I stand on an island surrounded by the sea, a place that never wanted itself to be
Where the Victorian Gothic facades rise like hymns of another century,
and the stone animals perched upon them breathe a silence
that outlives every monsoon, every riot, every crumbling of the present.
Owls with carved feathers guard the library domes,
their eyes wide as if they alone can read
the secrets the city hides beneath its noise.
Cats, slender and alert, arch above courthouse arches,
watching justice arrive late,
as it always does here.
Reptiles coil around forgotten pillars,
their stone tails wrapped in stories
that no one remained to finish.
Grotesques cling to cornices with teeth bared
sentinels of vanished fears,
echoes of an empire that carved its nightmares
into the body of the city.
And beneath them, Bombay rearranges itself.
Streets widen; skylines rise;
old doors vanish behind new glass;
war offices turn into cafés
where people speak of futures
the past could never have imagined.
Schools become administrative blocks,
cinemas fade like tired ballerinas
who have danced too long in the same shoes.
Yet the animals stay.
They stay because someone must remember
what the city has forgotten.
They stay for the few who look up at Rajabhai
for the wanderer at Flora Fountain,
for the dreamer on Horniman Circle,
for the lonely soul who finds comfort
in the fierce, unblinking gaze of a High Court
These creatures do not love,
do not leave,
do not ask for anything.
They simply endure art deco
They are the last custodians of Old Bombay
a Bombay preserved, yes,
but preserved like an heirloom locked away,
belonging to no one who ride Aqua beneath it
And as the city keeps shifting,
as each monsoon wave breaks what the last one built,
as each reclamation defies the sea’s quiet warnings,
as each new sea link rises where mangroves once prayed,
I feel the city thinning into something dreamlike,
something shimmering,
something almost unreal.
Because what is Bombay
if not an illusion held together by will,
a mirage built on broken islands,
a fragile theatre of stone creatures and stubborn people,
a place that should not exist
and yet insists on existing?
In the end, I stand beneath the owl and the cat,
beneath the lizard frozen mid-climb,
beneath the grotesque who grins like a prophet,
and I realise:
this city is an impossibility
and that is why
it feels like love.
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