Haji Ali Mosque
If you’ve ever seen a photograph of this mosque then you’ll know why my friends and I made a special effort to photograph it ourselves. The mosque sits in the waters of the Arabian Sea. There is a causeway to the mosque but at times the causeway is underwater and you either can’t get to the mosque or you can’t leave. We wanted to be sure the tide was in our favor.
We expected to see something of a palace, all white and tinted with gold from the setting sun, a vision that had developed in our minds after reading about the place in our guidebooks. The entrance to the causeway is right off a busy boulevard that curls around the waterfront of Bombay or Mumbai, as you like. Traffic was bumper to bumper as we jumped from the cab with instructions to the driver to return in an hour.
We followed the crowds who thronged toward the mosque. The causeway was lined with the faithful walking slowly, the colorful sarees of the women forming a ribbon of red, green, blue and yellow to the, now we could see it clearly, crumbling structure. A phalanx of beggars formed up on both sides of the walkway, eating and chatting and now and then taking a moment to attend to business, stretching out an arm or perhaps a maimed leg to signify that they were working here and we needed to be charitable. The tide was low and the muck of the bottom was off-putting to us but not to the scavengers who were knee-deep in it examining the garbage that the tide had left.
Locals, who seemed to be on a family outing rather than a religious pilgrimage, crowded the mosque plaza. They sat in groups eating ice cream bars. They had been doing so for quite a while judging from the discarded wrappers that stuck to every surface. Some were praying though, as the piles of shoes in front of the mosque entry were nearly 4 feet high. How would you ever find your shoes? But almost everyone wore cheap flip flops so maybe it didn’t matter which pair you put on your feet when you left.
My friends and I decided not to part with our shoes and just wandered the walkways which are not considered holy. The mosque is in dire need of some fresh paint or just a good scrubbing. It was definitely not the picture we’d conjured up in our minds. Shabby is the kindest word for it. And while sometimes shabby is good, it didn’t seem to be good that day. Maybe because it was shabby and dirty and trashy.
As we drove back to our hotel along the boulevard, we could see the mosque from a distance and recognized the viewpoint of the photographs we had seen in our guidebook and on the internet. You need to be far away to get a sense of what the mosque had once been. Just walk along the boulevard at sunset is my advice.