So Where've You Been? 36 Mumbai (again)

[I am going to pretend I didn't have to go back through Delhi, because I hate the place.]

On the way back through Mumbai, things are surreally familiar. I spent hours in see-and-be-seen cafes (best line, from a waiter: Sir, your mother has telephoned. You may not smoke a hookah), or laughing my soaked head off at the oil slick seastorm between me and the temple causeway. I loafed at my favourite Mumbai hotel, like a prince, I ran around eating all the idlis sambhar I could lay my hands on.

But the most memorable moment was just before I left the city, at dusk. All packed, I walked back to my hotel, wondering where the monsoon had disappeared to, when a five year old flower seller accosts me ten feet away from my taxi to the airport.

I'm not good with the child labour thing. [Evidence. Evidence. Evidence.]

Little kid's selling bigwilting gerberas, big as her face. She's tugging insistently at my trousers, and I only have 8 rupees in my pocket. She doesn't speak much english, but life on the streets has taught her some.

"Twenty rupee!"

No. No. Sorry, darlin'. No.

"Fifteen rupee!" The automatic hard-heart, the necessary guard-against-it response to poverty kicks in as she does the automatic have-you-no-heart begging gesture - pinched fingers coming again and again to her mouth in supplication.
Hungry, it means. I'm no match for it.

I crouch down to her level. I haven't time or expertise enough to sign-language my way out of this, so I hope slow english and gestures will show her what I mean.
No. Don't need it. No money. No. See? No money. Only eight rupee. I would love to buy but no money. No.
I show her the coins. Only eight rupee, see? No money. She shakes her head.

Then takes the coins from my open hand.

Oh shit.

She stuffs the wilting gerbera in my hand. I try to pass it back to her. No. I don't need it. No take. She looks insulted. Turns her face away to indicate this is a sale, not a begging pitch. To maintain the fiction of self-respect, I have to collude, agree to take the wilting oversized flower from her.
She has me now; I feel like shit, and she knows it. The guilt transaction is successful. I've insulted her. I'd probably buy her half a store full of whatever she points at by now. Or a ticket to a country where she doesn't have to beg in the streets at age five.

She points at a paan seller, points to her mouth.

No fucking way! Chewing baccy?! That stuff's carcinogenic. I'm not buying paan tobacco for an infant. Not in any circumstances.

She starts to cry. There's nothing I can do to end this exchange but stand back up and walk briskly away.

Oh god. I just haggled a five year old down on a daisy.