Anything can be bought and sold – even kidneys, with a quarter of the fee going to the original owner, the rest to the middle man. There is even a season for child slaves sold for prostitution – the monsoon season, from June to September, when life in the villages gets desperate.Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth, is the city’s emblem – her temple stands, appropriately, in the frenzied silver market. Indians love to stare, all hoping for a glimpse of a star.The street life is a tragi-comedy, at times so extreme it teeters beyond rationale. Yet the spirit of the street kids is infectious, as are their smiles.

They are open and, owning nothing, have nothing to hide.Bombay is India’s powerhouse of manufacturing – everything from bicycles to textiles and pharmaceuticals – and overseas trade Arabs come to buy gold and designer shoes. The city is a cinematographer’s dream, yet films are never made in the city, and whenever the crew for Bombay Blue set up a shoot – on the beach or at the city’s morgue – an audience of hundreds, sometimes thousands, would gather. The drama hopes to rival Taggart in its gritty realism, and Hawaii Five- 0 in kitsch humour and exotic location.Bombay’s Bollywood is the world’s biggest film industry, churning out “masala” movies – candyfloss stories with jingly Hindi tunes – whose stars are revered by many Indians with a devotion akin to temple worship. Donald Sumpter, from Hanif Kureshi’s Buddha of Suburbia, and two relative newcomers, Glaswegian-born Shan Khan and Bombayite soap-opera star Shuli Subaya, are joined by a handful of Bollywood actors. In India a glimpse of an ankle is erotic, and Miss Asia will only bare her midriff Even the traffic signs give conflicting messages.

One blue billboard advises motorists: “It helps to be spaced out while driving. Keep safe distance.”Britain’s Channel 4 has chosen the grime and glamour of Bombay as the setting for a six-part police TV series to be shown here in the autumn. Bollywood actresses sing in Hindi pop bands that are modelled on the Spice Girls, and “tablatronic” techno pounds inside the city’s clubs.On some levels, Bombay is changing so fast it feels out of control. Every day, new images of Western life are beamed in by satellite TV. The West says curves and cleavages, Muslim chic replies with elegant, tailored lines and soft silks covering the entire body.

Life is fast for those in the rat-race; in the slums, it moves at the pace of an ox There are beaches, but the sea is too filthy to swim in. Bombay is a microcosm of India – underlying the glitz, away from the glare of the Bollywood film industry, is a city divided by contrasts and deep-rooted tensions. You can get laser treatment for eyes as advanced as in the West, yet a rickshaw driver will have a cataract the size of a gob-stopper.
West overlays East and, for hip Bombayites, there is fusion – and confusion. I sold them shit, cow dung,” says 28-year-old Mahindra, “street man” and sometime-interpreter, who works in the Salvation Army hostel in Colaba, downtown Bombay. “I was a begging boy on the streets of Bombay. Shining shoes, stealing, wreck-picking, car-wiping, massage boy, drugs-pedlar, liquor- seller I sold to the public in slums and dope to the tourists.