Mumbai

The Gateway of India, a basalt arch raised on the harbour front at Apollo Bunder in 1924, is the city's postcard and the departure point for the boats to Elephanta; the crowd around it at any hour is part of the scene. Facing the water beside it stands the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, open since 1903 and a landmark in its own right. A few minutes' walk west, Colaba Causeway runs south through Colaba, a mile of pavement stalls selling clothes, jewellery and curios between cafés and bookstalls. On Colaba's harbour shore, Sassoon Dock is where the fishing boats unload at dawn and the catch is sorted and sold on the quay.

An hour across the harbour by boat from the Gateway, Elephanta Island holds a UNESCO-listed cave temple complex cut into the basalt between roughly the fifth and eighth centuries. The main cave's Trimurti — a three-headed Shiva some six metres high, representing creation, preservation and destruction — is among the finest ancient sculptures in India, and the relief panels around it show Shiva's cosmic dance and his marriage to Parvati in deep, confident carving. From the jetty a walk of just over a kilometre leads to the foot of the stairs, where about a hundred and twenty steps climb past souvenir stalls and the island's monkeys, quick to snatch food, to the caves. Allow three to four hours for the round trip from the Gateway. Weekdays are quieter, and rough seas in the monsoon can stop the boats; beyond the caves, the island has villages, two old cannons on Cannon Hill and forest paths few visitors walk.

North of Colaba, the Kala Ghoda arts district holds the city's main museums and galleries within a few streets. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, in a domed Indo-Saracenic building set in its own garden, keeps one of the country's best collections, from Indus Valley material to Mughal miniatures. Beside it, the Jehangir Art Gallery runs rotating exhibitions of contemporary Indian art, and the National Gallery of Modern Art occupies the Sir Cowasji Jehangir Hall across the road. In a side street, the sky-blue Knesset Eliyahoo synagogue, built in 1884, stands restored. Each February the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival fills the district's streets with exhibitions, music and talks for more than a week.

West of Kala Ghoda, the Oval Maidan is a long lawn where cricket matches overlap from morning to dusk, and the buildings on its two sides make up a UNESCO World Heritage Site of their own, the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai. On the east side stand the Bombay High Court and the University of Mumbai with its Rajabai Clock Tower, still used by the institutions they were built for. Facing them across the grass, the apartment blocks of the 1930s show Art Deco adapted to the tropics — pastel façades, geometric motifs and nautical detailing — and the same row of buildings continues west to the seafront.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right: Victorian Gothic Revival blended with Indian motifs, built between 1878 and 1888 to designs by Frederick William Stevens, with turrets, stained glass and carved stone animals under a central dome. It is still a working terminus for the Central line's suburban trains and for long-distance expresses, moving millions of commuters a day, which is what makes it worth seeing in use rather than merely photographing. Across the road, the Municipal Corporation Building, by the same architect, still houses the city's government. On foot, follow DN Road south from the terminus past its arcaded commercial buildings to Flora Fountain, and on to the Oval Maidan.

North of the terminus, the bazaar quarter begins at Crawford Market, officially Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai — a Norman Gothic market hall completed in 1869 to designs by William Emerson, with friezes by John Lockwood Kipling over the entrance, still trading in fruit, spices and household goods. Beyond it the lanes divide by trade, gold and silver in Zaveri Bazaar and cloth in Mangaldas Market, around the Mumba Devi Temple, the shrine of the goddess who gave the city its name. Off the northern stretch of Mohammed Ali Road, Chor Bazaar deals in antiques, old brass, vintage film posters and second-hand goods of every kind.

Marine Drive curves for three and a half kilometres along the Arabian Sea from Nariman Point to Girgaum Chowpatty, and its sea wall is the city's promenade: walkers and joggers at dawn, families with kulfi and roasted corn after dark, and the arc of streetlights that gave it the name Queen's Necklace. Behind it stand more of the 1930s Art Deco blocks of the UNESCO ensemble. At the northern end, Girgaum Chowpatty is where the city comes for bhel puri at sunset — the food is the point, not the swimming — and on the last day of Ganesh Chaturthi, in August or September, it is the main beach where the processions immerse their Ganesh idols in the sea. In the monsoon, high tides throw waves over the sea wall.

From Chowpatty the road climbs onto Malabar Hill, a ridge of high-rise apartments that ends at Walkeshwar. There the Banganga Tank, a centuries-old sacred stepped tank, lies ringed by temples and old houses, with the towers rising above it. Back below the hill, a short walk inland from Chowpatty in Gamdevi, Mani Bhavan is the house where Gandhi stayed on his visits to the city between 1917 and 1934, kept as a museum with his room, his letters and a gallery of dioramas of his life.

North along the shore, three of the city's great shrines stand within a few kilometres of each other. Haji Ali Dargah, the white tomb of a Sufi saint, sits on an islet just offshore and is reached along a causeway that the high tide covers, so the visit follows the tide. Close by, the Mahalaxmi Temple draws a steady queue to its three goddesses, and further north in Prabhadevi, the Siddhivinayak Temple is the Ganesh shrine to which much of the city comes to pray. All three expect covered shoulders and knees, and shoes are left at the door — the dress and conduct customs of any Indian shrine.

Two of the city's working systems can be watched at close range. At Mahalaxmi, the Dhobi Ghat is an open-air laundry of concrete wash pens in long rows, where washermen beat, rinse and dry clothes from across the city; the road bridge beside Mahalaxmi station on the Western line looks straight down on it. Late in the morning at Churchgate station, the dabbawalas unload home-cooked lunches from the suburban trains in tin carriers marked with their code and sort them onto handcarts and bicycles for the offices of the southern city; in the afternoon the empty tins travel back the same way.

Dharavi, between Mahim and Sion in the middle of the city, is a dense informal city in a couple of square kilometres, running thousands of small businesses — leather, pottery, recycling, textiles, food processing, embroidery. In Kumbharwada, the potters' quarter, the kilns smoke in the lanes, and schools, temples, mosques and cricket grounds fill the gaps between the workshops. Across the Mithi River, in plain sight, stand the office towers of the Bandra-Kurla Complex, the financial district.

North across the Mahim Creek, Bandra grew from fishing villages of the Portuguese period into a suburb of seafront promenades, old lanes and shopping streets. Its seafront promenade, Bandstand, ends at Bandra Fort, a 17th-century Portuguese watchtower on the rocks with the Bandra-Worli Sea Link arcing across the bay below; on the hill above stands the Basilica of Our Lady of the Mount, whose September feast, the Bandra Fair, fills the hill with pilgrims for a week. Inland, the lanes of Ranwar and Chapel Road keep the old cottages of Bandra's villages, their walls painted with murals. Carter Road on the western shore, Pali Hill and Hill Road hold the cafés, galleries and boutiques, and Linking Road the street shopping.

Mumbai is the home of the Hindi-language film industry, and Juhu, north of Bandra, is one of the seaside districts where much of it lives. Juhu Beach fills at sunset with families, cricket games and carts selling snacks and shaved ice, and film crews are a common sight on the streets around it. Further north, Film City in Goregaon holds the sound stages and outdoor sets where much of the industry shoots. In the Gulshan Mahal mansion on Pedder Road, the National Museum of Indian Cinema traces the industry from the first film screening in Bombay in 1896 and the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, in 1913. For the films themselves, see a new Hindi release with a Mumbai audience, which cheers the hero's first entrance.

At the city's northern edge, Sanjay Gandhi National Park keeps a forest of wooded hills inside the city limits, with leopards that are present though rarely seen. Deep in the park, the Kanheri Caves are more than a hundred Buddhist caves cut into a basalt hillside from around the 1st century BCE onward: monks' cells, rock-cut water cisterns and a great prayer hall with standing Buddha figures. The main gate is a short ride from Borivali station on the Western line, and the caves lie several kilometres inside, so the ride in is part of the visit.

Mumbai's street food is built for people moving between trains, and it holds its own place in India's regional cooking. Vada pav, a spiced potato fritter in a soft bun, is sold outside the suburban stations; pav bhaji, buttery mashed vegetables with toasted rolls, and bhel puri and sev puri come into their own at the beach stalls of Chowpatty and Juhu after sunset. The Bombay sandwich — bread spread with green chutney and layered with potato, beetroot, cucumber and tomato, often grilled with cheese — is the city's own. The old Irani cafés, with bentwood chairs, bun maska and milky chai, still serve the old city, and the Parsi kitchen adds dhansak; Malvani and Konkani restaurants serve fried bombil, pomfret and the kokum drink sol kadhi. During Ramadan, whose dates move each year, Mohammed Ali Road becomes a night food market of kebabs, nihari and malpua, with the sweet shops along the road for dessert.

The suburban railway is the city's circulatory system: the Western line runs north from Churchgate, the Central and Harbour lines from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, and outside the peaks a train is the fastest way to cover distance along the peninsula. Metro lines cross the suburbs, and an underground line runs from beneath the airport south through the business districts toward the southern tip. Auto-rickshaws are not permitted in the southern city, so it is black-and-yellow taxis and app-based cabs below Bandra and auto-rickshaws above it. From the Gateway, boats cross the harbour to Elephanta and to Mandwa, the landing for Alibaug.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport lies between the western suburbs and the old city, and the road from it to the southern tip takes from one hour to three depending entirely on the hour you land; hotels in Bandra, Juhu or Andheri are much closer. Long-distance trains leave from the terminus, Mumbai Central, Dadar, Lokmanya Tilak Terminus and Bandra Terminus, among them the Konkan Railway's trains south to Goa and the Konkan coast. For the rest of the country, the choice between an overnight train and a domestic flight starts from these same stations and the airport.