As I might have mentioned, I love cities. I love them with a kind of blind fervour that shrugs off their pollution and their vices.

I get kind of antsy when I'm in a particularly isolated, tranquil destination. I find myself wondering when the next bus back to the Big Smoke will be leaving. It's crazy, I know.

We flew into Mumbai last night. Of it, I knew very little - except perhaps silly things like that the gin label 'Bombay Sapphire' sounds as poetic as alcohol gets, and that the blue colour of its bottle looks stolen from a stained glass window.

From the air, Mumbai looks like a handworked throw - the patchworked sort they hawk to tourists all over the country. No straight lines; the stitching wanders in every direction. Glittering beads and sequins make it fit for a latter-day Maharajah.

So too, the view over Mumbai last night was a vision of twinkling lights. Mostly orange ones that glowed like coals, but interpersed with ones that shone with the cool ice-blue of fluorescence. Certain areas of the city twitched and sputtered and threatened to go dark, but somehow the lights stayed lit. Oil refineries' enormous towers were sending plumes of pure flame high into the air - it was apocalytic, modern and ancient all at once.

Arriving at the domestic terminal, you're not offered the nicety of a pre-paid taxi booth as happens at the international. Taxi touts materialise out of the night-time gloom just as you're pondering how you can possibly break the 500 rupee note that's burning a hole in your wallet and ensure you have change for the journey. Shrugging them off, you join the queue for one of the beat-up yellow and black taxis that careen around the bend in front of the arrivals hall and check to make certain that the taxi's meter's been switched on.

The meters on taxis here are a sight to behold. They look like relatives of those antiquated cash registers you sometimes see in museum displays. The numbers are printed on metal discs which flip over ever so slowly, and at the end of the journey, you and the driver study a 'conversion card' that tells you how much the tiny amount showing on the meter is really worth in today's money.

It's a little like shopping in a grocery store that's still pricing everything in multiples of a ha'penny, and then going to pay in shiny five dollar polymer notes.

I loved the taxi ride in to the city centre. It was my favourite sort: nice and long, so you feel like you can really soak up those first new city moments. The ones where everything is wonderous and strange, and every single block you traverse might as well be Everest for all the challenges and diversions it offers.

Mumbai gives off a complex vibe. It's energetic and happening, but with an undertow of heartache and despair. As if for every overnight success story there's someone struggling even to go on living. Amongst all the glossy billboards advertising Blackberry and the latest, smallest phones and PDAs there are countless people sleeping rough on the city pavements.

We passed massive neo-classical wedding cakes masquerading as buildings - some entirely covered in strands of fairylights, despite being ten or more storeys high. Equally, though, the city is awash with colonial architecture whose granduer and foreboding leaves you speechless. Not such different ways of celebrating wealth, plenty and power when you really get down to it.

There is indigenous fast food aplenty - more Indianised burger joints and kebab stands than you can poke a Ronald McDonald at. Eating seems to be a revered pasttime in this city, as these are joined by countless hole-in-the-wall diners offering masala chai, Southern Indian home-cooking and a smattering of Punjabi favourites. Mumbai determines to please the palate - and if that means you wish to dine at a themed 'Goa Portuguesa' restaurant, where all the waitstaff dress in costume, then consider your wish granted.

I'd been in Mumbai only ten minutes and my head was bursting.

At the same time, the cab was filled with the best scent ever: fresh, salty sea air. The beach-holiday air that eddies around and makes your hair all starchy and flyaway, and because of which, weeks later, you will still feel salt crystals on your upper arm.

That this city should be scented by the sea amazed me. It reminded me of home, and of how a place can be serious and frivolous and huggable and tough all at once.

The buildings we whizzed by were glamourous, decaying deco, and had names like "Summer Queen".

So perfect, so unexpected, so India.