Compared with most of the rest of the Bombay, Juhu is a salubrious, leafy suburb.  But there are still squatters living on the street.  If, like most foreign visitors, you arrive by car, you probably crawl through a noisy traffic jam, with a colourful mixture of trucks, taxis, cycles, autorickshaws and vehicles which defy classification.  At every traffic light, the car windows are surrounded by pleading faces, begging  with great professionalism.

The expensive hotel where I was staying was on the seafront, but separated from the beach by an intricate wrought-iron fence, entwined with creepers which echoed the exuberance of the electrical wiring of the area around the hotel swimming pool.

Nothing could have prepared me for the visual shock of the first sight of the beach, which becomes visible as a series of vivid vignettes, separated from the bland modernity of the hotel  by the grid of the railings. Even on an overcast August afternoon, at the tail-end of the monsoon, the vibrancy of colour and range and complexity of human activity overwhelms and entices.  Looking back, I find it hard to believe that all these pictures were taken on one short stretch of beach, over less than half an hour.

The first thing that struck me was the jewel-like colours of the bottles on the numerous stalls selling food and drink, some of them garlanded like religious shrines.  The beach is at once a market and a place of relaxation.  There are entertainers, like this boy with a performing monkey; and a range of fairground rides, including ferris wheels, which, along with the palm trees, give the beach its characteristic skyline. These wheels are painted with the same loving attention to colour as those hand-painted Indian trucks and powered only by human muscle, often, it seems, at great personal risk to the attendants (look at these guys, turning away up there).  At every step there is evidence of more entrepreneurial ingenuity:  an amazing home-made  vehicle on which you can take a ride;  a mysterious robot which, one imagines, dances and/or plays music through those headphones when you have paid your fee.

For some, the beach is a place to sleep (believe it or not, the building behind that stone wall is the BombayTheosophical Society).  But for many it is clearly a place to come for pleasure.  As the afternoon fades away , an atmosphere of peace and stillness creeps over everything. Everyone's attention shifts towards the sea, waiting for that sudden moment when the sun drops down below the Indian Ocean.  There is a pause, almost an audible collective sigh, before, the day over, people start drifting home.