The flaneur in Mumbai – Hindustan Times

An enthusiastic commuter by road, I found myself awash in the sacred presence of the sea. All I could hear were waves, the sound of picnics, and an occasional airline above. I was barely a few hundred metres from road traffic, but the noises of the street were blocked by sea-facing buildings and greenery and drowned out by the drumbeat of a rockstar sea. It made me wonder whether I was really in a busy megacity.

I strolled on sand to welcome 2024, walking resolutely and without remit, never stopping for anything but street food or sweet coconut water. I scheduled parts of the walk in different times of the day, for research. What a journey it was, arduously comfortable, a slow 10 kilometres as the crow doesn’t fly.

Speaking of which, 2024 is now on its third month, still technically new, like a purchase within its returns window. It can still be greeted and welcomed, sort of. And so, here’s to good fortune for self, relatives, friends, colleagues, foes, and all others.

I begin my walk at Versova; I make my way through a narrow alley to the pier, where, if I wished I could catch a boat to Madh Island, site of many fishing villages and apartments of several filmmakers, screenwriters and actors. Today, though, I’d keep to this side of the creek. Here, one evening last year, I was hunting for a vendor of fish fry, nice and easy, when what seemed to be a lightning cloud of paparazzi floated down the alley. They had swooped on this urban fishing village from, maybe, Bandra, Film City or other celebrity-supporting habitats. The reason for attention in this working class neighbourhood was sauntering down the alley in a colourful jacket. As chill as you like, film star Kartik Aaryan headed to the pier, surrounded by a loose knot of bodyguards warding off nonexistent threats to his personal space. The fans trailing around him didn’t want to touch him or steal anything off him but they did want selfies, and he graciously obliged. It was exciting and at the same time also matter-of-fact — a very tinseltown Mumbai occurrence.

Most evenings, the film stars waiting to take the ferry number nil. Along the wider end of the pier, I saw motorised fishing boats being unloaded of catch. Near by, a cordon of fisherwomen squatted by bamboo baskets and chopping boards, asking what I wanted to buy. I followed my usual strategy of avoiding eye contact, because it is easy to sell fish to me. This, especially when the seller is a Koli fisherwoman exuding an unnerving combination of queenly haughtiness, school teacher-like testiness, and offering lawyer-like cross-examination with an implied back story of imminent starvation, which is factually inaccurate. I stepped sheepishly through, still avoiding eye contact. Last year, a fisherwoman had reeled me in with the words, “Am I not just like your mother?” And I’d paid twice, if I think of it, what the Bombay duck or mackerel was worth, and gone home in a daze. It was only a few days later that it occurred to me to ask whether she’d make her son pay for food. It was a nice gambit, all factors considered, and also one I’ve not yet used. Now, I have a cook to whom fish procurement is usually deputed. She grew up in a Koli community and knows how to haggle in a Mumbai fish market. Let the specialists handle the big fish. Me, I am a writer, also a socially useful profession like any, and I can explore whether it is possible to walk from Versova to Bandra to welcome the new year. It is, and I am the richer for it.

Versova beach is gracefully varied, with a pier and then a fishing village at the northern end, followed by a sandy beach and a boundary wall offering an amphitheatre view of the sunset over the sea. The northern side of the beach is well-lit and wide. Here, the dimpled, creased and furrowed sand shifts underfoot. The challenge for ankle, calf and hamstring dwindles somewhat once you have warmed up.

Anyone who loves fish should visit this beach, which is akin to an exorcism for the nose. Here, fisherfolk dry particularly oily fish, including the (in)famous Bombay duck or bombil, on wooden lattices. The smell reaches my window almost a kilometre inland, which I don’t mind. Nonetheless, it is among the most pungent smells ever. It is your dominant sensation on the beach, but you also enjoy the sight of children climbing up the more empty lattices, leaping off beached fishing boats, playing rubber-ball cricket right by the waves. It is inclusive cricket, with the sea itself handling the fielding duties on one side. The sea is a good fielder, patiently returning each ball. Someone hurls a pair of rubber slippers into it as a prank, and his buddy grins as he wades knee deep to fetch.

The southern part of the beach is lit by high streetlamps bright enough to — at a pinch! — read. Here, families and couples lay mats on the sand and sit quietly enjoying the sea or tapping their tablets or e-readers. Mumbaikars now seem comfortable with having leisure time in public. It is one way in which the city has improved. It is a lively sight, a youth in a dark, nearly black denim jacket strumming his acoustic guitar as, beside him, a girl in a white top listens. It’s a musical sunset, pink, purple, orange, swirling together.

Farther ahead is narrower beach; the right-hand view comprised of the sea at dusk, and to the left, a swathe of mangroves leading up to the high rise skyline, which is far enough to look like a minor feature of the landscape. The sight is contradicted by that of posh villas and mansions at Juhu beach up ahead, a prestige address. An old-time island vibe and a prosperous mover-and-shaker vibe occur side by side. Even sharper juxtapositions are hard to notice in Mumbai, a city of extremes.

Here, the disjunction is made clear by a real border, a wisp of the sea, a gulf 25 feet wide, winding its nutrient-laden way into the precious mangroves. You get your shoes wet if crossing at low tide, and at high tide you get soaked up to the waist — so I hear.

It’s here that I encounter another person also attempting the walk I’m on. He is a young man who moved to the city two years ago. He works for a foreign bank and lives at the other end of town. He’d consulted Google Maps, which inaccurately displayed a continuous coastline, totally innocent of the gulf, which is very real. That day, we turned back and walked to Versova. We crossed under the metal latticework of a sea bridge and made small talk.

The gulf has a new neighbour in the form of a bridge connecting Versova and Bandra. The bridge is being built. In a few years, it will replace the horizon with itself. It has polarised Mumbai over multiple concerns, environmental, financial, governance-related, even traffic-related and aesthetic. It might reduce travel time for a few motorists and thin the traffic somewhat on inland routes, true. But this will come at massive cost to taxpayers at large, who have put up with the deterioration of basic infrastructure: drainage, the public bus service as well as road quality, at least some of which are fixable for a lower budget than this new sea link. One of my reasons for walking here is to see the uninterrupted horizon.

The next day, I manage to cross the gulf in a comically wobbly manner. Before it gets dark, there are many walkers at this end of the beach, and there is public transport of sorts. This is a raft, which puts the ‘j’ in jugaad, being made of plastic bottles and chunks of thermocol topped by a thick plywood board, all tied firmly together by what looks like a fishing net. This vehicle, steered by a man named Chandrakant Mangela, is fun for your inner child, who duly remembers how to balance when top heavy, for just a minute. That’s how long the ride takes. On the other side, I exchange small talk with the raft man. He says he gets 20 to 30 customers on a busy evening, give or take. I privately hope one of them was the young banker from yesterday, who’d come so far to walk along the shore.

A few steps later, just like that, glamorous Juhu beach comes into view. It’s spacious by Mumbai standards, fringed by tony mansions of the seriously rich. On this side of the beach, only a few people are seated on the sand, and there is some sand castle construction. Right here is where I imagine sat Vina, Rai, and Rai’s folks circa 1956 in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rai’s father, Vasim Vaqar or “Vivvy” Merchant, an amateur city historian, is digging into the sand. Rai’s mother cautions him not to venture into the tide where the Old Man of the Sea might pull him under. Rai is entranced by the sea’s “come-hither murmur, its seductive roar” which evokes in him the longing to go abroad. Not me, I want to make it here.

In the novel, the boy meets — and falls headlong in love with — Nisha/Nissa/Vina. A diva even as a child, she hands him an indictment of India generally, and when he offers her an apple, she says she hates apples but eats it anyway.

“Want to know what I like, what’s the only thing I like?” she called after me. I paused and turned back to face her.

“Yes, please,” I humbly said. I may even have bowed my head in misery.

“I love the sea,” she said, and ran off to swim. My heart almost burst with joy.”

There are young couples here, thankfully.

Rushdie’s novel, with playful accuracy, said Juhu beach was “Bombay-Bondi”, and today it is more so. It’s alright by me. I will take pleasure in a boatride (date to be decided). Or I might wear a parachute and enjoy the beach aerially, while being towed by a fast boat (eventually). But I also like that quieter end of the beach, where it is possible to imagine a child giving an apple, a metaphor for his heart, to his love, and it is still possible to have those moments on this beach even today.

You might visit Juhu beach in the early evening, when there are just enough people for you to enjoy being in a throng of leisure-takers, and the food stalls, of which there are many, are not crowded. Juhu beach has only one eyesore — a vast, floating screen bobbing on the waves flashing ads at you. The rest is delightful. Not that you see it on weekends. Last year, I brought a friend here on a Sunday evening, and we could not see the sand beneath a million feet. Still, the sight of the crowd itself was beautiful.

Juhu beach is famous and pretty, so leisure-seeking locals and out-of-town visitors make a beeline here, stimulating the local economy. In a city with scant room to expand and precious few public spaces, the beaches are havens of unbounded sky and the sea, about which Rushdie memorably writes in Ground… “Touch the sea and at once you’re joined to its farthest shore…”

Juhu beach is also memorable in the mornings. Last year, I rode my bicycle there and sat on the sand with my legs crossed under me. It’s a great place for meditation with eyes open or closed. One deep look at sea and sky calms you down. Or close your eyes and you can meditate on the sound of the sea. Is it one sound or is it made of many? From which directions does it come? The sea sounds fabulous on a Sunday morning, when there are few vehicles on the roads, and the food stalls haven’t yet opened. The sunlight glitters off the waves behind joggers with staggeringly well toned bodies, yoga buffs, dog walkers, and breeze-eaters (playfully translated by Rushdie from the Bambaiya Hindi hum hawaa khaa rahe hain) whose soundtrack is the sound of the sea.

I’ve lived in Mumbai for, give or take, 15 years, but this walk brought one new discovery after another. One was that I romanticise the city. That’s great, because it feels momentous to be here. And the second and more concretely material discovery was this: the southern end of the beach, closer to Bandra, has a cement and stone pier. Imagine having come to this beach more than once and having missed a whole pier curving into the sea. You can sit here anointed by the fire opal light of sundown with the Juhu skyline spread behind you like a yellow sapphire necklace.

Close to the end of the pier, couples cuddled in the safe refuge of dusk, a few folks from the fishing village relaxed, and a man stood staring at last light. I thought I got why he was staring. If the city breaks your heart, and it will, it also gives space to nurse yourself back to wholeness. Not the wholeness of before, a new one.

Or maybe he was an actor getting feels for an audition. It was a moving sight nonetheless. On the beach, cricket and football games were being played. A large number of wooden fishing boats rested atop the rocky, wet plain by the pier, reminding me of a shoal of resting fish.

It was incredible to realise how much this modern, services-oriented city is still a place of old occupations conducted in modern ways — catching, drying, storing, selling fish. In the fishing villages, including Khar Danda, which lies ahead, ancient rhythms still animate lives. The rocky shore here, for instance, supports clams, which my cook sometimes harvests as a gift for me. They taste delicious in a savoury curry. She always refuses payment.

During my walk, the fishing village of Juhu Koliwada hosted a seafood festival with multiple stalls, and live singing and dancing based on Koli folk music and other genres. One evening, I interrupted the walk, which wasn’t intended to be continuous anyway, but segmented for ruminative thinking, and visited one of the stalls, run by my cook’s family, and bought a superb meal.

Ahead of the seafood festival maidan, the fishing village has a couple of small piers at a deep gulf spanned by a metal foot bridge. It was easy to cross the bridge and walk down a tarmac lane by the seafront. On the other side were petite cottages of fisherfolk with handkerchief sized front yards and open community sheds between the cottages where two-three fisherfolk sat over companionable beverages. When fishermen unwind on shore, they let their hair down, because the fishing trade is risky.

This being election season, a rich political party has also sponsored gully cricket tournaments to please local youth: I saw two tournaments, pretty much on the same day, no doubt with prize money on the line. At one, the announcer played playground cop, hinting at dire consequences if teams did not vacate the pitch on request. No one seemed to pay much attention as no one was trespassing at that moment. But some folks need to assert themselves, whether on the cricket field or in stump speeches. I walked on and reached Bandra, with its mesmerising Carter Road seashore.

This is Bandra, queen of the suburbs, though many South Bombay (SoBo) folks maintain it is SoBo away from SoBo!

Bandra West ranges from small urban villages to huge high rises, and tenements, cottages and bungalows and everything in between — even remnants of an sea facing fort. One of its jewels is Carter Road, a beachfront road with a swathe of rocky shore. Carter Road is a popular place to hang out at trendy eateries, drinkeries, ice creameries, and even a small, open air amphitheatre besides outdoor exercise equipment. A tiled walkway meanders by the shore. There is even the sculpture of a large bat to honour star cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, who lives nearby. The bat dwarfs the next door police outpost and outdoor tables whose tops are chessboards.

Here my walk ended. To me, it felt like a big deal. It was exciting and fun, and instilled a sense of completing a ritual, of coming full circle in the city I call home. It tuned me with the primal rhythms of the coast, and startled me with the fact that there are more wonders left to explore after over a decade of wearing out shoes as a journalist and writer. It also opened for me, a worker with words, a bay window into the lives of those working with material reality in a knowledge-and-services city buzzing with boating and shipping and fishing, occupations which work with nature and are risky. It left me feeling vivified and grateful to have walked from aspirational Versova to destination Bandra.

Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.

As the new year dawned, I recalled what a friend, John, had mentioned a few years ago. You could walk, he’d said, all the way from Bandra to Versova. This, by road, is around 11 kilometres, a good 45 minutes in peak traffic. It is quite a journey in logistical and aspirational terms. In my coastal home town, Mumbai, you hang out at the seashore. The sea is part of your existence if you live anywhere within whiffing distance of it. The idea that you could commute on foot as a novelty awakened in me a primal urge to explore. The story about a mountaineer scaling a peak “because it was there” may or may not be true, but it makes sense. And this journey is probably undocumented. That it was no mountain but level sand did not deter me; nor did the fact that it was utterly risk-free. It was exciting and fun. I discovered that, with a little help, I could walk along the coast and the journey would add another metaphorical brick to Mumbai-as-home in my heart.

An enthusiastic commuter by road, I found myself awash in the sacred presence of the sea. All I could hear were waves, the sound of picnics, and an occasional airline above. I was barely a few hundred metres from road traffic, but the noises of the street were blocked by sea-facing buildings and greenery and drowned out by the drumbeat of a rockstar sea. It made me wonder whether I was really in a busy megacity.

I strolled on sand to welcome 2024, walking resolutely and without remit, never stopping for anything but street food or sweet coconut water. I scheduled parts of the walk in different times of the day, for research. What a journey it was, arduously comfortable, a slow 10 kilometres as the crow doesn’t fly.

Speaking of which, 2024 is now on its third month, still technically new, like a purchase within its returns window. It can still be greeted and welcomed, sort of. And so, here’s to good fortune for self, relatives, friends, colleagues, foes, and all others.

I begin my walk at Versova; I make my way through a narrow alley to the pier, where, if I wished I could catch a boat to Madh Island, site of many fishing villages and apartments of several filmmakers, screenwriters and actors. Today, though, I’d keep to this side of the creek. Here, one evening last year, I was hunting for a vendor of fish fry, nice and easy, when what seemed to be a lightning cloud of paparazzi floated down the alley. They had swooped on this urban fishing village from, maybe, Bandra, Film City or other celebrity-supporting habitats. The reason for attention in this working class neighbourhood was sauntering down the alley in a colourful jacket. As chill as you like, film star Kartik Aaryan headed to the pier, surrounded by a loose knot of bodyguards warding off nonexistent threats to his personal space. The fans trailing around him didn’t want to touch him or steal anything off him but they did want selfies, and he graciously obliged. It was exciting and at the same time also matter-of-fact — a very tinseltown Mumbai occurrence.

Most evenings, the film stars waiting to take the ferry number nil. Along the wider end of the pier, I saw motorised fishing boats being unloaded of catch. Near by, a cordon of fisherwomen squatted by bamboo baskets and chopping boards, asking what I wanted to buy. I followed my usual strategy of avoiding eye contact, because it is easy to sell fish to me. This, especially when the seller is a Koli fisherwoman exuding an unnerving combination of queenly haughtiness, school teacher-like testiness, and offering lawyer-like cross-examination with an implied back story of imminent starvation, which is factually inaccurate. I stepped sheepishly through, still avoiding eye contact. Last year, a fisherwoman had reeled me in with the words, “Am I not just like your mother?” And I’d paid twice, if I think of it, what the Bombay duck or mackerel was worth, and gone home in a daze. It was only a few days later that it occurred to me to ask whether she’d make her son pay for food. It was a nice gambit, all factors considered, and also one I’ve not yet used. Now, I have a cook to whom fish procurement is usually deputed. She grew up in a Koli community and knows how to haggle in a Mumbai fish market. Let the specialists handle the big fish. Me, I am a writer, also a socially useful profession like any, and I can explore whether it is possible to walk from Versova to Bandra to welcome the new year. It is, and I am the richer for it.

Versova beach is gracefully varied, with a pier and then a fishing village at the northern end, followed by a sandy beach and a boundary wall offering an amphitheatre view of the sunset over the sea. The northern side of the beach is well-lit and wide. Here, the dimpled, creased and furrowed sand shifts underfoot. The challenge for ankle, calf and hamstring dwindles somewhat once you have warmed up.

Anyone who loves fish should visit this beach, which is akin to an exorcism for the nose. Here, fisherfolk dry particularly oily fish, including the (in)famous Bombay duck or bombil, on wooden lattices. The smell reaches my window almost a kilometre inland, which I don’t mind. Nonetheless, it is among the most pungent smells ever. It is your dominant sensation on the beach, but you also enjoy the sight of children climbing up the more empty lattices, leaping off beached fishing boats, playing rubber-ball cricket right by the waves. It is inclusive cricket, with the sea itself handling the fielding duties on one side. The sea is a good fielder, patiently returning each ball. Someone hurls a pair of rubber slippers into it as a prank, and his buddy grins as he wades knee deep to fetch.

The southern part of the beach is lit by high streetlamps bright enough to — at a pinch! — read. Here, families and couples lay mats on the sand and sit quietly enjoying the sea or tapping their tablets or e-readers. Mumbaikars now seem comfortable with having leisure time in public. It is one way in which the city has improved. It is a lively sight, a youth in a dark, nearly black denim jacket strumming his acoustic guitar as, beside him, a girl in a white top listens. It’s a musical sunset, pink, purple, orange, swirling together.

Farther ahead is narrower beach; the right-hand view comprised of the sea at dusk, and to the left, a swathe of mangroves leading up to the high rise skyline, which is far enough to look like a minor feature of the landscape. The sight is contradicted by that of posh villas and mansions at Juhu beach up ahead, a prestige address. An old-time island vibe and a prosperous mover-and-shaker vibe occur side by side. Even sharper juxtapositions are hard to notice in Mumbai, a city of extremes.

Here, the disjunction is made clear by a real border, a wisp of the sea, a gulf 25 feet wide, winding its nutrient-laden way into the precious mangroves. You get your shoes wet if crossing at low tide, and at high tide you get soaked up to the waist — so I hear.

It’s here that I encounter another person also attempting the walk I’m on. He is a young man who moved to the city two years ago. He works for a foreign bank and lives at the other end of town. He’d consulted Google Maps, which inaccurately displayed a continuous coastline, totally innocent of the gulf, which is very real. That day, we turned back and walked to Versova. We crossed under the metal latticework of a sea bridge and made small talk.

The gulf has a new neighbour in the form of a bridge connecting Versova and Bandra. The bridge is being built. In a few years, it will replace the horizon with itself. It has polarised Mumbai over multiple concerns, environmental, financial, governance-related, even traffic-related and aesthetic. It might reduce travel time for a few motorists and thin the traffic somewhat on inland routes, true. But this will come at massive cost to taxpayers at large, who have put up with the deterioration of basic infrastructure: drainage, the public bus service as well as road quality, at least some of which are fixable for a lower budget than this new sea link. One of my reasons for walking here is to see the uninterrupted horizon.

The next day, I manage to cross the gulf in a comically wobbly manner. Before it gets dark, there are many walkers at this end of the beach, and there is public transport of sorts. This is a raft, which puts the ‘j’ in jugaad, being made of plastic bottles and chunks of thermocol topped by a thick plywood board, all tied firmly together by what looks like a fishing net. This vehicle, steered by a man named Chandrakant Mangela, is fun for your inner child, who duly remembers how to balance when top heavy, for just a minute. That’s how long the ride takes. On the other side, I exchange small talk with the raft man. He says he gets 20 to 30 customers on a busy evening, give or take. I privately hope one of them was the young banker from yesterday, who’d come so far to walk along the shore.

A few steps later, just like that, glamorous Juhu beach comes into view. It’s spacious by Mumbai standards, fringed by tony mansions of the seriously rich. On this side of the beach, only a few people are seated on the sand, and there is some sand castle construction. Right here is where I imagine sat Vina, Rai, and Rai’s folks circa 1956 in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rai’s father, Vasim Vaqar or “Vivvy” Merchant, an amateur city historian, is digging into the sand. Rai’s mother cautions him not to venture into the tide where the Old Man of the Sea might pull him under. Rai is entranced by the sea’s “come-hither murmur, its seductive roar” which evokes in him the longing to go abroad. Not me, I want to make it here.

In the novel, the boy meets — and falls headlong in love with — Nisha/Nissa/Vina. A diva even as a child, she hands him an indictment of India generally, and when he offers her an apple, she says she hates apples but eats it anyway.

“Want to know what I like, what’s the only thing I like?” she called after me. I paused and turned back to face her.

“Yes, please,” I humbly said. I may even have bowed my head in misery.

“I love the sea,” she said, and ran off to swim. My heart almost burst with joy.”

There are young couples here, thankfully.

Rushdie’s novel, with playful accuracy, said Juhu beach was “Bombay-Bondi”, and today it is more so. It’s alright by me. I will take pleasure in a boatride (date to be decided). Or I might wear a parachute and enjoy the beach aerially, while being towed by a fast boat (eventually). But I also like that quieter end of the beach, where it is possible to imagine a child giving an apple, a metaphor for his heart, to his love, and it is still possible to have those moments on this beach even today.

You might visit Juhu beach in the early evening, when there are just enough people for you to enjoy being in a throng of leisure-takers, and the food stalls, of which there are many, are not crowded. Juhu beach has only one eyesore — a vast, floating screen bobbing on the waves flashing ads at you. The rest is delightful. Not that you see it on weekends. Last year, I brought a friend here on a Sunday evening, and we could not see the sand beneath a million feet. Still, the sight of the crowd itself was beautiful.

Juhu beach is famous and pretty, so leisure-seeking locals and out-of-town visitors make a beeline here, stimulating the local economy. In a city with scant room to expand and precious few public spaces, the beaches are havens of unbounded sky and the sea, about which Rushdie memorably writes in Ground… “Touch the sea and at once you’re joined to its farthest shore…”

Juhu beach is also memorable in the mornings. Last year, I rode my bicycle there and sat on the sand with my legs crossed under me. It’s a great place for meditation with eyes open or closed. One deep look at sea and sky calms you down. Or close your eyes and you can meditate on the sound of the sea. Is it one sound or is it made of many? From which directions does it come? The sea sounds fabulous on a Sunday morning, when there are few vehicles on the roads, and the food stalls haven’t yet opened. The sunlight glitters off the waves behind joggers with staggeringly well toned bodies, yoga buffs, dog walkers, and breeze-eaters (playfully translated by Rushdie from the Bambaiya Hindi hum hawaa khaa rahe hain) whose soundtrack is the sound of the sea.

I’ve lived in Mumbai for, give or take, 15 years, but this walk brought one new discovery after another. One was that I romanticise the city. That’s great, because it feels momentous to be here. And the second and more concretely material discovery was this: the southern end of the beach, closer to Bandra, has a cement and stone pier. Imagine having come to this beach more than once and having missed a whole pier curving into the sea. You can sit here anointed by the fire opal light of sundown with the Juhu skyline spread behind you like a yellow sapphire necklace.

Close to the end of the pier, couples cuddled in the safe refuge of dusk, a few folks from the fishing village relaxed, and a man stood staring at last light. I thought I got why he was staring. If the city breaks your heart, and it will, it also gives space to nurse yourself back to wholeness. Not the wholeness of before, a new one.

Or maybe he was an actor getting feels for an audition. It was a moving sight nonetheless. On the beach, cricket and football games were being played. A large number of wooden fishing boats rested atop the rocky, wet plain by the pier, reminding me of a shoal of resting fish.

It was incredible to realise how much this modern, services-oriented city is still a place of old occupations conducted in modern ways — catching, drying, storing, selling fish. In the fishing villages, including Khar Danda, which lies ahead, ancient rhythms still animate lives. The rocky shore here, for instance, supports clams, which my cook sometimes harvests as a gift for me. They taste delicious in a savoury curry. She always refuses payment.

During my walk, the fishing village of Juhu Koliwada hosted a seafood festival with multiple stalls, and live singing and dancing based on Koli folk music and other genres. One evening, I interrupted the walk, which wasn’t intended to be continuous anyway, but segmented for ruminative thinking, and visited one of the stalls, run by my cook’s family, and bought a superb meal.

Ahead of the seafood festival maidan, the fishing village has a couple of small piers at a deep gulf spanned by a metal foot bridge. It was easy to cross the bridge and walk down a tarmac lane by the seafront. On the other side were petite cottages of fisherfolk with handkerchief sized front yards and open community sheds between the cottages where two-three fisherfolk sat over companionable beverages. When fishermen unwind on shore, they let their hair down, because the fishing trade is risky.

This being election season, a rich political party has also sponsored gully cricket tournaments to please local youth: I saw two tournaments, pretty much on the same day, no doubt with prize money on the line. At one, the announcer played playground cop, hinting at dire consequences if teams did not vacate the pitch on request. No one seemed to pay much attention as no one was trespassing at that moment. But some folks need to assert themselves, whether on the cricket field or in stump speeches. I walked on and reached Bandra, with its mesmerising Carter Road seashore.

This is Bandra, queen of the suburbs, though many South Bombay (SoBo) folks maintain it is SoBo away from SoBo!

Bandra West ranges from small urban villages to huge high rises, and tenements, cottages and bungalows and everything in between — even remnants of an sea facing fort. One of its jewels is Carter Road, a beachfront road with a swathe of rocky shore. Carter Road is a popular place to hang out at trendy eateries, drinkeries, ice creameries, and even a small, open air amphitheatre besides outdoor exercise equipment. A tiled walkway meanders by the shore. There is even the sculpture of a large bat to honour star cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, who lives nearby. The bat dwarfs the next door police outpost and outdoor tables whose tops are chessboards.

Here my walk ended. To me, it felt like a big deal. It was exciting and fun, and instilled a sense of completing a ritual, of coming full circle in the city I call home. It tuned me with the primal rhythms of the coast, and startled me with the fact that there are more wonders left to explore after over a decade of wearing out shoes as a journalist and writer. It also opened for me, a worker with words, a bay window into the lives of those working with material reality in a knowledge-and-services city buzzing with boating and shipping and fishing, occupations which work with nature and are risky. It left me feeling vivified and grateful to have walked from aspirational Versova to destination Bandra.

Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.