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.”

We walked miles today, through markets and mosques, past parks and peacocks, in a city drenched by sun and covered in a thin and constant dust that miraculously never seems to dull the extraordinary colors we’re seeing everywhere. From one second to the next, the smells shift, from curry to cardamom to cinnamon, pungent and sharp, a whirlwind of mysterious (to us) new sensations.

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.