Mumbai Fort District is tied to Lin and Didier Levy’s early years in Bombay through the unstable apartment they shared and the building’s eventual collapse. Its remembered rooms make the place more than a former address: for Lin, it is also a marker of friendship, loss, and the difficulty of naming closeness.

The Shared Apartment

For a year after Lin first arrived in Bombay, he and Didier lived together in a small, fractured apartment in Mumbai Fort District. The building was already crumbling around them: plaster fell from the ceiling onto their faces as they slept, while fresh chunks of stone and wood appeared in the hallway. These details establish the apartment as a precarious home, shaped by the visible decay of the structure around it.

Collapse and Remembrance

A couple of years later, during the Monsoon, the building collapsed, killing several people. Lin sometimes walks past the site and looks up at the opening where his bedroom once was. The memory links an intimate domestic space to a sudden public disaster: the bedroom survives in his recollection as an absence in the sky.

Association with Didier

Recalling the apartment, Lin describes himself and Didier as close, while hesitating to call them friends. Their year of shared housing provides concrete evidence of their long association, but the destroyed building also gives that history a measure of loss. Lin’s uncertainty about friendship remains unresolved; Mumbai Fort District holds the remembered circumstances of their closeness without settling what to call it.