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Published: November 8th 2018
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We had earmarked today to visit Elephanta Island, but David was not feeling his best and Sara realised that as it’s Diwali, the crowds were likely to be worse than usual. As the trip was going to involve five hours or more in the open sun, with a lot of walking and 2 hours of choppy rides on the ferry, we decided to give it a miss. The size of the queues for the ferry more than vindicated our decision!
Instead, we walked south from the hotel into Colaba, a small peninsula in the very south of Mumbai. At 8.30 it was very peaceful, with empty roads and none of the shops open. We passed affluent house and hotels fronting onto the harbour, then headed down the main road. The map showed an area of docks, and we had thought we might explore them. However, most of the area turned out to belong to the military, with large signs saying trespassers would be shot and smiling guards who somewhat belied the message but nonetheless would not let us take a photo even of the warning sign. The entrance to the commercial section of the docks was marked by a bell
tower, built by the British, but the stench of the fish drying facility and the unidentifiable WTF smells of the area was so pungent we decided to give it a miss. Our route took us through large areas of naval and military bases, with grand houses for the brigadiers, blocks of apartments for the officers and tenements for everyone else, before we reached our objective of the Afghan church. This is a Presbyterian church built by the British to commemorate the dead of the disastrous First Afghan War of 1838, and it also remembers the British soldiers who died in the 1878 Afghan war and in subsequent insurrections. Records show that one only man out of 16,000 soldiers and civilians - a surgeon – survived the retreat from Afghanistan in 1838.
We approached the church only to find it locked, and were just ruing the wasted trip when an elderly man appeared from nowhere to unlock the church and show us round. He pointed out the faded, shredded regimental colours, the stained glass windows shipped in from England and the notches in the pews designed for men to rest their rifles in.
We strolled slowly back towards the
hotel, grateful to be able to walk in shade almost all the way. The shops were all now open, and the streets full of people threading marigold garlands for Diwali. We were stopped by men handing out sweets and a marigold flower and tying orange and red strands of wool onto our wrists, also for Diwali but mostly, it seemed, as a way to ask for money. Our last stop was the catholic Church of the Holy Name, before heading back and passing once more the hawkers selling 5 ft long fluorescent coloured balloons shaped like light bulbs (why?), and then retreating back to the cool welcome of the hotel, and yet another cup of refreshing tea in the Palace Lounge. It’s a holiday, after all – nothing wrong with spending the afternoon reading our books.
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