Colaba, the southern district of Bombay, is where the city’s remade geography and its older coastal life remain sharply visible. Its history of reclaimed islands and displaced Koli fishermen gives the place a human cost, while its causeway and harbor mark points of passage in the journeys that repeatedly redirect Saleem’s family and, later, Saleem himself.

Setting and Transformation

Before Bombay became a peninsula, Colaba was one of its islands, surrounded by the Arabian Sea. The city’s expansion joined the Seven Isles through reclamation, sunken piles, and tetrapods, reshaping the shore into what the narrator likens to a grasping hand reaching westward. Colaba’s name preserves a trace of this earlier geography, but the district’s modern form records the work of fort and city that took land from those who had lived there first.

The transformation is not presented as a neutral change of scenery. Fishing grounds, rice fields, and island settlements recede as the city grows; the novel sets the persistence of everyday food and custom against the loss of the landscapes that sustained them. Colaba thus belongs to a Bombay built by successive powers, each leaving marks while displacing what came before.

Koli Fishermen and Dispossession

The Koli fishermen, among Bombay’s first inhabitants, are described as having suffered most from the city’s expansion. They are confined to a small village at the peninsula’s thumb, between the naval base and the sea. The name Colaba survives as the district’s name, but that survival does not restore the community’s lost territory or authority over the coast.

The account makes dispossession visible in ordinary movement through the district. Along Colaba Causeway, past inexpensive clothing shops, Irani restaurants, and modest flats, Koli women carrying the smells of pomfret and crab jostle to the front of a bus queue, their saris hitched between their legs. The narrator reads their defiant bearing against the history of defeats behind it: a fort and then a city took their land, while pile-drivers and later tetrapods took pieces of their sea. Their continued presence makes the altered shoreline a record of conflict rather than a completed disappearance.

The contrast between the district’s crowded modern routes and the fishermen’s narrowed access to the water is pointed. Arab dhows still spread their sails against the evening sunset, yet the older dominion of fishing nets, coconuts, rice, and Mumbadevi is giving way. The British, too, are about to depart in August 1947; the passage places colonial withdrawal within a longer history of changing dominions, without suggesting that the end of one power reverses earlier dispossession.

A Threshold in the Family’s Journeys

Colaba also sits within the novel’s recurring geography of transit. When Amina and Ahmed Sinai leave for Bombay by the Frontier Mail, Ahmed bolts the compartment door and lowers the shutters against people outside asking to be let in. He dismisses them as fare-dodgers, but the narrator recognizes their pleading as a prophecy of later scenes of exclusion. The train journey makes the boundary between protected interiors and those left outside part of the family’s story.

On the day Amina and Ahmed depart for Bombay, Earl Mountbatten announces the Partition of India and begins a countdown to the transfer of power. The family’s movement and the country’s political division therefore share a date, as private travel unfolds alongside a national passage. Colaba belongs to the destination of that journey and to the city where family history becomes entangled with the larger remaking of India.

Years later, the same pattern of transit returns in reverse. After the war, Saleem travels west from Benares on a departing mail train, clutching the outside step and pounding on a compartment door while a voice inside repeats the refusal once spoken by Ahmed. The image connects Saleem’s later vulnerability to the earlier journey toward Bombay: the closed train compartment becomes a repeated figure for who is sheltered, who is excluded, and how a person’s place in history can change.

The City Seen from Elsewhere

Colaba is part of the urban world Saleem explores through telepathy from a broken-down clocktower. At first he treats the minds he enters as peepholes in a private sightseeing machine, leaping among distant places and unfamiliar lives; eventually that tourism gives way to curiosity about what is really happening around him. The city and the country become connected not only by rail and road but also by his expanding, unstable inward reach.

That instability persists in the novel’s journeys beyond Bombay. Saleem reaches Pakistan aboard the SS Sabarmati, whose name recalls Commander Sabarmati, and reads the passage into exile as another recurrence in a life governed by repeated patterns. Later, the soldiers’ pursuit carries them down the Padma, which the narration identifies with the sacred Ganges before their route leads toward the sea. These passages place Colaba within a wider network of roads, trains, boats, and borders: movement changes identity and belonging, but it does not erase the histories attached to places or the exclusions encountered along the way.