Arrived in the port of Mumbai this afternoon and H and I went ashore to see Unglaubliche India.

The memsahib takes a very firm line with anyone we have dealings with, such as taxi drivers, and attempts to rip them off with as much effort as they use trying to rip us off. All not very relaxing. The first taxi stop was a ladies emporium across town and the memsahib emerged with an impressive sari and much Indian bling. The next problem was that there is a lot of post-purchase work involved with a sari, such as making blouses and pleats, and we had to immerse ourselves in the teeming slums of Mumbai to find a recommended tailors which we found down an dingy alley with swastikas (Hindu supposedly) on the shop front. They agreed to do a staggering amount of work in a few hours for not much money while we went off to the swanky Taj Mahal Palace Hotel for sundowners of G and T (Bombay Sapphire, naturally) and samosas.

Our taxi driver nagged us into visiting this other sari place which I came close to refusing to enter as it was upstairs in a nasty building that looked like the only thing holding it together was the dirt on the walls. Two more saris joined the collection but these were pret a porter and didn’t need extra work. See earlier blogs about Fiji !!

After collecting the tailoring work we went back to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel for a curry dinner with the memsahib sporting her new sari. In the hotel which had literally hundreds of women wandering about also wearing upmarket saris, the memsahib had more than her fair share of compliments.