A copy of Home in the City in hand, its pages bookmarked with strips of a cut-up invitation card, we walk down Marine Drive with Sooni Taraporevala—photographer, screenwriter, filmmaker, and showrunner.
It is early morning, and the promenade is already alive with joggers, walkers, and those pausing to take in the breeze. At a traffic signal, she stops, flips open the book, and gestures toward the street. “This is where I took Camel on Marine Drive,” she says, referring to a 1977 photograph of two boys riding a camel along the seafront. And just like that, we are off—following her through the layered histories of Mumbai, tracking the city through her lens, her stories, and her life.
“My primary muse has always been real life, because I think real life is often more amazing than fiction.”
In 1988, Taraporevala wrote Salaam Bombay! telling the story of Krishna, a twelve-year-old runaway navigating the unforgiving streets of Mumbai in an attempt to earn 500 rupees—enough to be accepted back home. The film became a landmark in Indian cinema, winning the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature at the Cannes Film Festival and receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Decades later, the echoes of that world remain. “It’s definitely helped me as a screenwriter to have been a photographer. And it’s helped me as a photographer to be a screenwriter,” she reflects. “I often see stories in a single frame.”
“This is all Salaam Bombay! territory,” Taraporevala says as we stand before a walk-up in Grant Road. The building’s wooden staircase creaks underfoot as we climb toward a fourth-floor landing, dimly lit and filled with the scent of the city. Peering over the ledge, she conjures an image from the past: a sea of faces below, over a hundred men looking up at her camera while the film was in production.
Taraporevala’s photographs offer an intimate, insider’s view of Mumbai’s Parsi community—one of the city’s most historically significant yet visually underrepresented populations. Her work chronicles the private lives within this world: the familiar contours of Cozy Building, the balcony in the house she grew up, the quiet rituals of a close-knit community that has largely existed away from the public gaze.
Sooni and her father, Rumi on the balcony at Cozy Building. Photograph by Alina Tiphagne
Her father still lives there, in an apartment he now shares with an uncle, just as the family always has. The photographs, much like the city itself, are imbued with a sense of both constancy and flux—Mumbai as it was, as it is, and as it continues to unfold through her images.
Born in 1957 in Bombay, Maharashtra, Sooni Taraporevala currently lives and works in Mumbai, India.
