Shri Kalika Devi Temple, Kalbadevi

Few shrines in Mumbai are as small, or as consequential, as the Shri Kalika Devi temple on Kalbadevi Road. The goddess known locally as Kalba Devi or Kalika Devi gave her name to the whole quarter around her — one of the densest trading districts in South Mumbai, a warren of cloth wholesalers, steel-utensil godowns, paper and stationery shops and handcart traffic that begins near Crawford Market and runs north toward Bhuleshwar and Princess Street.

• Visitors chasing the city's postcard landmarks usually rattle straight past.
• The temple is a modest, brightly painted sanctum set flush into the shophouse line, announced by a doorway, a bell, a smell of camphor and a cluster of flower-sellers rather than by any spire you could pick out from a distance.
• The stories the neighbourhood tells about the shrine are older than its present walls.
• Local tradition holds that the goddess's original seat stood nearer the shoreline of the old island of Bombay, and that her image was carried away and kept hidden for a long stretch of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the island's temples had a precarious time, before being brought out and re-enshrined here.
• Long-time residents will also tell you the building you see is a rebuild — that when the road was straightened and widened for Bombay's tramway in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the temple was reconstructed tight against the new building line, which is why it reads today as part of the street rather than as a walled compound.
• Both accounts travel by oral memory and neighbourhood record rather than firm documentation, so take them as the quarter's own history of itself.
• This is one of the better corners of Mumbai for a vegetarian traveller, because the Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar lanes have long been home to Gujarati, Marwari and Jain trading families and the eating houses that feed them.
• Unlimited Gujarati thalis, Kathiawadi snack counters, farsan shops stacked with fafda, khaman and chorafali, jalebi frying in the open, kulfi and falooda parlours, and small Udupi-style canteens turning out idli, dosa and rice plates are all within a short walk.
• That said, Mumbai as a whole is a seafood and meat-eating city, and this quarter also has eateries that are not vegetarian at all — so look for a clearly displayed pure-veg or Jain board, and confirm with the counter before you order rather than assuming.
• Ask for Jain preparations specifically if you avoid root vegetables; most kitchens here will know exactly what you mean.