Bombay

Bombay gives Dexter Mayhew’s travels a temporary address and, more importantly, a place from which he can try to draw Emma Morley into his future. In a downtown hostel, amid heavy rain and the clutter of travel, he writes her an eleven-page letter that moves from jokes about India to an invitation to meet him at the Taj Mahal. The city is presented chiefly through this act of communication: a distant vantage point from which Dexter’s apparent freedom becomes an appeal for renewed closeness.

Setting and Conditions

Dexter writes from a downtown Bombay hostel whose uncomfortable mattresses and plentiful Australian guests make it an unglamorous base for his travels. His room has a small plastic picnic table beside the window. Outside, rain falls so loudly that it competes with the compilation tape Emma made for him; he compares the downpour with the rain in Edinburgh. The details make Bombay immediate without turning it into a broad city portrait: the reader encounters the city through the cramped room and Dexter’s comic account of being there.

The room is also a workplace of sorts. Dexter sits at the picnic table with beer, writing while the rain continues outside. He acknowledges that he is drunk, and the letter’s emphatic capitalisation and digressions carry the exuberance of someone writing quickly and without much restraint. At the end, he has filled eleven pages, the most he has written since his final examinations. Bombay is thus not simply a stop on a journey but the setting in which an impulsive private message takes shape.

The City Through Dexter’s Letter

From Bombay, Dexter reports that India is an extraordinary experience, mixing claims of wonder with blunt references to poverty and illness. He says he has taken thousands of photographs and promises to show them to Emma at length when he returns. His account is deliberately informal: he teases her about trying to educate him, complains about the books she gave him, and describes struggling through Howards End because he keeps expecting a more sensational plot. The letter makes his travel experience part observation and part performance for an absent audience.

That performance includes his defence of the circumstances that brought him to India. Dexter says that being barred from teaching English as a foreign language was, in retrospect, the best thing that happened to him, while insisting that the school overreacted to his relationship with Tove Angstrom, whom he describes as twenty-one. The episode lends his account of Bombay a self-justifying edge: he presents himself as an adventurer who has escaped a professional setback, even as he jokes about the judgment that followed him.

India also appears as a possible opening in Dexter’s working life. He recounts meeting a television producer on a train who, after seeing his photographs, suggested that he might work professionally and gave him a card, with a view to contacting her in August. The prospect is tentative, but it gives the journey a possible consequence beyond sightseeing. Dexter’s photographs, first promised as entertainment for Emma, have also attracted the attention of someone who might offer him work.

Bombay and the Invitation to Emma

The letter’s central purpose is an invitation. Dexter proposes that Emma come to India and meet him at the Taj Mahal, offering to cover her expenses and suggesting that they could travel together for three months, perhaps going on to Kerala or Thailand. He frames the offer as an escape from anxious routine: the two of them could stay awake for pleasure rather than worry about what comes next. His promise to pay draws on the contrast between his unearned money and Emma’s hard work, while his joking suggestion that she repay him when she becomes a famous playwright keeps the offer affectionate and teasing.

The proposal is complicated by the fact that Dexter cannot remain in India indefinitely. His mother has been unwell; he says that her operation went well, though he is unsure whether she is telling him the whole truth, and he expects to return home in the autumn. He also hints that his mother has a theory about him and Emma, offering to tell her if she comes. The invitation therefore carries more than the prospect of travel: it offers shared time, with an implied personal significance that Dexter partly discloses and partly retreats from.

After writing, Dexter addresses the letter to the Taj Mahal for 1 August at noon and signs off by returning to the pair’s familiar formulation, Dex and Em, Em and Dex. He admits that he may have said too much, but insists that he thinks about Emma often. The closing mixture of tenderness and insult—he jokes that there is nobody he would rather see get dysentery than her—preserves their teasing intimacy even as the invitation risks exposing how much he wants her to come.

Narrative Significance

Bombay is shown at a distance from Emma, but the letter makes that distance narratively active. Dexter’s account reaches her from six hours ahead, while he imagines her waking with a Sunday hangover. His descriptions, jokes, and plans are a one-sided attempt to bring her into a place she has not yet visited; the city becomes legible through what he wants her to see and through the future he proposes for them.

The episode also sets Dexter’s restless self-invention beside the practical limits of his circumstances. He can imagine months of travel and a new professional opportunity, yet he must return because his mother is ill, and the invitation depends on Emma choosing to join him. Bombay is consequently both a scene of apparent freedom and the point from which Dexter makes a vulnerable appeal. The rain, the cramped room, the photographs, and the pages of the letter all converge on that appeal: travel matters here because he tries to make it a shared experience.