Are we drawn to places that remind us in some way of our native country or do we travel abroad as an escape from it? I would have argued that the answer was obvious until I fell in love with Sicily, whose cities have a shabby gentility so evocative of India's older metropolises, but sometimes seem even grander. I've wandered in a daze through the streets of its capital, Palermo, early on a Sunday morning and marvelled at how some of its Moorish-influenced architecture would not have seemed out of place beside the Indo-Saracenic buildings in Bombay like the Taj Hotel. When I got lost down side streets of the port town of Catania and walked past tenements with precarious balconies that looked like they might crumble to dust before the week was over, I might as well have been in Calcutta. The jumble of European and Islamic architectural styles is in itself part of the charm. You come across churches that were converted to mosques and then turned back into churches. (For the bjp, sorry, vhp acolytes among our readers, I hasten to add that this is all part of Palermo's medieval past and not a regressive strain of 21st century barbarism.)
On the train, the Sicilian matron sitting next to me chatters on regardless, pointing out bits of scenery and alerting me ahead of my stop, even though she has established that I can't speak a word of Italian. After the train I am waiting for pulls into Messina late with one of its compartments on fire and the station's staff launch into one of the most languid fire-fighting efforts ever—long on raucous coughing and short on equipment—I realise I'm home half the world away in other ways as well. I had an inkling of this while submitting my application for a visa at their consulate in Hong Kong. The raft of documents requested included a letter from my company's bank certifying that its account had sufficient funds to repatriate me if it became necessary to deport me. This is one bit of form-filling I am certain even our bureaucrats have not thought of, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be adopted along with the new regulation in Delhi that requires notifying the police if you have a foreign visitor