–Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus), Mumbai (Bombay) in August 2005

I’m still in the middle of finishing my third year review (though I have started Dark Knight Returns on the sly). However, today’s news has shocked me back three years to the month I spent in Mumbai and traveling through parts of Southern India. I was about to move to Mississippi and start a new life, and thought I’d just do a complete system restart by spending a month in India. I’d always wanted to go to Bombay, primarily because of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and it seemed like the right time to do it. No one else had the time/money/interest to go with me, so I went alone. Alone, except that I blogged it. It was the start of this blog, actually. I’d hidden the category, since this blog had become something else in the meantime, but I’ve pulled it back out today.

I have to get back to editing my review (it’s getting close!). But my thoughts are of fruit juice vendors in Colaba and lazy dogs in the street with the shouts of men hawking their carved Ganeshes in booths outside the Leopold. Even the OMG awful crush of the “Ladies Compartment” on the train from Mumbai to Hyderabad that I caught at the VT. And I will be thinking of the Gateway to India with the (persistent) guides hawking their services alongside the forbidding elegance of the Taj Hotel.

I will be conjuring that Colaba tonight. Maybe it will do some good.