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Whenever somebody visits Mumbai for the first time, they are most keen to see all of its famous sites including the Mint, the Docks, the Armoury, its cotton spinning machines and cloth looms, the Museum, telegraph machine, the metalled roads, the Observatory, its hospitals, the gunpowder works, the Town Hall, the Panjarapole – a home for destitute animals – the narrow strip of land at Colaba with the lighthouse at its very end, the mills, the Industrial School and others. Besides, many moneylenders have their counting-houses in the Fort, where one’s eyes are dazzled by the heaps of freshly minted coins from the Mint. One is enthused by the constant ringing of the coins. There are shops run by Parsis, Englishmen and Mussalmans filled with exquisite crystal ware and other expensive objects. One can also see doctors, their shelves lined with potions of many colours; they look very impressive and one begins to feel that they might be real experts in the art of medicine. Similarly if one enters a merchant’s house, one cannot help getting the feeling that one has entered the abode of Lord Kubera himself after looking at the opulent furniture, the grand vehicles, the demeanour of his servants and the obvious wealth visible throughout. There are bookshelves set against the walls, supporting thousands of neatly bound books on a myriad subjects, while pictures are displayed at various vantage points. In other words, wherever one goes, there is something to catch the eye. After five in the evening, attractive wagons decorated in a kaleidoscope of colours and drawn by Arabian horses can be seen along the road to the Camp. Their pomp and splendour left a man recentlyarrived from the Konkan momentarily dumbstruck. He exclaimed, ‘Amazing! Your Mumbai is just like Paradise. If one doesn’t visit Mumbai at least once in a lifetime, life is not worth having lived’.
