Kanchipuram

Another night on the Kanyakumari Express simply wasn't in the cards. (We had no cards. Even if we had had, they'd only have stuck to our skin and fused to the vinyl sleeping bunks.) So we got off near Vellore, took a rickshaw to the central square and were — this was a first for me — hailed by a bus. Here we are in the world sari capital, city of seven gopurams. Off now to inspect the workshops.

Juhu Chowpatty

Don't let me forget to describe the ("sea facing") view from the 3rd floor of the Taj tower, which surely must be the best in India. However, seeing as this blog is nominally about chaats, I'll mention instead that I had pav bhaji and falooda on the way to the airport. Took the bus up to Santacruz, where I had an incredible dahi puri, then walked through Khar (W), past a Shiv Sena post, past a bulldozer in the act of clearing a slum, and onto Juhu, home of the Sea 'n' Sand and playground of filmi stars. Clustered at the northern tip of Juhu are some hundred semi-permanent stalls, all offering exactly the same selection of snacks. If Bombay is a pav bhaji mecca, this was the Kaaba. But I saw only one place actually working the tava, churning the fresh vegetables into the fried paste known as "bhaji." So I ordered it up fresh, and they delivered it with a still-melting pat of butter to a rattan mat on the beach. With the extra pav ("quarters," so you get only two buns split in half) it came to Rs 35, on a Bombay scale not too shabby. Onions, as always, were free.