Marine Lines is a railway station and coastal district in Mumbai whose very name is a relic of British rule, and which in this book functions as a hinge between the city's respectable surface and its criminal depths. The name derives from Marine Battalion Lines, a British military establishment, a throwback to the mid-nineteenth century when the British put Mumbai on the trade route by linking the city with an extensive network of railheads. The battalion was later converted into air force residence quarters, still visitable just south of Metro Adlabs. If one gets off at Marine Lines station, only a road known as V. Thackersey Marg separates the sea from the famous Marine Drive promenade, the Queen's Necklace along which the Arabian Sea, murky and grey, flails and lashes against giant tetra-pods. The station thus stands at the point where the city's colonial infrastructure, its maritime commerce, and its leisure coastline all converge.

The Graveyard at the Station's Edge

Abutting the station is Bada Qabrastan, a sprawling 7.5-acre cemetery that is a reminder and testimony to man's mortality. The graveyard, a hundred and fifty years old, is so close to the station that commuters cut across it before taking the stairs leading to the over-bridge at the north end of the station. The dead and the living share the same daily path, the cemetery functioning not as a remote resting place but as a thoroughfare woven into the routine of commuters. It is here that the book's narrator comes on a story about Haji Mastan, the yesteryear's don who was Mumbai's most notorious gold smuggler, on the occasion of his barsi, or death anniversary. Mastan is remembered every year by his three daughters with a profusion of flowers and rose petals, a practice not unheard of in Mumbai, where the rich like to remember their dead in various ways. There is an apocryphal story that when Dawood Ibrahim's police constable father, Ibrahim Kaskar, passed away, his son arranged for truckloads of rose petals to be showered on his father's grave, and for three days the fragrance of roses wafted across the graveyard. The cemetery thus becomes a stage where the city's most feared criminals are mourned with the same lavishness as its respectable citizens, and where the boundary between the underworld and the ordinary is blurred by shared rituals of remembrance.

The Geography of the Underworld

The district around Marine Lines is inseparable from the larger geography of Mumbai's criminal and marginalized neighborhoods. Dongri, a stone's throw away from the cloth market in Kalbadevi, was initially part of the original island of Mumbai, which stretched from Malabar Hill to the Dongri hills. In the mid-1700s, the Dongri hills were levelled as part of the plan to merge the different islands of Mumbai, and the low-lying patch of uneven land between Crawford Market in the north and the reclaimed lands of Kamathipura in the south came to be called Dongri. Today, Dongri is choc-a-block with rickety, old buildings, falls partially below the gigantic JJ Flyover, and is primarily dominated by Muslims. By late morning, the bazaar in Dongri spills onto the footpaths, selling audio and video tapes of Islamic teachings, attar, henna, chikan kurtas, mojris and jewellery, and the area is full of Iranian and Afghani restaurants, bakeries and sweetmeat shops selling mawa cakes, hot jalebis, kheer and gulab jaamuns. During the late afternoons and evenings, the aroma of hot kebabs, biryani, gosht and kheer permeates the neighborhood. This is the world into which Jenabai Daaruwali was born in the early 1920s, to a Muslim Memon Halai family, one among six siblings, her father ferrying passengers on Victoria carriages across the city, the family living in a one-room tenement on Mohammad Ali Road in Dongri. Marine Lines, with its cemetery and its station, stands at the northern edge of this densely populated, predominantly Muslim quarter, a gateway between the bazaar's teeming life and the sea.

A Threshold of Violence and Memory

The station and its surroundings also mark the site of some of the book's most harrowing episodes. During the 1992-93 Bombay riots, Jenabai, in her long white chikan nightgown and a shawl that covered the grey in her hair, a fair and heavily jewelled lady with a rosary in one hand and a white flag in the other, went out onto the street and led a demonstration, walking between the torched lanes of Dongri towards the Pydhonie junction, unconcerned about danger. The junction, with the Hamidiya Masjid on the right, Khatri Masjid on the left and three Jain Derasars, had become the dividing line for the two wounded communities, and the Pydhonie police station, a gift of the British era, stood at right angles from these religious houses. The Suleman Usman Bakery firing on 9 January 1993, in which the Special Operation Squad opened fire inside the bakery under the direction of joint commissioner of police R.D. Tyagi, resulting in the death of nine Muslims while the police failed to apprehend terrorists or seize firearms, was the last straw for Jenabai, who had peered through her windows and heard the gunshots and helpless cries of people from inside the bakery. Marine Lines, with its cemetery and its station, is thus not merely a backdrop but a charged location where the city's communal wounds, its police violence, and its criminal legacies all surface, and where the women of the book, from Jenabai to the drug baronesses of the slums, live out their lives against the constant presence of death.