morning as I stood by the open carriage door, enjoying the scenery as it whizzed by and the cool morning breeze. As he drew closer I couldn’t go any further back without falling out of the train and so I was stuck for a bit until he moved enough for me to make an escape. He wanted to accompany me on my travels, he said. Lucky, lucky me! I clearly still have it, baby! (Boo hoo!)

And now, click below to see an early morning scene at a rural Indian station.