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The Taj Mahal Hotel on the seafront in Bombay is toweringly, terrifyingly, tear-inducingly plush. Situated just behind the Gateway to India - a massive stone archway built for some king's visit in the 1930's and from where the last representatives of the Raj set sail stoically and shamefacedly back for Blighty not long after - it was designed by an Indian engineer who, after being denied entry to a British-owned and British-run hotel in the city (what, an Indian, in India? Pshaw), decided, admirably, to beat them at their own game and construct an edifice that would out-shine and out-posh and out-luxury anything that the colonial interlopers could ever build themselves. And, fair play to the man, he didn't half succeed; inside the thick and cathedral-ish stone walls it is all polished marble and dark wood and water features and air-conditioning and plants bearing huge orange flowers and tastefully-subdued lighting and music and immaculately-dressed and beautiful staff offering tall glasses of ice-cold fruit juice for you to swill away the dirt and dust and dry, dry heat of the colossal city outside, which must be one of the maddest on earth. The hotel boasts several bars, including one with a beer garden in which you can get tanked on cocktails, observed by parrots and lizards; and another cool, cosy, shaded maritime-themed place that faces the sea, from where you can watch some of the millions of Bombay's homeless bed down for the night on the promenade, beneath their filthy rags or strips of torn tarpaulin whilst you drink your mortgage-priced beer. I sat away from the windows, in this bar, and made sure I never left the hotel without a fistful of rupees. But my room also faced the sea so whenever I drew or opened the curtains the appalling poverty is what I'd see; standing at the huge bay window in my £400 a night room, watching those people whose bed was concrete and whose duvet was a dirt-blackened shred of cloth. Typical India; dizzying wealth and staggering penury pressing against each other.

Anyway. The festival at which I was a guest was putting my girlfriend and I up in the Taj for three nights only, but we were staying in Bombay for six, so pretty soon we had to check out (as we were handing in our keys, Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, cuffs aflutter, was picking up his). We carted our bags out into the slap of the heat. Walked, wheezing and sweaty, around the corner. Found another hotel. Read the tariff, which was reasonable. Checked in. Turned the aircon on. Unpacked, showered, flicked through the seventy or so Hindi TV channels trying, unsuccessfully, to find an English-language one. Got bored of all the Bollywood singing and warbling. Went back out into the heat that comes at you like a bellowing bull and walked down to the Gateway to India, past the palace of pampering that we were now cast out from, caught the boat to Elephanta island and marvelled at the huge carved statues of Ganesh and his godly mates and got growled at by monkeys. Ate some bad curry. Paid a visit to the open-air toilet in which the taps weren't working so had to wash my hands in a barrel of water that was boiling and leaping with whiskery, leggy life. Caught the boat back to the gargantuan city seething in the smog and went back to the hotel and showered again and went out and ate delicious spicy fish and drank a lot of wine and then went back to the hotel and showered again (the heat) and went to bed and slept.

Except I didn't sleep. It was odd; I've had brief bouts of insomnia before, for years, but nothing like this - this was a new and unprecedented kind of sleeplessness. I was lying there, knackered, waiting to drift off, when, from nowhere, I became aware that I was trying to sleep, and that I was waiting to notice the signs of falling asleep, so the very act of doing that, the mental and bodily changes involved, was enough to startle me back into wakefulness. Sleep doesn't like being scrutinised. And, once I became aware that part of my mind was watching and waiting for sleep to arrive, it became impossible to stop doing it, which of course pushed sleep further and further away. Worse; the hypnogogic imagery that your brain generates at the point of sleeping - often quite strange, but relaxing none the less - began to adopt a nightmarish quality, uncontrollable, as if I was dreaming while still awake, which made me want to keep my eyes open, which then flew sleep to the other side of the world, into a different timezone, very distant, unreachable.

So of course I got out of bed. Went to read in the other room so as not to wake my girlfriend. Rapidly got bored and frustrated. Went to the window, the glass of which was hot to the touch, even with the late hour, even with the aircon, and gazed out at the sleeping city. Except the city wasn't sleeping either; this was Colaba, the party district of Bombay's south end, and people don't wear watches. Cabbies were washing their cars, taking great pride in the cleaning and sprucing of their dilapidated jalopies; groups of Ozzie backpackers were running, shouting, from bar to bar, dodging the hundreds of feral dogs and the thousands of beggars and the gangsters waiting to rob them and the gaunt guys trying to sell them drugs; the paan wallahs were yelling and displaying their medicinal bundles of herbs; legless people scooted by on skateboards; an old, blind feller in spotless white robes opened his arms and shouted something at the sky, a limbless man lay on his belly on the pavement, lapping some soup from a bowl; and through it all cruised great big cars like prowling sharks, ferrying people done up in more bling than Puff Daddy could ever dream of. And over it all shone the tower of the Taj, where the night before I climbed into a bed the size of Mongolia and slept like a baby. In another life. One where I was able to sleep.

Slumbering, though, I would've missed all that; Bombay's night scene. But that was two months ago and I haven't slept properly since. Thank the gods for Temazepam.
© Niall Griffiths 2008

Surrounded by the madness, Niall can’t get no sleep

Bombay Nights