The thing with East on West is that the slow glide of spice-scented skin over pale intrigued thighs, and the glow of the one against the other, can get in the way of the day-to-day stuff. That international, intercultural post coital stillness just gets interrupted by his jangling mental desire for desi khana, those hand-ground spices in the dhal and palak paneer the way Mamaji tells the servants to do it at home, while back on London time you’re up for a bit of pizza and some earnest chit chat about the latest killer film from Croatia. But perhaps that’s more a man woman thing than a Hindi-Estuarine schism. Let’s get right back to the shining dark gloss of those pale thighs and get it right from there.

Lights down, schmooz, get into kitsch mode. Think thick fake pink fur, eyelashes that you could comb hair with, shiny fabrics that ignite at 50 metres, cue Frank—

Come fly with me, let’s fly let’s fly away

If you can use, some exotic booze

There’s a bar in far Bombay…

Bar Indigo in Colaba, white hot Bombay-Mumbai, about the most happening joint in town. Colaba is mainline Bombay Central where the polished people come out to play in restaurants and bars filled with chilled air, icy beer, and even chillier expressions of cool above smooth flat navels, hipster D&G jeans and sparkly sandals on display on the young and unlined party people. Sometimes I find it hard to breathe with the humidity and the studied cool of the crowd, the money crunchers and the boys and girls of Bollywood. There is season’s black over here as well as over there, incase you haven’t read a paper for two months.

I have my eye on a boy. For quite some time I’ve had my eye on this boy, six foot, green eyes, sack ‘o’python body, he’s as hip hop hot as every other smooth-skinned schmoozer in this bar put together in another sack to fight it out with the pythons.

There’s an age thing. I’m 35, he’s 26. I have a thing about that, older women, younger men, oh God, so Pauline Collins under an olive tree, so sad old cow with hair brush lashes, and blown up condoms for boobs fighting it out in a top that would look just about right on my ten year old niece. But it’s okay, I’m doing demure with an edge, the edge being a pink t-shirt over army fatigues with a deeply edgy pair of sparkly but sadly flat sandals. I think they’re good. Will he like them? He looks like he doesn’t like a whole load of gloop on a girl.

A heavenly babe in heels as high as the distance from my wrist to my elbow treads on my toe. ‘Hey bitch,’ I say in my dream world of studied cool, ‘get a licence before you go out in those.’ But no, I apologise to her for being in the way of her Himalayan stacks. She looks me up and down. She’s confused. ‘Why are you here?’ say those Surrey with the Fringe on Top lashes. What she really says is:

‘No problem. Cool here naar?’

Indeed it is. I want him. She may have a clue, a tip, an idea. We get talking. I ooze charm from every pore and oil my way across her defenses. I tell her my plan.

‘What man, are you mad?’ Her belly button smiles at me as she crunches over in horror.

I explain that I know the odds are against it but I’m a tryer. I jut a hip as if to show that this body is up for anything.

‘I’ve got a date with him,’ I let slip to the heavenly babe.

‘Bullshit man,’ she spits in my eye.

I did, I do. It’s taken me a year. But I got the boy. But then 25 million other women in India might claim the same thing as they get to see him in the movies any hour of the day they choose, or splashed over every filmi magazine on the subcontinen