Colaba Causeway is a Bombay thoroughfare that becomes a threshold between private life and public consequence. In one of the novel’s decisive episodes, Commander Vinoo Sabarmati follows his wife Lila and her lover Homi Catrack to an apartment near the Causeway and kills them, then emerges into the street and surrenders. The location also belongs to a wider pattern of journeys and returns: it connects encounters and departures to the city’s changing history, while Saleem’s recollections make travel through Bombay echo the novel’s recurring questions of who is admitted, who is left outside, and what returns in altered form.

Setting and narrative context

Colaba Causeway is named as a route in Bombay and as the setting for more than one consequential movement. In Saleem’s account, it is where Lila drives to an address for her meeting with Homi. The place is not developed as a detailed portrait of the street; instead, the narrative uses it as a point of passage, linking the city’s ordinary routines to private conduct and, eventually, violence.

That movement across the Causeway is set against other journeys by train and boat. The novel repeatedly places arrivals and departures at thresholds—train doors, platforms, and routes between Bombay and Karachi—where belonging and exclusion become palpable. Colaba Causeway belongs to this network of passages: people travel toward encounters there, and events there send consequences back into the wider social world.

Lila and Homi’s meetings

Every Sunday, Lila takes children to the Metro Cub Club, while Homi prepares to leave for a separate weekly rendezvous. Saleem describes the parallel routines: Lila’s Hindustan car carries the children toward the cinema as Homi gets ready to meet her. Their paths converge at an address off Colaba Causeway, where Saleem frames them through the inherited language of love stories and legendary lovers.

The romance is also surrounded by the knowledge of those who remain behind. Homi’s daughter Toxy reacts to his departures with distress, while Saleem connects the affair to the grief and grievances that have accumulated around him. The Causeway therefore marks not an isolated meeting but a crossing point between the lovers’ secrecy and the people affected by it.

The Sabarmati affair

After Saleem secretly constructs and delivers an anonymous note to Commander Sabarmati, the Commander obtains a private detective’s report. One Sunday morning, while Saleem has an alibi at the Metro Cub Club, Sabarmati goes to the naval arsenal, takes a revolver and ammunition, and travels by taxi to Colaba Causeway. He walks through a narrow lane to the apartment where Lila is staying with Homi.

Sabarmati shoots Lila and Homi. He then leaves the building carrying the gun and walks along the Causeway until he reaches a traffic policeman. He tells the officer that he has killed his wife and her lover and intends to surrender, but the frightened policeman runs away. Left on the traffic podium, Sabarmati directs cars with the gun as though it were a baton until police arrive and arrest him.

The contrast between the private apartment and the public street gives the episode its sharp change of scale. The killings occur inside a domestic setting, but the surrender turns the aftermath into a spectacle witnessed and managed in public. The newspaper account presents the affair as a national drama; Saleem later recognizes that his anonymous intervention helped set the events in motion, although he says he had not intended the killings.

Recurrence and historical passage

The Causeway episode is one part of a larger pattern in which departures, blocked entry, and belated arrival recur across Saleem’s life. Early in the family’s journeys, people outside a train plead to be let into the compartment; Saleem later finds himself outside a departing train, calling for entry with words that recall those earlier voices. The repeated image makes a boundary between inside and outside more than a matter of travel: it becomes a way of registering exclusion and changed identity.

Elsewhere, Bombay’s history is evoked through successive layers of geography and construction, from the islands that preceded the peninsula to the reclamation projects that reshaped the shoreline. The Causeway sits within this larger urban landscape of routes and transformation. The novel does not assign it a single symbolic meaning, but its recurring placement in journeys and decisive encounters makes it one of the city’s thresholds, where personal actions can become public history.