Back Bay is a coastal part of Bombay’s southern peninsula, presented both as a district of personal attachment and as a stretch of working shoreline. For Lin, it belongs to the city he has learned to love; for Modena, it is bound up with his hope of finding Ulla; and, on a nearly deserted beach road, it becomes the setting for Lin and Karla’s reunion.

Setting and Urban Geography

Lin describes the city’s central peninsula as beginning at the broad curve of Marine Drive and following the shore toward the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site. This coastal strip is the seat of the mafia council’s power, but it is also the part of Bombay to which Lin feels most attached. Back Bay’s roads and shore belong to that larger seafront landscape, where busy streets remain only a short distance from the sea.

The geography is not simply a backdrop to the city’s business. Lin recalls walking between Flora Fountain and Colaba Causeway many times, learning where shade and cooler breezes could be found along the route. The repeated journey makes the peninsula legible through ordinary movement: its heat and shade, traffic and sea-facing roads, and the familiar way through the city.

Longing and the Search for Ulla

Back Bay carries a more intimate association for Modena. He tells Lin that Ulla loves the area, as well as the President Hotel, and imagines that she might return after a Lufthansa flight from Germany. He asks Ramesh to check the hotel for her name after each flight, while he himself waits outside rather than going in. His search turns the district into a place of expectation: each arrival may bring the person he hopes to see, but the possibility remains unresolved.

The scene makes Back Bay part of a recurring act of waiting rather than a confirmed meeting place. Modena’s attention to flights and hotel arrivals gives the area a private meaning that contrasts with its busy urban setting: a familiar stretch of the city becomes a map organized around one absent person.

Shoreline and Reunion

On a night when celebrations draw local people toward the Sassoon Dock area, Lin takes the Back Bay road toward Nariman Point. The road is almost empty. Along the beach, where fishermen often repair nets and battered boats, he sees Karla sitting on the edge of an old fishing boat partly buried in sand. Lin sits beside her; she greets him by name and says she is glad to see him, having thought he would not come.

The encounter places a personal reunion within a working coastal landscape rather than an interior refuge. The half-buried boat, the beach road, and the absent crowds establish the scene’s setting without separating it from the life of the city around it. Back Bay thus connects the novel’s intimate attachments to Bombay’s larger geography: the same seafront that holds Lin’s sense of home also holds the hopes and meetings that keep drawing him back.