If you are a new arrival to Bombay, you perhaps have never visited this place.
If you live in Chembur, an old driver might have driven you through the Port Trust road to Bombay VT to save you some time. You may have stared out of the windows of your car but may have noticed nothing.
But this place is special. If there is any place in Bombay, which remains in the 70s, it is the harbor area. Nothing has really changed in this place. No coffee shops, no tattooed and pierced young people, no swanky high-rise apartment buildings, and definitely no sizzle. The place looks exactly as Indira Gandhi left it, which is to say in a dilapidated and neglected way as she left much of Bombay that India inherited from the British. There are old warehouses and dust-covered Bombay port-trust road. There are the same slums and the worker's quarters. Millions of gunny sacks sit waiting for their trucks in each of the warehouses. If you can read through the dust and neglect, you can actually read the history of the city as it was in the 80s, in these buildings.
The harbour line of the Central Railway commuter line runs parallel to the warehouses and storage for petroleum products. The names of these stations remind you of what the city was in the 1800s. The streets are not crowded except for trucks.
I am here at Sewri looking for the mudflats. I have come in the afternoon and therefore precisely at the wrong time. You have to come early in the morning, but that is not how things worked out.So here I am being led by young relatives as we drive back and forth as we try to locate the turn-off point to Sewri Jetty.
Finally we find it, the little road that goes to the edge of the water. Here in the afternoon, there are hardly any people. A few boys mill about playing on a rusting barge that has been beached. A few workers sit on the skeleton of a boat. The mangroves rise all around me from the mud-flats.
I am here looking for flamingos. I ask a street boy about them. Flamingos, his eyes light up as he smiles and he points to the mangroves. There are millions of birds here, wintering in these mudflats, except this is the wrong tie, and they are all hidden. I see a solitary bird, a majestic pink flamingo standing still under a bush. Gulls, terns and the ubiquitous crows occasionally rise from the mangroves and fly back into them.
I know they are there, hidden from view, resting away from the heat of the afternoon, just like the rest of the city. These are the winter visitors to the city. Fortunately for the rest, this is relatively an obscure place and nobody has thought of capitalizing on this on the tourism brochure.
I stand there disappointed that I missed the ministry of the birds. Across from the channel I can see Trombay or New Bombay, I can't tell which because the haze is thick. I am really glad to be here. Even if I couldn't see the birds. It is great to travel back in time to the 70s and the 80s and find places in Bombay that have withstood the test of time. This looks like (and is) the Bombay of my childhood.
Unfortunately it is changing. The government is planning a coastal harbor freeway through these parts that will endanger the migratory paths of these birds and the coastal mangroves. But right now, everything looks just fine.
On the way back, I see the IMAX theatre in Wadala and remember how close we are to losing this war. India may not be shining for everyone yet, but it is surely getting a lot of trappings.
