I headed north to look for a mosque and restaurant nearby that my guidebook suggested. I will not speak the restaurant’s name, for it does not exist. I knew that it was on an alley near the mosque that was north of the market. I headed north up an alley to look for the restaurant or the mosque. After wandering in a desultory sort of way for a while, I started to get the feeling that both the mosque and restaurant were hiding from me, the way the market had. And sure enough, just when I had been about to give up hope, I turned a corner and there was a huge mosque. It is shocking how easy it is to miss enormous buildings in this tangle of people and streets. You just take a wrong turn and you could be lost for hours. There is no sense to the streets. They look like a series of veins, or like the little rills that get created when rain starts streaming down a dry dirt hill. I am sure if you live here it is all childishly simple, but to my eyes all the buildings and streets and people seem to be an organic, incomprehensible part of each other. You go down one alley and end up walking through a lane that ends in a dead end but has a walkway through the back of this set of buildings which also has a market set up in it and weaves in and around other sets of buildings and finally you end up in an empty lot or at a church or at no longer functioning school which has a broken gate for you to walk through to get back out onto the street half a block up from where you left it. Mumbai looks not so much like it has been built but like it has grown. I don’t know how some of the buildings stay up. Tradition, I guess. The buildings and structures are like houses of cards that have been shellacked. They look fragile, but you can’t knock them down.

So I found the mosque. I took a few pictures of the pretty outside, but I didn’t want to go inside and disturb the faithful. Besides, I was still on my restaurant mission.

That damn restaurant doesn’t exist. I swear it doesn’t. I looked at every shop front in every alley around where it could have been. Stupid guidebook.

I headed north once again to hit the Mumba Devi Shrine for whom Bombay has been renamed. However, all I saw were store fronts on the street where it was supposed to be. I was wandering around trying to figure out where it was when I saw a little passageway. I tried to go in the little passage way, but the people waved me away- exit, exit. They pointed about twenty feet away to the large entrance that I had not seen. So I went in there.