Before there was a city, there was water. Seven islands, scattered across the mouth of a shallow bay on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. The largest, Bombay Island itself, ran perhaps eleven kilometres from north to south and nowhere more than four kilometres across. The others — Colaba, Old Woman’s Island, Mahim, Mazgaon, Worli, Parel — were smaller, lower, greener, and at high tide, sometimes smaller still. Between them ran channels and creeks and marshes thick with mangrove, where the sea moved in twice a day with bureaucratic regularity and reminded everyone that the land was, in a fundamental sense, borrowed. The channels flooded and receded, leaving standing water in every mangrove hollow — still, brackish, sheltered from wind. The Anopheles mosquito asked for nothing more. The islands had been brewing fever for centuries before anyone arrived to catch it.

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: White Falcon Publishing; 1 edition (August 2026)
• Author: Sidharth Jain
• ISBN-13: 9789376312184
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inch

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