Having arrived in Calcutta, I'm all mixed up - which is probably as it should be. The first day of India has already confounded me in both good and bad ways.

We flew in on Druk Air (which turned out to be great - for those of you wondering, there were sweets, but the cabin attendants were lovely and not at all brusque! Plus, how could I fail to be charmed by an airline whose inflight mag is called 'Tashi Delek', and which informed me politely that the Bhutanese are a people who like to eat chilli 'not as a spice, but as a vegetable ...')

Today's landing sky was like flying through scads and scads of grey cottonwool, with plenty of turbulence thrown in.

As our plane breaks through the cloudcover, I am shocked to discover how beautiful - how alluring - India looks. It's as though I'm so steeled to deal with grimy grossness that I'm taken aback as I fall for the landscape.

It's so green - a million different hues, carefully patchworked in the most delicate, slightly irregular squares that abut one another. Each has a different pattern on it, the crops standing out sometimes like fine lacework, sometimes like rough blanket stitching.

The buildings we drone over are squat and semi-decaying, but they are strangely affecting and very atmospheric. They look like middle-class mansions gone elegantly and subtely to seed.

All about are bodies of water - square, circular, elliptical, irregular - resplendent with water-weed on their calm, dark surfaces. And everywhere, everywhere are coconut palms, splashed about the landscape with abundance, as though by the hand of some over-generous god.

And then we land.

And I'm walking up the landing bridge from the plane into the airport hall, and thinking 'so this is what India smells like ...' It hits you as soon as you step off the aircraft - a pungent smell, like wet rubber and linoleum and disinfectant and elbow-grease. Although we're inside, tiny insects have found their way in, and start clambering on my glasses, meandering into my field of vision like unbidden visitors.

We're in the arrivals hall, and the Indian officials are in a chatty frame of mind.

'Long hair!' one teasingly berates a Japanese man with a shoulder-length cut. 'And what is this? Your job?'

'I'm a writer,' the Japanese guy replies, as he's waved through on a current of good-humoured, jokey officialdom.

When it's my turn, another turns to me and says, 'You're a lawyer?' with just a scraping of scepticism.

'That's right!' I enthuse, thinking guiltily about how College of Law is not done and wondering if I've just misrepresented myself to the Indian authorities.

There is an intriuged pause in which four bureaucrats simultaneously wonder how a woman in a purple embroidered shirt bought for five dollars in Mexico could possibly be a lawyer ... and then I'm in.

In the taxi we nearly die several times - this is par for the course, and just reassures me that I'm really in India. We're ducking and weaving, and honking like mad, lunging at large trucks and buses as though we're bullfighting. Sometimes our driver curses the vehicles that threaten to take a slice off our car; sometimes he solicitously informs them that their door is ajar, or that a stray piece of clothing is trailing out of the car and onto the road. It's manners and madness all at once.

But then we leave the taxi and have to find somewhere to stay. It's up many, many flights of dark, unlit stairs - and it's horrible. The bathroom is filthy and the floor doesn't drain. Pigeons are roosting in the ceiling cavity, alternately cooing and cackling and then scratching and scraping just like rats. The ceiling's not finished, and so our room is open to their putrid little festival.

The whole place is overrun by a solvent-like stench. It's like paint and glue and plaster all at once. I soon discover that all the 'rooms' down the corridor are like bombed-out wrecks - their ceilings are gone, so they're open to the sky, and they're filled to the brim with refuse from a building site.

I've had only two hours' sleep in the last 24, and so I start to cry. I keep telling myself that I've seen the pointy end of budget accommodation before, and that I'll be fine.

And while that's true, it doesn't stop it sucking something awful when you're tired and hungry and lost in a new place.

And so I'm sitting here just trying to say that something can be beautiful and terrible all in one. And as I type, I feel can feel the edges of that concept starting to erode the boundaries of everything that came before 'India'.