10 Best Things About Bombay
A once-seedy port area named for the founding community of Koli fishermen, Colaba is now mainly a commercial district whose avenues are filled with wallahs (peddlers) of some product or another. Walk down busy Colaba Causeway and you'll be shadowed by tobacco wallahs and fruit wallahs, hash wallahs and bongo wallahs, money-changers and life-changers. But just beyond the causeway, Colaba's quiet residential streets are the closest thing to peace you'll find in central Bombay. Ancient banyan vines hang over grand mansions built by the British. With their splendid wooden galleries and half-crumbling walls, the houses make the area look uncannily like Savannah.
Many of these mansions are protected landmarks, so the exteriors cannot, technically, be altered. But local architects always find a way around building codes—witness the modern high-rise that literally shoots out the top of one (still intact) villa. Apparently, the law didn't say anything about the roof.
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