I'd like to come back from a trip abroad with things to share across the dinner table too. Make that Italy please.

The pilgrimage home begins like it does every day; on a molten stream of tar, surrounded by ballooning grey clouds of smoke and endless yellow headlights. Everywhere the sound of a whirring burring billows like buckram and buzzes like bees. Small spurts of speed are brought to a stop by marauding two-wheelers and stray crossers of streets.
The auto guy cricks his neck- king of the road- purveyor of speed and enjoyments. We don’t need lights, only guts and grit.
Holy Ghost Church appears like a rock in a torrent of confusion. Inside calm and grey- outside a spiralling necklace of yellow beads.
Over the flyover, little houses look up at us, their terraces yawning like sleepy children. The light turns red. Stuck between a cacophony of sounds. Breathe in warm, fuzzy poison from a lead pipe two inches away. Women clutch at children with vacant eyes, their saris flapping like old sails. Like Old London in Oliver Twist, where soot and grime covered an entire city, except for the scooters, jasmine vendors and belly-jiggling pandus in hats.