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First, the flight almost didn’t reach Mumbai… do I have to call it that? After five years out of the city, even five extra hours in Delhi airport were unbearable. So, too late for a welcome drink. Fitted in, actually, with my abortive search for one in the city. Three years in dry Gujarat and another couple in Dehra Dun left me lusting for the perfume of the harpadon nehereus (no, I’m not going to tell you what that is). And thirsty.

But a good, old fashioned drink in Bombay at a regular joint?Behind my back, it’s become a city of lounge bars playing an approximation of sound that passes for music these days (Lounge? Like a lizard from the 1920s, a snakeskin suited gigolo who coils up to you, tongue snaking furtively.

Trance? Where you wish you were in one so you didn’t have to listen to it. Remix? Where you wait for an alien abduction). That drink doesn’t go down smoothly without some suitably cheap rock music playing in the background—even Bryan bloody Adams will do. Not Himesh silkensomething.

Long ago, we wrote articles and made pages to the strains of the girls from the neighbouring Soniya Mahal trying to sing songs from Maine Pyaar Kiye. But now that would be a dance bar and therefore distinctly non-grata and maybe Nariman Point has changed forever.

What us females knew then is that the dancing girls were much prettier than us. If we didn’t know it, the cabbies told us. So no drink, no music. Where has Bombay gone?

Out to eat maybe? But no one eats either. That is, they eat faux Italienne, Hellenic, French, Chinese (yo!), Thai, Lebanese, even street pijjo appears to have bits of brown stuff that might be fake oregano. Every once-decent town restaurant has a suburban branch. I guess that makes sense when the city’s once best-known coffee shop looks like a boring French prostitute’s boudoir or is that a French prostitute’s boring boudoir?

The great fish joint down the road, small, filled with the smell of fresh bangra (and even harpadon nehereus) and mill workers (perhaps not so fresh), is now air-conditioned and filled with suits discussingwhatever they discuss.

That leaves the cabbies, the last resort for the desperate to connect with Bombay. But whoever I met didn’t get his dialogue from Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3. Then the boss tells me that my personality’s missing. Maybe I will call it Mumbai after all.That’ll learn me.