The first message carried to you on the freshly-laundered breeze from green Mahableshwar is that Bombay is polluted. Lungs, unused to such zinging freshness, expand greedily.

Life is clearly unfair. Your chosen city, constantly besieged by polluting vehicles, is under a cloud of black dust that clogs your lifelines. And here, where "many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness", on the mountaintops, is where life could be cosy. Yet, the drudgery in Bombay is what makes the Mahableshwar caper affordable. Among life's travesties, this.

And as you slide up the mountaintops, there are evidences of a turf war. Not on the scale of a Chotta Rajan Vs Dawood Ibrahim, but likely as venomous. The 'agent', an innocuous word that has been made ugly by the breed that it represents, is clearly persona non grata here. The good guys (the bonafide hotel owners' association) have put out a warning against the bad guys (the touts). The exact stern language eludes me now, but it was clearly provocative enough to invite black paint on the boards that shout the message.

The touts are there, at the entrance to this excursionists' paradise where the uniformed lot take the mandatory fee and glue a ticket lushly printed with strawberries on to your vehicle. We are assured, as my car-proud husband mutters at the desecration, that a bit of water would wash it off.

The touts crowd the car, withdraw disgustedly at our show of independence. But let's concede them their livelihood -- it is a pretty difficult country out here for a non-native.

We were here as the usual blast of monsoons buffeted the western coast. The fog descends like so many ghosts of the Britons who have usurped local names -- Arthur's Peak, Elphinstone Point, Helen's Point, and Falkland Point. It deviously overtakes your visibility. You are alone, really, in an eerie world where the only cocoon is your AC-warmed car, while trees, black with moss, twist gnarled branches at you. You wonder at how well the local civic organisations have manicured these, to free the turning roads and by-lanes of their clutch.

Here you chase your tail, literally. Only the mood is not playful. The fog plays its usual hide-and-seek, with the needle-spray of rain as its mask. It could be a bleak spot to be stranded. Your Bombay-bred, crowd-loving child sets up a steady whine. But the fog lifts. A white police vehicle cruises by, as if to reassure. You have left the nowhere land you had entered. The touts, it is clear, are unlikely to loose their livelihood.

A 'novel' map of Mahableshwar does exist, promising your destination in 20 seconds. But that seems a brain-cruncher. A resort with hundred, thousand hotels, from foreign-sounding Belle Vue to homespun Madhuban. Yet the rainy season, despite receiving a trickle-turned-torrent tourist inflow, does not throw them up in disgusting numbers onto the streets -- as in Lonavla or Matheran, for instance. The wetness keeps them within limits, off the roads on which horses proclaim their health with the profuseness of the dung they drop.

But the rain does not keep off the rowdies. Unfortunate, but true, that the representatives of well-behaved humanity back home will turn rowdy at a tourist spot.

A short jaunt at a reasonably safe hour for a woman still drew lewd jeers -- with a deliberately ascending tone that men reserve for pre-assault situations in a hunt. Grown-up men can be rather pathetic: from a car chase to lobbing a half-consumed corncob. One could have been in depraved Delhi. Perhaps they went to bed that night with a smile of achievement.

One could team up with author James Finn Garner and write a scathing indictment, shorn of humour, of all those who crassly "invade another's personal space". But to understand such document men need to evolve. And that may well take aeons. Till then, it is not advisable, in Mahableshwar, as in any tourist destination, for any woman to be so taken up with God-created beauty that she forgets manmade lakshman rekhas.

If there is anything I would envy in a man, this must be it -- his freedom to be alone, roam where he wills in such countryside without having to constantly contend with a section of humanity that just will not take a hint.

Reality sucks. A soporific is Dina hotel, which costs like a many-starrer, but is worth every penny. A sample: for breakfast bhurji-pav, bread-jam, corn-with-milk, porridge, idli-sambar -- not a choice, mind you, but all assembled on your too-small table. And so the party continues, through every meal making putty of your diet and self-control. It is a pretty place, where you don't mind being locked in from the sheets of rain.

Sightseeing, for some reason, has always included historical spots. It could be a good or a bad thing -- if you are morbid you could visit the graves where the Chinese and Malay are buried. Mahableshwar was a jail for these convicts from 1843 to 1864. Mother-proud Shivaji weighed her in gold at the Shankar Mandir.

And as always, it took a white man to "discover" this green paradise -- in 1791, Sir Charles Malet (and not, admonishes the 'novel map' of Mahableshwar, Peter Lodwick who visited it much later in 1824). That's something over which their respective descendants may want to squabble. Along the way, let's not forget the local contribution -- it was Maharaja Pratapsinha of Satara who decided that the salubrious climate warrants a health resort label. And it is a label that has stuck.

Sightseeing spots are several, but I have come to the conclusion that all a Bombayite needs is a bed, three meals a day, and he will begin to see the Gates of Pearl, Paradise. But a compulsive and guilty need to educate your child sets you off on a few half-hearted jaunts to the Shankar Mandir in old Mahableshwar where Shiva reinvents himself as Rudra, and the dank temple where five springs (called the panch ganga) spout, pumping you with an atavistic urge to worship the elements.

But the most educative experience that my child received, truly, was when she stepped into a have-all general store to meet up with a St Bernard -- a gargantuan creature which could have towered several heads over her, only he was too busy snoozing the afternoon away. Now she wants to own one of the breed that ran along with Heidi on the Swiss slopes. And you wrench the dream from your child when you explain that to own a St Bernard in a Bombay flat would mean that her father and I would have to pitch a tent outside.