Lin’s arrival in Bombay is both a border crossing and the tentative beginning of a homecoming. He reaches India as an escaped prisoner using a forged passport, with freedom still precarious and no settled destination beyond the city. The arrival’s decisive turn is modest but consequential: when asked whether he will stay or continue elsewhere, he chooses Bombay for a while. The city becomes the place where a fugitive without a plan begins to imagine remaining.

First Impressions of the City

Lin’s recollection begins with the city’s smell, which he registers before seeing or hearing anything of India. In retrospect, he understands it as carrying the oppositions that will shape his account of Bombay: hope against hate, greed against love, and life amid both renewal and decay. Its associations range from the sea and machinery to the crowded activity of people and animals, and from restaurants and places of worship to bazaars devoted to perfumes, spices, incense, and flowers. The impression is not a single picturesque detail but a compressed portrait of a city containing competing forms of life. Lin later connects that first impression to belonging: the city’s familiar smell welcomes him when he returns.

Heat and people follow smell in the sequence of his attention. After leaving the climate-controlled plane, Lin waits in airport queues as the humidity makes the new climate immediately physical. He describes learning that Bombay’s wet heat persists through both day and night, presenting adjustment as a condition of staying: one learns to live with it, or leaves. The people he notices make another kind of first impression. He recalls the many regions, communities, religions, castes, and appearances represented in Bombay, seeing the city as a concentrated encounter with India’s variety. These observations establish that arrival is not simply entry into a new country; it is an encounter with a place whose scale and differences exceed his ability to take them in at once.

Crossing the Border Under a False Identity

At the airport, Lin’s immediate concern is not to announce himself but to pass without attracting attention. He travels from Auckland on a New Zealand passport whose photograph he has replaced himself. The forgery is imperfect: he believes it can survive a routine inspection, but knows that further checking with the New Zealand High Commission could expose it. His freedom therefore depends on a document that offers passage without security.

Lin has prepared for the control by finding a small group of New Zealand students on the flight. They are making their second trip to the subcontinent, and he cultivates a slight acquaintance by inviting them to share their experience and travel advice. At the airport, Indian officials assume he belongs with the relaxed group and give him only a cursory check. He gets through not by persuading them of a detailed invented story, but by appearing to travel alongside people whose genuine documents and untroubled manner make his presence seem ordinary.

The retrospective narrator distinguishes this improvisation from the smuggling knowledge he will acquire later. At the time, Lin does not understand the broader tradecraft of smugglers and their use of unsuspecting fellow travellers. His sole contraband is himself: his vulnerable, hunted freedom. That distinction gives the border crossing its particular tension. The technique is improvised, but the risk is real, and passing control offers only temporary safety rather than a final escape.

A Fugitive’s Continuing Escape

Outside the airport, Lin experiences the crossing as exhilaration, but the narration immediately qualifies that release. He had escaped from prison almost two years earlier; the fugitive’s life, he explains, requires another escape every day and night. Reaching Bombay does not erase the danger attached to his past. He is still not completely free, and the new passport and country bring hope alongside fear rather than resolving either one.

The moment at the airport therefore marks a change in location, not an end to flight. Lin stands beneath the Bombay sky with a sense of possibility, but that possibility remains inseparable from the need to run and hide. The contrast between the apparent simplicity of arrival and the ongoing labor of staying free becomes central to the event: a border can be crossed in minutes, while the fugitive condition continues beyond it.

Choosing to Stay Without a Plan

When a fellow traveller asks whether he is checking into a room or passing through Bombay, Lin admits that he does not know whether he wants to stay or continue somewhere else. He has no plan, and at that moment he accepts the description of himself as a brave, hard man without one. He nevertheless says he thinks he will stay in Bombay for a while. His answer is provisional, not a declaration of a settled future.

The other traveller offers to share a room with him and a companion for the night before they catch the train the next day. Lin considers accepting because their genuine documents and easy manner might help conceal his false passport. Even after choosing to remain in Bombay, he assesses the offer through the practical caution of a man still protecting his assumed identity. The decision to stay and the instinct to hide coexist: the city offers a possible beginning, but Lin enters it still measuring safety one step at a time.

The event also establishes the retrospective shape of Lin’s story. He frames his life in Bombay as beginning with the city, a woman, and luck, and recalls that his first sight of Karla Saaranen’s green eyes would become part of the hand he began to play there. The arrival thus points toward relationships and choices not yet developed in this scene, while its immediate outcome remains small and open-ended: Lin has made it through the airport and decided to stay, without knowing what that choice will lead to.