A Reunion of sorts.

We pay for last night's unimpeded slumbers with a terrible night of sleeplessness. The silence is broken first by the odd dog, then a rooster or two, followed by a few crows, the call to prayer, a couple of car horns and finally by the hotel staff rousing themselves underneath our window. We must have been utterly zonked last night to sleep through that racket.

We have arranged to meet J at 2.00 which allows us some time to visit the Indian Museum, which we have never previously got around to. We pack our bags and deposit them in the hotel lock up before walking round the corner to buy our tickets. We then negotiate the job creation scheme that mans the entrance and start to look around.

It is a huge building around a central courtyard. The first two floors appear to be the public areas but there is a lot of quite frenzied construction work going on so it is difficult to tell. There are a few areas that appear to have been renovated in the last decade or so and others that look as if they predate independence. Some interesting rooms like the Bengali Art exhibition are locked shut without explanation. There is one very popular room containing a display of Egyptian artefacts. A cabinet displaying two mummified corpses seems to be the big draw, although we consider the A/c to be the main attraction.

One reason for our visit was that D had recently read George MacDonald Fraser's autobiographical volume about serving in Burma in 1945, in which he mentions a spell of leave where he was accommodated in the museum. He wrote that he thought it to be better than any hotel that he had ever stayed in. D was delighted to find a notice on one of the walls confirming that part of the museum had been used as a WW2 leave camp.We discovered that the frenzied building work was all about completing an exhibition of Buddhist Art that is due to open tonight for a celebrity preview. Best of luck with that.

By now we were ready for a cuppa so we followed the signs to the cafe. It was closed. We adjourned onto Park Street in search of refreshment and on a whim ascended to the terrace of the Park Hotel for tea. This was consumed to a soundtrack of increasingly gut wrenching Country & Western music. Johnny Cash's 'Ring of Fire' seemed like a poor choice for an upmarket catering establishment.

It was time for our postponed rendezvous with J. His train had got in at 1.30 am and he had to find a hotel. This is India. Anything is possible. We met in the Fairlawn garden and swapped our tales. He is en route for Burma via the recently opened land route. A couple of hours soon passed.

At J's suggestion we dined at Bhojohori Manna, Esplanade. This was a windowless first floor room but quite busy, with a very competitively priced menu. It appeared that we had arrived a bit late as much of the menu was unavailable and the place quickly emptied. We enjoyed the food, especially the jaggery ice cream, and the bill for three came to less than two cups of tea at the Park.

For our post prandial entertainment we opted for a tram ride to Ghariahat which did not disappoint. We took a taxi back to Sudder Street and wished J bon voyage before recovering our luggage for the trip to Sealdah Station.