Chira Bazaar and Thakurdwar Quarter

Inland from Girgaon Chowpatty, where the orderly grid of South Mumbai frays into a knot of narrow lanes, Chira Bazaar and the adjoining Thakurdwar quarter form one of the oldest continuously trading corners of the city.

• The area runs roughly along Jagannath Shankarsheth Marg and Thakurdwar Road, between Charni Road station and Kalbadevi, and is best walked in the morning, when shutters are still going up and handcarts have the road largely to themselves.
• The name Chira Bazaar is usually traced to the cut stone once traded here.
• Nothing in the quarter is packaged for visitors; the reward is simply watching a nineteenth-century market town carry on inside a twenty-first-century metropolis.
• Girgaon was the cradle of Marathi publishing, theatre and journalism in Bombay, and the trade has never entirely left these lanes.
• Small publishing houses, typesetters and stationery wholesalers still keep offices above the shopfronts, and stacks of Marathi titles — devotional texts, school guides, poetry, cookery — are sold from counters barely wider than a doorway.
• Second-hand book sellers set up along the pavements, sorting paperbacks, exam manuals and back issues into precarious towers.
• Browsing costs nothing, bargaining is expected, and most sellers will happily let you stand and read.
• A few steps on, the bookstalls give way to the utensil trade: rows of brass, copper and stainless-steel shops whose goods spill onto the street as lamps, puja thalis, water pots and towering vessels, polished until the lanes glint. The quarter is devotional too.
• Thakurdwar takes its name from an old temple of the Lord — the Ram mandir that still anchors the junction — while several Jain derasars stand quietly behind carved facades a lane or two away, with more toward Bhuleshwar and Pydhonie.
• Remove footwear, dress modestly and ask before photographing inside any shrine.
• Just off Thakurdwar, the heritage lane of Khotachiwadi preserves timber-balconied houses from an older Bombay, and during Ganeshotsav the whole neighbourhood is at its most alive, and its most crowded.
• Girgaon is one of the better corners of Mumbai for simple vegetarian eating, but assume nothing: Mumbai is a major seafood and non-vegetarian city, so read the board or ask at the counter before ordering anywhere.
• The local speciality is Maharashtrian snack food — batata vada with fried chillies, sabudana vada and sabudana khichdi on fasting days, thalipeeth, kothimbir vadi, misal with pav, and in summer glasses of piyush and aamras.
• Several long-standing snack and sweet counters around the Thakurdwar and Girgaon Chowpatty junctions run pure-vegetarian kitchens; confirm that at the counter, since the surrounding streets mix all kinds of eateries.
• Walk east toward Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar and Gujarati, Marwari and Jain-friendly thali halls take over, many willing to cook without onion and garlic on request — again, ask first.