Coastal Road work eats into visitor count at Haji Ali

Haji Ali is what made Mumbai unique among coastal cities. The low white mausoleum in the middle of the sea, its single minaret mingling with the horizon, was a landmark everyone who travelled on the busy road connecting South Mumbai to Mahim gazed on. Now, that familiar sight no longer exists

Mumbai Wednesday was the 557th urs (death anniversary) of Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari, yet, the Haji Ali dargah wasn’t overflowing, leading Akthar Ali, who runs a share-a-taxi from the dargah to Mahalakshmi station, disappointed. While the taxi driver attributed the lack of crowds to school and college exams, a shop attendant on the dargah premises pointed to the disappearance of stalls since the Coastal Road construction began.

Coastal Road work eats into visitor count at Haji Ali

“There’s been a 30 % drop in visitors,” he said. “People used to come to pray and shop. Now that’s gone.”

Haji Ali is what made Mumbai unique among coastal cities. The low white mausoleum in the middle of the sea, its single minaret mingling with the horizon, was a landmark everyone who travelled on the busy road connecting South Mumbai to Mahim gazed on. Now, that familiar sight no longer exists.

The Coastal Road has changed the shape of the entire complex. Earlier, the dargah came into view the moment one entered the narrow entrance road. Then followed the walk through the sea on the narrow pathway leading to the shrine.

Now, there’s neither sea nor dargah as you step inside the entrance pathway. A steep wall on one side, a dark paan-stained tunnel, a gravelly road on which trucks go up and down - all these must be traversed before you get a glimpse of either sea or dargah.

It’s the feel of the sea that Basheera Banu misses the most. Perched at the edge of what’s left of the narrow pathway in the sea, she occupies the same spot that her mother did for decades. Basheera offers coins in exchange of notes to those wanting to give alms on their way out. “The sea is all around us but it rarely washes over us as it used to,” she says wistfully.

Like Basheera, most of the hawkers that line the road to the dargah have grown up in its surroundings, and like her, miss being in the middle of the sea. Not only has the place’s raunaq gone, they complain, now, on the rare occasions that it rushes in, the sea water has to be pumped out. Earlier, the waves would immediately recede.

For these hawkers, the Coastal Road has had harsher consequences. More than 100 of them were displaced by the tunnel, they say, and the promise of reinstatement has yet to materialize. This means children have had to drop out of school. “We inherited our parents’ business, but we’re making sure our children won’t,” they say.

Has the disfigurement of the approach to Haji Ali affected visitors? Trustee Suhail Khandwani insists it has not; in fact, he says they’ve increased. “We used to have 12 security men earlier; now we need 30, apart from volunteers on special occasions.”

Like Akhtar Ali, the hawkers too blamed exams for the lack of crowds on an Urs day, confirming that the dargah holds a special attraction for young people. Three girls who’d come to spend the day there all the way from Kandivli said they made the trip twice a month. Though they preferred the old open setting, the changes hadn’t made them stop coming.

Once the Coastal Road is done, the trustees hope attention will be paid to the long-pending dargah beautification project. “I’ve attended 17 meetings in seven years,” says Khandwani, “but implementation has been very slow.” However, the beautification might end up transforming the dargah beyond recognition.

There’s been one more change. As always, on Wednesday too, the dargah had many Hindu visitors. But, says Mohammed Sayeed Merchant, whose father is the chairman of the trust, every year, devotees going to the Navratri Mela at the nearby Mahalakshmi temple, would also come to Haji Ali. This year, their numbers were significantly less.