One evening in January 1989 Roversi stopped at the Malabar Hotel in Cochin, Kerala, and as he began reading Pasolini’s The Smell of India realised he was staying in the very hotel where his fellow Italian had stayed almost thirty years earlier. Pasolini travelled to India in 1961 with Moravia and Morante and wrote of his impressions, nocturnal wanderings and encounters; the photographer answers his text with his own images of the country.