Bandra Village

This photo is very telling of the feel of the neighborhood I live in, which I've heard called "Bandra Village". It is, roughly speaking, the network of lanes that twist around chaotically behind Waroda Cross Road, which, runs parallel to Hill Road, Bandra's historical aix principal, east-to-west from SV Road and Bandra Station.

The area is almost entirely Catholic, and full of people of Portuguese-Indian fisherfolk descent. At last week's Kitab Festival, a literary event in Mumbai, Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out Mumbai, read a personal essay about how in his grandmother's lifetime, all of Bandra went from looking like this--a sort of idyllic, fishers-and-farmers market district, to the "post-industrial hell" that it is now. I quite like it now, but it was still an interesting essay.

This is the fruit seller on Waroda Cross Road, just up from my flat, with one of the (literally) hundreds of crucifixes erected in memory of some local resident. The left side plaque says "Our Lady of Vajlakramani," but the right side (not visible) says "Out Lady of Fatime". Almost everyone in my building is Indian, but has a Portuguese name like "Gonsalves," "Da Silva," or "Rodrigues".