Colaba Causeway

Colaba Causeway is a major, crowded street in Colaba whose shops, traffic, and public life surround Leopold’s, a prominent bar and restaurant. In the narrative, the Causeway is more than a busy urban setting: it is where Bombay’s social spectacle and informal economy become visible, while the nearby contrasts of construction, wealth, and precarious housing give that bustle a harder edge.

Setting and Street Life

From Leopold’s, the Causeway appears through two metal doors that roll up into wooden arches, opening the ground-floor room onto what the narrator describes as Colaba’s busiest and most colorful street. The bar is among the largest in the city, and its position makes the street part of its social theatre: customers gather inside, passersby move outside, and people watch one another across the threshold. The narrator presents the Causeway as a place of movement and display, inseparable from the crowded public life of Colaba.

That display continues inside Leopold’s. Mirrors on pillars and walls let patrons inspect others, admire themselves, and watch themselves being watched. The restaurant’s roughly thirty marble-topped tables, cedar chairs, high ceiling, fans, and wall of displayed fruit give it a distinct material presence, but its central attraction is the circulation of attention between the room and the street. Karla’s nickname for the deliberately uncomfortable chairs suggests a place designed for a steady turnover of customers rather than prolonged repose.

Commerce and Informal Boundaries

The Causeway’s commercial life includes counterfeit goods sold by street traders, who display imitation Lacoste, Cardin, and Cartier products with confidence. Nearby, taxi drivers accept tips to turn their mirrors away from unlawful activity in their vehicles; across the street, officers at Colaba Police Station perform their duties even as some have paid heavily for the privilege of working in that lucrative central posting. The scene places ordinary street trade, evasion, and official corruption within the same urban frame.

Leopold’s operates as an unofficial free zone, largely ignored by the police station opposite. Its unwritten rules divide activity by place: Indian prostitutes may accompany customers to the upstairs bar but are barred from the ground floor, while European prostitutes are permitted downstairs. Drug and contraband deals can be negotiated at tables, but the exchange of goods and money takes place outside. Bribes follow a similar pattern: agreements may be reached in the upstairs booths, but payment and the handshake that seals the deal happen on the pavement. The Causeway is thus not simply the view from the bar; it is where business that cannot officially occur inside is completed in public.

The City Beyond the Causeway

The narrator resists treating the corruption visible around Leopold’s as uniquely Indian. Foreigners and Indians complain about corruption in Bombay, and he acknowledges that their complaints are often justified, while observing that money distorts public and commercial systems elsewhere too. Didier Levy distinguishes between dishonest bribery found everywhere and what he calls an honest bribe particular to India. The narrator’s early response is not condemnation but a desire to observe, become involved, and enjoy the city; he later recognizes that his freedom, and even his life, will depend on the willingness of people in India to look away.

The narrative sets this busy commercial world against the severe poverty around the Cuffe Parade slum, beside the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site. There, a ten-acre settlement of about seven thousand huts houses twenty-five thousand people, without electricity, running water, or toilets, while the modern complex next door offers shops and displays of jewels, silks, carpets, and craftwork. The contrast is not a feature of the Causeway itself, but it enlarges the picture of Bombay introduced there: the same city that accommodates the bar’s negotiated shadow economy also tolerates immense differences in security and wealth.

A Street Shaped by Work and Precarity

The slum beside the construction site began as housing for the tradesmen and labourers building the World Trade Centre towers on the shore of Back Bay. Companies set aside land and supplied plots and building money; workers and their families made huts from bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Wells and rudimentary paths served the planned workers’ compound, which was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. The legal settlement’s carefully marked plots formed a fragile base for the towers rising above it.

As workers’ wages and the site’s fresh water attracted businesses and people without housing, shops clustered along the fence and squatters’ huts spread beyond it. The legal and illegal settlements blurred together as the latter grew to eight squatters for every person in the workers’ compound, with more than twenty-five thousand people in all. Residents experienced the fence as an arbitrary division: friendships, marriages, celebrations, and mutual assistance crossed it, and fires, floods, and epidemics demanded cooperation from both sides. The Causeway’s street commerce and the slum’s improvised community are distinct spaces, but together they show a city made through overlapping systems of trade, labor, surveillance, and survival.