Five years ago, we rented an apartment in Rome, in the Jewish Ghetto, and spent a few weeks here with our children. This afternoon we retraced our steps to the Piazza Mattei, and restaged the same photo we took back wheben everyone was, well, shorter.

Upon arriving Saturday in Mumbai, we visited with the creative team at Umbrella, a talented design agency — and again we saw work that was unusually rich and vibrant. The funny thing is that we met founder Bhupal Ramnathkar (known to all as Ramu) through Facebook: he follows our status reports. A highly successful advertising creative director, he’s created a design-focused boutique firm that does lovely work — unusually thoughtful and visually sophisticated. Ramu was a very helpful and gracious host in Mumbai.

In last Sunday’s newspaper, there was a tragic story about the abduction of a four-year old girl here in Bombay, taken from her bed while the family slept. Her distraught parents later reported the missing girl to the police, who immediately searched the area. The girl’s tiny body was found, tossed in a ditch, shortly thereafter.

There is no greater loss than the loss of a child — more unspeakable, still, when such a tragedy is the result of a violent crime. But it was a small reporting detail in this story that got me.

“The girl lived with her parents, who are flower sellers,” it read. “They lived on the footpath near the railway station.”

There’s a settlement on the other side of the wall from where we are living — protected here on campus — and apparently the little stone dwellings house families who have handed down squatting rights over generations. Each time we walk back to the main gate (we’re at the other end of campus) Malcolm asks if we can walk through the settlement, as the people are, well, nicer there.

Outside the main gate of the National Institute of Design, scattered in between the auto rickshaws and the cows and the flies, next to the groups of assorted people spinning and dying thread for the Kite Festival that begins this weekend, a family of children migrate aimlessly. They run and chase each other like all children. They giggle and tease each other. And then they see us — white people, or maybe it’s just that we’ve bathed more recently so our skin is a lighter shade — and their expressions change on the spot. They come to us, pinching their fingers together and pointing to their mouths. They follow us all the way back to the gate. They are filthy and tiny and incredibly, almost unbearably beautiful — like the little girl, pictured here, a young Cindy Crawford — but it is their hardened, knowing expressions that are my undoing.

The children here are exquisite, and we’ve been photographing them everywhere: sleeping under displays at the markets, posing with their classmates, wedged between their parents on bikes — some even come up and try to sell us things. Hard to say no, but we resist: good practice for India.