Have you eaten yet?
Okay, good.
Imagine a fish called a duck
Or a paradox swimming along the coast.
Even if a dream is impossible to return to,
There are still traces of movement.
In the days of the British Raj,
Bombil was transported by ‘Daak’, or postal trains.
x
Wooden carriages were filled with the scent of dried fish
And so, they called it ‘Bombay Daak’.
We’ve been brought here by a series of misheard stories.
March 2025
Consider Juhu Beach, Mumbai. Within an interval before consequence, when concrete pillars begin to rise, people gather at the beach every morning. This might be the last time they can see the horizon before the Versova bridge sections it off. The bridge will cut down traffic by a nanosecond, until it won’t, and there will be more schemes of even more bridges and tunnels. Remember, Mumbai was once a whale beached on reclaimed land, waiting for the sea to swallow it whole.
A boy, about eight or nine years old, calls out to us, says ‘watch this’, and captures a crab in a plastic bag with his bare hands before letting it go.
July 2016
A coming of age (or an initiation into the logic of endings).
It was well known at the time that peacocks roamed around an upscale neighbourhood near the 12th Road in the Juhu Vile Parle Development Scheme. We had heard conflicting rumours of their origin. Some said they were descendants of birds released during a bygone Bureaucrat’s eviction in the 1900s. Others claimed they had escaped from a film set decades ago; extras who outlived their scenes and became permanent residents of a city built on borrowed narratives.
One peacock, who would often block traffic for hours near the bus depot, led us to a strange apartment that expanded into infinity the moment you stepped inside. A remote location hidden in plain sight. The lights were off, and the apartment was packed with exotic animals from all over, as if someone had been smuggling entire worlds. A baby fawn ran past me. At the end of the corridor stood an uncle with a toucan on his shoulder. It was the first time I had seen one of those. He gestured toward my friend, who walked up and touched his feet. The uncle gave him around three hundred rupees, and that was that.
We stepped out of this import-export pocket universe and made our way towards Hotel Sea Princess looking for something cheap to smoke.
The beach smelled rancid. It looked like some scene had happened. There were big crowds of policemen, families, and the press. At least a couple hundred bystanders formed a congregation around a huge lump. I tried to look closely and it briefly came into view. A metallic, rotten mass baking deep into the afternoon.
Later that day, local celebrity Shilpa Shetty provided some context on Instagram:
“A whale on the shores of Juhu, in front of my home 🙁 Must’ve swept ashore with the waves and couldn’t get back.. Poor thing!”
Anyway, listen carefully.
The Bombil needs to be cleaned first.
You begin with the fish in a colander and a bowl.
Swirl the water gently, releasing grit and sand.
Raise the colander, let the water drain, and repeat.
November 2012
A ‘stranding’ is a state in which the body is stuck where it does not belong. In ecological terms, it usually refers to a moment when a marine creature is forced ashore, suspended between land and sea. Periods of mass stranding, often following shifts in current or temperature, reveal how fragile orientation can be when familiar routes fail.
Historical records have little room or patience for omens and other such events of symbolic weight. In spite of this, ‘stranding’ has come to mean more than mere biological misfortune. It is the condition of being caught between worlds, which has, in this present moment, become the norm. We are all, in some way, stranded here.
March 1971
In the film Anand (1971) there is a song called “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli”, sung by Manna Dey. The music video is shot on Juhu Beach. There is no bridge being built over the horizon, and no partitioning of land from sea. In this song, the coastline is an unfixed, uncertain border, dancing to lunar rhythms.
We shall briefly trace the footprints of our protagonist, Anand, who has lymphosarcoma of the intestine, and was played by the superstar Rajesh Khanna. He befriends a brooding, cynical oncologist called Babu Moshai, played by Amitabh Bachchan. In the film, he only has six months to live, but this was the 70s, and the structure of time was not so neatly divided in those days.
As the rumour goes, Rajesh Khanna, who was at the peak of his career, had insisted upon the director to include the song “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli” in the film. Due to budget constraints, they could only afford to make a plain, uncomplicated music video that would be filmed in a single day, without a big setup, and with natural lighting. This video shows Khanna walking along Juhu Beach, mouthing the words to the song: “Zindagi kaisi hai paheli / Kabhi toh hasaaye, kabhi yeh rulaaye” (Oh, what a riddle this life is / Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me cry).
The riddle offers us a glimpse into Anand’s own stranding. Although he is not yet dead, his decay has begun, and in noticing this, it is as if all opposites are now finally converging into one cosmic riddle. Nearing the end of his own life, Anand walks along the shoreline, singing towards the sea. He begins away from the water, and slowly moves closer until his feet are immersed in the same spot where, decades later, off-screen, a dying whale will wash up.
September 2023
We now take a detour to the Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers (The iconic Bombay Stock Exchange building), where there is a big crowd watching expert analysis underlined by streams of red.
Shall we gather around the giant LED screen?
The late astrologer, Bejan Daruwala, is on the news again, resurrected, speaking in free-market tongues. He says the constellations of Rohini and Krittika are colliding, which indicates that the economy’s about to collapse. The tension between markets and myths can often leave us in a stranding of a different kind. Intertidal zones are spaces in-between high and low tide-lines, where land and sea blur into each other, marked by volatility and flux. We continue to look for meaning in misheard stories. In a fit of homesickness, I got a Bombil tattooed on my arm.
The stock market delivers omens of its own, via indicators that point towards increasingly bizarre fictions. Charts, stars, algorithms, prophecies. The whale was 40 feet long, and had been dead for two or three days before it was crane-lifted and removed. Looking at the uneasy coexistence of economic calculation and superstition, it is worth remembering that even in times of market volatility, our faith in superstition seems unshakeable.
April 2025
‘Zhau dya na kaka, mi student aahe.’
Outside the Juhu Chowpatty Beat Chowky, you take a video of the neon sign that says “I <3 MUMBAI POLICE”. The constable walks up to you, goes through your camera and makes you delete it. The act feels rehearsed, like you’ve been here before. You have to delete the footage. Both you and the policeman are caught in a loop. Mirror processes, each verifying the other’s existence through repetition. You’ll do this again tomorrow, and he will too.
You once told me that the Bombil was a bird that dove too deep, spine up. The gods punished it by stripping its wings, leaving only fins that flap like forgotten prayers.
There’s no reliable way to tell a story. The neon heart pulses above us, and it is never a question of whether we love the police or not. A recurring dream only recurs for us to form distant relations, to fruitlessly try and describe some broad, unnameable bleakness at the centre of it all.
March, 1980
A detour with first-world cousins. Sixteen years before I was born, an orca called Hugo died in captivity at the Miami Seaquarium. His tank was called ‘the whale bowl’, and was 24x11m or 6m deep. Outside of captivity, Southern Resident Killer Whales form complex and stable social bonds with their families. Each orca pod has its own distinct language, a dialect passed down through generations. If Hugo hadn’t been captured, he would’ve most likely spent nearly all of his time with his mother and the rest of his family. His favourite food growing up would have been Chinook Salmon. Separated from his pod, he had developed a habit of ramming his head against the glass wall of his enclosure repeatedly. He was fifteen years old when he died of a cerebral aneurysm. His body was reportedly disposed of in a landfill, and the Seaquarium never mentioned him again. On this day in Bombay, Aasha (dir. J. Om Prakash) had just come out in theatres. It would later go on to become a cult classic. In the climax of the film, Aasha sings – “Sheesha Ho Ya Dil Ho, Aakhir Toot Jata Hai” (Whether it is glass or a heart, eventually it breaks).
One last thing before I forget.
Soak the Bombil for five minutes, then swirl again.
Pick out straws, bugs, debris.
The fins must be trimmed with precision.
Next, the gutting.
There is the story of an object,
and then there is the story of a passing through.
Of purity and cross-contamination.
Of bureaucratic and geographical checkpoints.
Run your hands over the fish,
Feel for remnants of its last meal.
Rinse it under cold water, one last time,
Falling into a recurring dream.
And then let it sit.
Photographs by Harmeet Singh Rahal