It was light when a bloke came along with a thermos flask of tea. I invested and it proved good value for 1.20 Indian Rupees as it held about three cupfuls. We all got up and folded away the bunks, getting breakfast in bits and pieces at various stations along the way. We got a new record bargain of six bananas for 1 Indian Rupee.
We spent the day reading and looking things up in the splendid Lonely Planet “India” book. We were entertained by the usual collection of beggars, hawkers and buskers that normally haunt the trains. Although the two Germans gave hand-outs to all and sundry, they got f*ck all from us.
The scenery had been predominantly rural, so we were alerted to our arrival in Bombay by the steady build up of stations, shanty towns and scruffy suburban satellite buildings. We rolled into Bombay Central Station at 16:45 hrs. and were immediately picked up by a hotel tout who led us onto a bus which transported us through a filthy, ramshackle bustling city to Room 3 of the New Marine Guest House.
We had a bit of a barney (argument, Barney comes from Cockney rhyming slang - Barney Rubble = trouble.) with the tout who wanted 10 Rs. for his “services” on top of the 80 Rs. that we had to pay for a double room for the three of us. He had us over a barrel, so we reluctantly paid up and set off down the seemingly endless flights of steps to the street.
Our first priority was food and we got this in the Marina Restaurant just down the road. It was good stuff, but the portions were measly. We booked tickets for the flicks (cinema), to see “The Battle of Midway” (a clash between the American fleet and the Imperial Japanese Navy which marked a pivotal turning point in the Pacific Theatre during World War II.) at 21:30 hrs. and we set off in search of the fabled India Gate.
We wandered along the London-like (Soho) streets, browsing at the many stalls selling clothing (counterfeit goods with false Western labels), books and toiletries. We gave up before reaching our objective due to lack of time and headed back to the hotel, pausing for a Thums Up cola in a grade 2 café. We are all feeling tired and grubby from the train journey.
Back at the hotel I had a shower. I removed my greasy grey T-shirt (once white!) and scrubbed under the cold shower until the black rivulets running down my body went through shades of grey and finally became clear.
I joined the boys and put on fresh clean clothes for our cinema jaunt. The kino (cinema) was a posh one and many Indians had dressed up in their finery for the occasion. We sat through a couple of fantasy adverts, for such items as toilet flush cleaners and luxury suitcases, before the main film.
The seat reclined and the interior was well maintained, as was the film quality. In this 1976 American Technicolor war film Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda plus a host of other famous aging Hollywood actors put over this dramatization of the battle for supremacy in the Pacific Ocean that took place between the 4th and 7th June 1942, only six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
We left the cinema cheered by this distraction from the trials and tribulations of Indian life and returned to the hotel for a good night’s sleep in Bombay’s warmer clime, despite our beds being too short as usual. Our hotel was the New Marine Guest House, 15 “Jasville” Building, 9 New Marine Lines, opposite Liberty Cinema, Bombay (now Mumbai) 400 020.
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