Over the last three years of living in/off Bombay, the city is a great muse, a character that provokes a genre by itself. Yet this city of stories is prone to an amnesia which I call the resilience syndrome or chalta hain, as people are on the move trying to survive. If anything defines this maximum city is it’s innate ability to sustain anything, 11/7 or 26/11 or the annual deluge, people are back to work the next day as the city means business, or dhando vado, a Gujarati speaking city in many parts with Bhojpuri the language heard more on the street.

This city is soaked in a history of trade and commerce, yet there is no time to note or remember it even while one passes by it in Fort or Colaba Causeway or Marine Drive. The cosmopolitan character is a function of its survival instinct, yet is rife with ghettos that sits uneasy with its larger than life idea.

I try to capture the present through an Indian Ocean lens, mapping the spots which are archives in the cityscape. The past echoes in the present only if one is trying to listen to it, in the Parsi joints such as Britannia, or on the stroll of the Marine Drive, which is an UNESCO heritage site.

The Al Sabah Mansion on Marine Drive speaks of an Arab Bombay where Kuwaiti merchants used to frequent prior to oil in the Gulf. Bombay was the capital of the ‘Other Raj’ (James Onley’s book) in the port cities of the Khaleej where the rupee was the legal tender until 1970.

Aden used to be a part of the Bombay Presidency, where Dhirubhai Ambani went to work in the 1950’s. Aden had a Gujarati Chief Minister, until the British pulled out giving Dubai the pole position. Adenwala Road in Parsi Colony, Dadar is a physical testimony to this history.

I write very slowly, and most of my work is long duree in nature, but I try to map the Indian Ocean, one image and paragraph at a time, and hopefully something valuable comes out of it.