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the Cape of Good Hope, after many perils and storms and illnesses, beyond this massive gate lies all of India. Here are tigers and wise men and famines. A hurried stop, a quick halt to take a bath and get a night’s sleep on solid land, before the train departs early the next morning for the real India, the India of the villages. Nobody back then came to Bombay to live there forever; it was just a way station, between paradise and hell. You came to Bombay to pass through it.
    It was called Heptanesia—the city of seven islands—by Ptolemy in A.D. 150. The Portuguese called it Bom Bahia, Buon Bahia, or Bombaim—Portuguese for “good bay.” In 1538, they also called it Boa-Vida, the island of good life, because of its beautiful groves, its game, and its abundance of food. Another story about its name concerns the Sultan Kutb-ud-din, Mubarak Shah I, who ruled over the islands in the fourteenth century, demolished temples, and became a demon: Mumba Rakshasa. Other Hindu names for these islands were Manbai, Mambai, Mambe, Mumbadevi, Bambai, and now Mumbai. It is a city that has multiple aliases, as do gangsters and whores. Waves of rulers have owned this clump of islands: the Hindu fisherfolk, the Muslim kings, the Portuguese, the British, the Parsi and Gujarati businessmen, the sheths (joined by Sindhis, Marwaris, and Punjabis later), and now, finally, the natives again, the Maharashtrians.
    If you look at Bombay from the air, if you see its location—spread your thumb and your forefinger apart at a thirty-degree angle and you’ll see the shape of Bombay—you will find yourself acknowledging that it is a beautiful city: the sea on all sides, the palm trees along the shores, the light coming down from the sky and thrown back up by the sea. It has a harbor, several bays, creeks, rivers, hills. From the air, you get a sense of its possibilities. On the ground it’s different. My little boy notices this. “Look,” Gautama points out, as we are driving along the road from Bandra Reclamation. “On one side villages, on the other side buildings.” He has identifiedthe slums for what they are: villages in the city. The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of this juxtaposition. And it is soon followed by violent shocks to the other four senses: the continuous din of the traffic coming in through open windows in a hot country; the stench of bombil fish drying on stilts in the open air; the inescapable humid touch of many brown bodies in the street; the searing heat of the garlic chutney on your vadapav sandwich early on your first jet-lagged morning.
    From the beginnings of the city, there was a Bombay culture, unique in India. Bombay is all about transaction—dhandha. It was founded as a trading city, built at the entrance to the rest of the world, and everybody was welcome as long as they wanted to trade. Gerald Aungier, the East India Company’s governor from 1672 to 1675, gave the city freedom of religion and of movement, a marked departure from the Portuguese feudal and religious policies. From then on, Bombay flourished as a free port, in every sense of the word. When the American Civil War stopped the supply of cotton to England, Bombay stepped into the breach and earned in five years, from 1861 to 1865, £81 million more than the city would normally have received for its cotton. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which cut travel time to the Empire in half, Bombay truly became the gateway to India, supplanting Calcutta as the richest city in the Indian Empire. So they came, from all over India and the world: Portuguese, Mughal, British, Gujarati, Parsi, Maratha, Sindhi, Punjabi, Bihari . . . American.
    On the map of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region issued by the region’s Development Authority, the land beyond the eastern boundary is marked WEST COAST OF INDIA. It is probably a cartographer’s impreciseness, but the distinction is significant and valid. It was not until the late nineteenth century that