The day before I finally flew to Mumbai, my check-in at KLIA had turned into a bureaucratic farce. I was denied boarding for failing to produce the old passport referred to in my five-year visa. This meant buying a new ticket and, thanks to a helpful tourist from Bangalore, filling in the online arrival and Ebola surveillance forms. Apparently, getting on a plane to India now requires the paperwork of a small military operation.
Eventually, after a three-and-a-half-hour delay and a decidedly underwhelming Batik Air flight, I arrived at Mumbai’s mantra-sounding Bombay Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, expecting another round of officialdom.
Instead, at one o’clock in the morning, I encountered the most cheerful immigration officer I’d ever met. His smiles and chattiness put me at ease. He told me that his screen showed I had made five trips to India in the last three years, proof that I liked India a lot. He then gave me a waggly smile of proud satisfaction and stamped me in. For a moment, I felt as though I were at a ticket booth at a tourism fair rather than an immigration counter in a country that had turned form-filling into an art form.
He didn’t even want to see my old passport or the forms I’d spent so much time completing. I insisted he look at them.
For Ganapathy’s sake! I’d bought a new ticket and nearly lost the will to travel. The least he could do was admire my paperwork.
“Alright, yes, yes. Very good!”
There I stood, like a schoolboy proudly showing his homework to a teacher.
Selfie with my Vada Pav – Bombay’s trademark energy-sustaining and soul-satisfying vegan burger. I discovered how much I loved it only on my last day, devouring one in my hotel room before checking out.Irani and Parsi communities share the same Zoroastrian roots, but Parsis are descendants of Persians who settled in India many centuries ago, while Iranis are more recent immigrants from Iran. Britannia & Co., founded in 1923 by an Iranian immigrant family, is an Irani café serving a blend of Iranian and Parsi cooking. Big Apple Dreams or Déjà Vu by Design? A Flatiron-style building near the Grant Road Railway Station. Mumbai’s Suburban Railway or “Local” carries an astonishing 2.2 billion passenger journeys a year — more than six times the population of the United States. But every day, six to seven people don’t make it home — victims of overcrowding, falling from moving trains or being run over on the tracks. Panki – a speciality of Swati Snacks, an iconic Mumbai vegetarian eatery where long line of evening diners come to savour home-style Gujarati flavours.Vatcha Agiary, a Parsi Zoroastrian fire temple in Central Mumbai, built in 1881 with its two eye-catching winged, human-headed bull statues flanking the entrance.Backbreaking toil, beads of sweat and glimmering hope in Dharavi: Asia’s most celebrated slum where an estimated one million human beings are packed into just 2.57 square kilometres beside a fetid river, in the heart of Mumbai.
"To my eyes, the city was beautiful. It was wild and exciting. Buildings that were British Raj-romantic stood side to side with modern, mirrored business towers. The haphazard slouch of neglected tenements crumbled into lavish displays of market vegetables and skills. I heard music from every shop and passing taxi. The colours were vibrant. The fragrances were dizzyingly delicious. And there were more smiles in the eyes on those crowded streets than in any other place I'd ever known. Above all else, Bombay was free - exhilaratingly free."
Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram (2003)
From early Portuguese, English and Persian accounts to contemporary Indian writers, generations of visitors have had plenty to say about Bombay, now Mumbai. So much, in fact, that finding something new or surprising to say about India’s largest city has become a challenge for any travel writer.
Due to its edgy, outsider-made-it-big energy, its position as a trend-setting gateway to a continent-sized nation, and its clout in finance and media, Mumbai is often compared to New York. Deep down, though, I suspect that, with South Asian migration on the rise and the right platform, the globalist crowd, led by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, would very soon expect people to call New York the Mumbai of America.
Mumbai must have one of the world’s best systems for directing arriving passengers to their e-hailing rides. Arrows on walls and painted floors lead you to the lift, which opens onto the right level, where staff in reflective jackets stand ready with signs to guide passengers to the correct lane in the car park. There, you simply wait for your Uber and if you have trouble deciphering Indian licence plates as I did you could simply hand your mobile phone to one of the boys on duty who would promptly type a message “kab time jayenge?” to the driver. The whole operation was impressively efficient and, unlike the usual airport chaos, a genuinely pleasant experience.
The ride to my hotel was equally highly-rated and fast: along broad, new, clean thoroughfares, bridges and flyovers.
Then, just as my mood could not soar any higher, near what appeared to be city centre, at a traffic light, an Ola Bike rolled up alongside my car, its pillion rider flipping her hair like a girl in a shampoo commercial — a thoroughly emancipated Bombay girl, I imagined, in a loose, crinkle shirt barely concealing her string top and sturdy legs, her raised rear illuminated by the motorcycle’s own tail light.
The lights turned green, and the taxi veered into an old neighbourhood lined with turn-of-the-century shops and houses. Crumbling colonial facades stood stubbornly amid the showy glass-and-steel structures and greedy concrete.
That pretty much summed up my first hour in Bombay, in the wee hours of a Friday morning, before I arrived at my one-star hotel on Lamington Road and climbed its dimly lit wooden stairs to my small, comfortable bedroom ready to power up for the five hectic days of discovery ahead.
Bipin told me to head to Bandstand for my espresso coffee when I got to Bandra. So off I went with the only honest-looking auto rickshaw driver outside the railway station I could find.Losing my way to the museum, I spotted chicken puffs in the display window of Café Military, another old-school Irani joint in Fort. They brought back memories of my father and the coffee shop on Batu Road, KL, where I grew up. A few shops down the road, at a snack bar called Oasis, chicken puffs were his favourite snack. For a moment, Bombay took me back to my childhood in Kuala Lumpur. Young lovers, two friends and a watchful dog chilling in a cafe, just next door to Mannat, Shah Rukh Khan’s seaside mansion in Bandstand, Bandra WestKumbharwada, Dharavi’s historic potters’ quarter, first settled by migrants from Gujarat in 1887, where the homes look more normal and the workshops a lot neater in striking contrast to the congested, tangled alleys just beyond. The queue to get a crowded seat in Aram to eat its legendary vada pav, at the Capital Cinema Building.Not trying to put a rose gloss on poverty, but finding a smiling child in a slum like Dharavi, without running water or a toilet, seems easier than in a luxury condominium with an infinity pool in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.Blending into their new homeland like sugar dissolving into milk. Parsis are Persians whose ancestors fled Iran following the Arab conquest more than a thousand years ago. Only about 55,000 still remain in India, with Mumbai their great stronghold. From the Tata dynasty, which helped build industrial Bombay, to Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara, the Parsis have left an indelible mark on the city’s identity, enterprise and spirit.A bicycle repair shop in KalbadeviPhotographers at dusk milling around for their last tourists of the day. The Gateway of India was built in Indo-Saracenic style to commemorate King George V’s visit in December 1911, but not completed until 1924. About a month after Gandhi was assasinated, the last British troops marched out of India from this spot on 28 February 1948, marking the end of Empire, sailing home aboard the Empress of Australia. Two popular Mumbai food from Maharashtra – (front) Misal Pav, moth beans curry with bread roll and (back) Zunka Bhakri – dry spicy stir-fried chickpea flour with flatbread made from sorghum or milletShopping in Colaba Causeway. A market area with plenty of pavement stalls and boutiques selling bohemian jewelry, trendy clothes, leather bags, handicrafts, and souvenirs.We followed Bipin, our Dharavi tour guide, through a warren of narrow lanes, ducking our heads as we squeezed through passages barely wide enough for a full-sized adult man. We were actually snaking our way below people’s bedrooms and homes. The lanes were airless and dimly lit and required light from our phones to see. Then, through a shaft of light, a smiling young girl appeared at the doorway of her home. A small, cheerful face despite the unimaginable living conditions.Dharavi DreamingA boy at a street-food stall near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj MuseumHolding up his girlfriend’s image as she tries on some accessories“When I have money, I like Varanasi. When I have no money, I like Bombay.” Ramesh has been driving a taxi in Mumbai for years. He says business has suffered since Uber came along. He is saving money for his daughter’s wedding in Varanasi. ” Pretending that Dharavi is an oasis of opportunity absolves [the elite of Bombay] of the guilt of ignoring the pitiful conditions in which their cooks, maids and drivers live. They have come to believe that life in the shanties and its sweatshops can’t really be so bad if slum residents are able to be so productive.”
Naresh Fernandes, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay. 2013Muslims make up about 22% of Greater Bombay’s population. The Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 killed hundreds, mostly Muslims, and forced many to leave their homes. The city moved on, but the violence left deep scars and widened the mistrust and divide between the communities.Singhara (Indian water chestnut) at Crawford Market. Beating Bombay’s humid 37 degrees heat with a roadside glass of sugarcane juice, freshly-pressed with a wedge of lime sandwiched between the stalks as it passed through the roller.A curious child in an open, tidy, tiled courtyard greeted us in Kumbharwada. Leopold Cafe, Colaba Causeway: 155 years old and immortalised in Gregory David Roberts’ novel Shantaram. On 26 November 2008, gunmen opened fire here during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, killing eight people and injuring around 28. Bullet marks remain on the walls. The cafe reopened a few days later and resumed serving customers. Mumbai, it seems, is not easily told to stay down. Kalbadevi, a historic South Mumbai neighbourhood named after the goddess Kali. Once a merchant quarter home to Gujarati, Jain and Marwari communities, it offers a very different Mumbai from the one most tourists see. Chickory — a contemporary, cosy Kannada café in Kala Ghoda where, armed with a book on Zen I’d bought from Kitab Khana, I wandered into for a tiffin and coffee just before lunch hour but soon found myself surrounded by grim-suited lawyers from the courts nearby.
Bombay’s Manhattan-like skyline rises above a megalopolis of over 20 million, where immense challenges meet boundless potential. The metro bound for Cuffe Parade.Churchgate is a busy suburban railway terminus, yet at night its bright, windowed façade makes it look more like a luxury hotel. Flowers and friends at the Flora Fountain at the southern end of Dadabhai Naoroji Road at the Fort business district of Mumbai
Acknowledgments
This amateur piece on Bombay is only a snapshot of a great city, glimpsed over five days of wandering, mainly through the areas referred to by Mumbaikars or Bombayites as SoBo. Whatever I have managed to capture, and whatever affection that I now have for Bombay, are owed much to the friends who generously shared their knowledge, advice and love of the city with me.
To Bonnie, for his restaurant recommendations—though some were observing their weekly day off when I arrived; to Flocy, for arranging what became a life-defining visit to the “eco-slum” of Dharavi; to Ruchika, for insisting that I visit the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya and pointing me towards some of the city’s street-food delights; and to Ronnie, for his tips on what to do after sunset and how to stay safe, as well as for agreeing to put his Bengaluru bias on hold.
Last, but most certainly not least, my thanks to Suchet for his local insights, and especially to Zareen for sharing her knowledge of Bombay’s history and culture, introducing me to her favourite bookshop, Kitab Khana, and recommending books and places that helped me get to know the city better.
A word on the name: I know the city is officially Mumbai, but I still prefer Bombay. Perhaps it is habit, perhaps history; or perhaps I am simply not a fan of renaming places. Whatever the reason, Bombay has a ring to it that Mumbai, to my ears, just doesn’t quite match.
To all of you, thank you for your friendship. You made my five days in the city far richer than they would otherwise have been. Any shortcomings in this amateur account are, of course, entirely my own.
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We checked out of the lovely Lotte City Hotel Tashkent early in the morning on Uzbekistan’s National Day and headed for the airport. From my window seat, the one-hour flight offered a spectacular view of what I took to be the western end of the Roof of the World. Jagged ranges rose one behind another, their summits capped with summer snow and their slopes streaked with glaciers and waterfalls, folding into each other like some enormous granite accordion.
Dushanbe—meaning Monday—was named after the day of its weekly market. I expected the capital of a poor former Soviet republic—shaped by Soviet planners once home to a large Russian population and formerly known as Stalinabad—to have a somewhat crumbling back-to-the-USSR feel, with a hint of East Slavic nostalgia.
Yet, having read about Tajikistan’s secular laws and restrictions on the hijab, I was surprised, and a little deflated, to find Dushanbe feeling more like the better bits of Pakistan or Iran than a capital of an ex-soviet socialist republic: more headscarves, conservative clothing, featureless public spaces and buildings, and a different rhythm of everyday life—or at least that was my hurried impression as I dashed around with our driver, trying to buy two SIM cards and change our money into somoni before heading off to the mountains.
Woman on a donkey, on the road to Voru.Happy children in Margeb, a village at the entrance to the Yaghnob Valley surrounded by steep slopes and high peaks.Yaghnob Valley is a world apart. Remote, untouched and difficult to reach.The people of the remote Yaghnob Valley speak a language called Zivok, a living descendant of Sogdian, the ancient Eastern Iranian language of a civilisation that once flourished along the Silk Road before the Arab conquests of the eighth century.Local boys in Margeb gathered fallen apricots from the ground and passed them to us through the fence. An act of small sweet kindness we will remember long after the trip.
This isn’t just a country that has mountains. The mountains are the country. A whopping 93% of Tajikistan is mountainous.
The roads prove it.
An hour or so north of Dushanbe, which itself lies at a respectable altitude of between 750 and 900 metres above sea level, the road enters the Anzob Tunnel, five kilometres of damp, dimly lit darkness burrowing through the mountains. You can barely see beyond the faint, scattered lights and the dark shape of the car in front. You drive on, hoping that the small, distant patch of light ahead is the exit and not an oncoming lorry.
I hadn’t come to Tajikistan, as many do, to tackle the Pamir Highway, that great Central Asian automotive bucket-list adventure, complete with nomad selfies and glamping yurts. Nor had I come to spend my days being driven from one lake to another, climbing out of a Land Cruiser, taking a photograph and climbing back in. There are only so many lakes a man can admire before even a beautiful one begins to look like the last.
Mizhgon (eyelashes), is the first of the Seven Lakes (Haft Kul) of the Fann Mountains. The others have names just as evocative: Soya (shadow), Gushor (awake), Nofin (bellybutton), Khurdak (little one), Marguzor (blossoming place) and Hazorchashma (a thousand springs). Our hosts in Padrud: Navruz, a student earning some holiday money, and Mohamad, who appeared to be running the homestay. We spent a night in Padrud right beside a roaring cascade, its torrents tumbling over rocks in a rush of icy blue water. Early autumn mountain scenery, the constant thunder of the falls and a proper bed with sit down toilets – better than camping beside a waterfall.Two friends, smiling and playing in Margeb.Goats on the road, Fann Mountains.Samsa – the Tajik version of siew pao. Piping hot, filled with meat and eaten with a spicy tomato sauce.Our dinner of mountain plov in Padrud.In Margeb, a man in army fatigues takes his grey donkey down the mountains in the evening.Zokir ready to tuck into our plate of delicious home-cooked qurutob, Yaghnob Valley.A lone traveler on our way down from Yaghnob, with the mighty Zarafshan Range rising behind him.A group of women walking along a mountain road in Yaghnob. In these remote valleys, the future of women lies in the balance between preserving tradition and having the freedom to choose their own path.Checking the way forward in Bidev (2,580 m), a remote outpost deep in the mountains of Yaghnob.The Yaghnobi people have lived for centuries in isolated mountain villages, preserving their own language and traditions. In the 1970s, the Soviets forced thousands from their mountain villages to work on cotton farms in the lowlands. Many died. Their abandoned villages now lie in ruins.Hamadon and friend outside their homes in the mountain village of Voru where houses are built of stones and weathered earth, with wooden doors, small windows and terraces, looking like they are stacked one above another up the mountainside.
I wanted to explore the country’s small, scenic and historically rich western region called Sughd, slowly enough to see what was going on beyond the scenery.
We started with Iskanderkul and Sarytag, then to Voru and Panjakent, drove up and stayed a night at the Seven Lakes, or Haft Kul. From there, we dropped Khujand from the plan and doubled back to Panjakent before heading to the mountain village of Margeb that served as gateway to the hauntingly isolated, heartstoppingly beautiful Yaghnob Valley. Finally, it was back to Dushanbe for our flight to Tashkent.
We travelled in a Toyota RAV4. The first driver spoke passable English, though his people skills could have done with a little servicing. The second, Zokir, who took us to Yaghnob, was a gem: perpetually laughing and smiling despite the tough mountain roads. We had no common language, but somehow managed to get along fine with a smattering of Russian, extravagant gesturing, and plenty of shrieks, grunts, oohs and aahs. Think three Teletubbies on a road trip.
Eight days later, we were back in Dushanbe, having covered a fair stretch of western Tajikistan. It had been a good trip, with its share of surprises, sore bums and roads that looked considerably shorter on Google Maps.
The Tajiks are essentially an ancient Iranian race. Their language is a Central Asian form of Persian, written in Russian Cyrillic since the 1940s, when Stalin ordered the change.A hot day in DushanbeAlthough only 5% to 7% of the land is arable, agriculture is important to the economy, employing over half the country’s workforce and generating around 25% of Tajikistan’s GDP.Qurutob, a traditional Tajik dish of torn layered and flaky flatbread (fatir) soaked in yoghurt (qurut) and topped with onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs.Panjakent, Tajikistan’s third-largest town, sits in the country’s west, not far from the Uzbek border. It has a history stretching back more than 1,500 years, when ancient Panjakent was a flourishing Sogdian city on the Silk Road. Today, the ruins of that once-prosperous settlement lie just outside the modern town.Emomali Rahmon, whose face appears on buildings and streets throughout the country, has ruled Tajikistan for more than 30 years. His rule has become increasingly authoritarian, but it has also brought a degree of order and stability to this small, isolated nation, where mining is a mainstay of the economy — not counting the export of a third of its men aged 20 to 39 to Russia as labourers. Dushanbe still has an attractive older area with lots of trees and stately buildings but it is tearing down many of its old buildings and Soviet-era apartments and houses, replacing them with glass and steel. In some areas walking around the city feels like wandering through one enormous construction site.In 2024, remittances accounted for about 49% of Tajikistan’s GDP, among the highest in the world. The new wealth shows in the grand houses, luxury dwellings and smart cars, but behind it are families separated by migration and visible social divide between those who leave to earn a living and those who stay behind.In 1939, Russians made up 57% of Dushanbe’s population. By 1989, their share had fallen to nearly a third. After the Soviet Union collapsed and civil war broke out in the 1990s, most left. Today, only a small Russian community remains but their influence lingers. Russian is still widely spoken.Waving the Tajik flag on Independence Day on 9 September. For a country that endured a bloody civil war from 1992 to 1997, torn apart by regional rivalries and ideological divisions, freedom and peace are no small achievements. Especially in this tough neighbourhood with Afghanistan and China next door, and Russia, Iran, Pakistan and India within a drone’s throw away.Unlike the mules and donkeys I’ve seen in Pakistan, India and Egypt, those in Tajikistan looked healthy and well cared for.Walking back after the Independence Day parade.Sarytag, a village with a homestay and tranquil walks approximately 7 km from the western shores of Iskanderkul Lake.
