Maharashtra

I gave my first Mumbai days to the things the city does that no other city on Earth attempts. At Churchgate station before noon I stood, with permission, beside the sorting lines of the dabbawalas, the lunchbox men, five thousand of them, who every working day collect home-cooked tiffins from suburban kitchens, relay them by bicycle, handcart and train across one of the planet's densest cities, and deliver each to the correct desk by lunchtime, guided by a code of painted symbols legible to men regardless of schooling. Management schools fly in to study their error rate, which is somewhere in the realm of one mistake per several million deliveries; the dabbawalas themselves, an association over a century old with roots in villages of the Sahyadris, treat the fame with amused patience. The supervisor who let me watch summarised their quality-control philosophy in one sentence I intend to keep: 'The tiffin is not cargo. Somebody's wife made it, somebody's mother. You do not lose a mother's cooking.'

Evenings, the city gathers at its edge.