Sandhya's Station

Meena bazaar looked like someone had swept up all the portside towns that ran from the Persian Gulf through the Hormuz past Karachi, Gujarat and Bombay down to the Malabar Coast, scrunched all these crusty places into a fist and daubed the remains onto the mouth of the Dubai Creek, installed thousands of AC boxes in every window and then waited for the pigeons to find their way home. It smelled of pav bhaji and shawarma, of frying oil and chai, of the humid press of bodies at work from dawn past the fall of night. It smelled, at noon, when the shops were shuttered against the heat and every man of sense and means took siesta, like an absence of rain, like brickwork disintegrating.