The mother of all dental abscesses began to gnaw around the base of an upper eye tooth just as I got off the Kalka Mail in Delhi. It was late on a glorious winter afternoon, and I knew that I was going to suffer. I found a place to stay, the usual kind of colourful dive I always seem to end up in, and the predominant colour of course was brown.

The pain remained on a low heat for most of the evening so I risked eating. It was a risk worth taking and the throbbing even subsided for a while, lulling me into a false sense of security. Back in the room I had rented I made myself at home as best I could. I read, went up on the roof to enjoy an open air shower under a trickle of cold water. Men were flying kites on a neighbouring roof, and squadrons of pigeons appeared out of the evening sky, swooping low over me, fanning me with the draught of hundreds of beating wings. They seemed to fly straight for me, only veering away moments before impact. The distant, setting sun struggled to shine through the smoky air from far beyond the chaos of minarets and aerials, and I felt at home, at peace with the world and with myself. I went to lie down for a while before going out for a wander through the city; I love Delhi at night, but not all of it. The old city (or one of them: there are seven) is just so jam packed with life and its results that I can spend hours walking and watching; being watched is fun too, and it can lead to all sorts of encounters and adventures.

As I was about to leave I couldn’t resist pushing against a door of planks that was set in one of the walls of the room. It sat about half a metre off the floor and I had assumed that it was just something put in place to block up a hole, or a divider to partition what had previously been a much larger room. It didn’t matter but I had to know.

The planks gave way and swung back into the room leaving me not a lot of space to manoeuvre, and on the other side was a balcony that hung out over the street, no more then two metres off the ground, my private royal box from where I could watch all the goings-on in Paharganj. This was incredible. It was like finding the door that leads from that fusty, old wardrobe into the delights of the Kingdom of Narnia. Noise, smells and colours everywhere, and it was all mine. I would have paid ten times the rent for that room if I’d been asked.