Sunday, February 6

As soon as you leave the main roads you enter areas where roads have no names and everything depends upon describing where you want to go in terms of landmarks. Getting to Udaya’s house, for example, requires explaining that you want to go to Kovalam multi-gym. If his house has an address then I have never known it (and never needed to).

Three minutes walk from Udaya’s house stands a small pre-school which we used to see almost every day when we lived in Blue Breeze. We used to pass it as we walked to the beach, Irma, Naa, Auo and me.

I look at it again. It has changed quite dramatically. Someone has built a second storey on the formerly one-storey building and then painted the school and surrounding walls in bright colours. It might count as a landmark but all the writing consists of Malayalam so I have no way of referring to it.

I look at the electricity substation next to the school and the tangle of wires in the sky that exist all over India wherever you find electricity or phones or internet connections.

I stop to take a photograph just as an Indian photographer with an impressive camera gets off his motorbike to do the same thing. We smile at each other.