India - Clear As Day

Something seemed "off" this morning.

(view from the street by our office)

It took me a minute or two to figure out what seemed different today.

(the harbor by the Gateway of India, coming in a later post)

The acrid smell of smoke was gone. Sure, it made other lingering scents all the more obvious, but my nostrils were caught off guard.

Wait? Do my eyes deceive me? I did not know the water's edge across the bay was lined with trees! Hell, until this morning, I thought the buildings on the other side were just tops with no bottoms.

(view from the pulling out of the hotel drop-off drive)

It turns out that seeing delineated clouds is a sight to behold in Mumbai. On the drive to work I was staring out the window like a kid in New York City for the first time. I wanted to ditch the office and truly "see" the town. Buildings were shimmering, or at least it seemed that way.

We passed alongside the harbor. Typically you cannot see the horizon and you couldn't really see it today, either. But what you could see was the smog horizon. Still, seeing a (relatively) bright blue sky against white clouds put the kind of spring in my step usually reserved for that first warm day of June back home.

To what do we owe this pleasure? A change in the winds? A brief moratorium on car emissions? All slum trash fires extinguished? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was because Oprah was in town yesterday and trolling our humble neighborhood of Colaba. She does want us to live our best lives, you know, and maybe she felt the first step was clearing the air. I'll take it.

(Thanks, Oprah! - via Times of India)