‘Who can sleep on this?’ Dewa demands.

‘This is a bed.’

‘Please take it away.’

More telephone calls.

Repetition becomes wearying. Finally another mattress is brought with some pillows. They accept it. There is no use protesting. Going along the outer passage Dewa sees a small room where the dirty mattress has been flung down. These are not mattresses for guests. They are for any room boy who can snatch a moment of sleep here. A tired boy sleeps as if it is the most comfortable place in the whole world.

The view changes at night. Dewa peers through the narrow apertures of the hotel windows. She can’t have enough of these glimpses into the unknown life that lies beneath her. In the West everything had been closed in, shut in. There was always privacy—locked doors, subdued voices. People there walked with closed faces. Here, everything is open, naked, exposed. Life seethes everywhere. From one comer she looks down on the kitchens of an eating house. A bare-bodied man brushes his teeth at the water tank on top of the flat roof. Another man dips clanging buckets into it to carry water down to the kitchen. There is much hustling and bustling going on down there. Barebodied men, barefooted, their veshtis tucked up, are fetching water, chopping, cutting, peeling, cooking, washing. They move quickly and lithely through the confined space of the small wood-partitioned room. Basins and pails, enormous cooking utensils fill up with all kinds of meats. Mutton for kofthas, chicken for tandoori. One man squats down on his haunches and with a long sharp knife peels and chops some long tubers, manioc yams perhaps. Smoke rises into the air as the food cooks on great wood fires. The men, talking volubly, carrying utensils from one room to another, work throughout the night. The kitchen floor is wet, they are barefooted, but it doesn’t mean anything to them. To and fro, to and fro they move from kitchen to outer rooms lifting cauldrons of cooked food. In another building an old man massages oil into the arm of a young man, smoothly and deftly kneading the aching flesh. The shelves of his little room are covered with bottles of different oils which he pours into the cusp of his palm. Rhythmically, with long swipes, he patiently rubs the oil in. Other rooms reveal clotheslines strung across and rolled up bedding. From the open passage that fronts the rooms Dewa looks down on rows of bathrooms. They are only for men, who spend hours brushing teeth and performing their ablutions, water splashing on their bodies as they pour bucket after bucket on themselves. This is part of their ritual, pouring water over head and body, something she always missed in Europe.