It began as a chain reaction, me interviewing them one after another, sometime between 2017 and 2018, learning slowly through them, their books and their projects to appreciate archiving and oral history. Over the years, we became friends, collaborators, and associates. Last week, I had the joy of working with them as a team for a new show by @citizensarchiveofindia run by the formidable @malvikab90 . Life brings people together, and sometimes you feel it's so that your world moves differently too.
📸 @nbhatia001
A Saturday spent experiencing three Catholic villages in South Mumbai as part of Jane Borges's #BombayBalchão walk for the In The Telling show by @citizensarchiveofindia . We walked, chatted, shopped and ate some mawa cake, cheese sticks and choriso buns along the way. Some fun was had.
📸 @christalle_clear and @jiyaa_khanvilkar
Finally found a favourite picture of home (with me in it), thanks to the lovely @christalle_clear who clicked it on my #Balchão walk for @citizensarchiveofindia . I moved here in 2003, an obese kid of 16, riddled with self-doubt, confident that nobody would ever bother to give me a second glance. I carry some of those teenage misgivings to this day, but this home has given me everything, as has this city. To know that you belong to something, even if it's a place, can sometimes bring you closer to yourself. It's given me stories, stories that I continue to absorb, live and share. It has taught me how to hide my lack within the pages of my work. It has made me realise that more than being seen, I'd like to be read. And that more than being loved, I would like to be understood. Home has given me a book that I am only now beginning to read carefully.
Happy birthday my dearest friend, sister, mummy all rolled into one. Thank you for making the good days even more beautiful, and the tough days so much more bearable. It's a sweet coincidence that you share your name with my mom, but it's sweeter that you are everything that I always craved, and didn't know I needed, until you came into my life. I have been totally spoiled by you, and I have also been lifted by you. I must have carried some good karma into this lifetime to have this and that, and everything else your kind, magical and beautiful soul continues to surprise me with. Have the best year ahead, you deserve only the best, @sandrax1305
Join us for an intimate literary conversation as B3C & Cities in Fiction hosts @janeborges87 , author of Bombay Balchao, in conversation with Divya Ravindranath. Explore the stories cities hold and the fiction they inspire — over Sunday brunch.
RSVP link in bio
📅 Date: 24th May 2026
⏱️ Time: 11:00 AM
📍 Venue: @nomadkitchenmumbai
Years of working as a journalist doesn't really prepare you for the creeping self-doubt that comes with being a novelist. In the last three years, I have had to contend with a lot, giving up a job that gave me a sense of purpose, to believing I had a book even when I wasn't sure, writing quietly not knowing if the voices in my head were leading (or misleading) me, to getting to travel because of the same work, thinking my book was ready, to returning to a job fearful that I was giving it all up, and then, starting all over again, without a job, and the same story, realising it's still unfinished. In between all this, dealing with greys, amnesia, bad back and eye strain. I don't know why some of us do this, the ride is no fun at all. But the destination, the one I arrived at today after completing my manuscript, doesn't feel so hopeless.
Join journalist, author and oral historian Jane Borges on a heritage walk that begins with a gallery visit to In the Telling, the Citizens’ Archive of India’s newest exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road. Hear the stories that motivated her to start her project, @soboicar with the Citizens’ Archive of India.
Afterwards, discover the lanes and neighbourhoods that inspired Borges’s debut novel Bombay Balchão with a book-themed walk. During the tour, you will visit the once predominantly Catholic neighbourhoods of Sonapur, Cavel and Dabul, and trace the eateries, old clubs, churches, homes and oral histories that form the crux of Borges’s narrative.
📍Chemould Prescott Road - Chira Bazaar
📅 May 16th, 4.30 PM
Book tickets on @urbanaut.app through our link in bio.
This is me, my brother and my cousins enjoying the fresh water gushing into Banganga, a temple tank steeped in Hindu legend and part of the Walkeshwar Temple complex in Malabar Hill.
We were visiting Bombay (from Muscat) that summer, and it was honestly my first distinct memory of this sacred tank.
My mother grew up near the tank, took her first swim here with her father, and shared many stories about life around it. It was my dad who took this photograph of us, and standing not very far from us, though not visible in this picture, was my uncle, Rocky Crasto.
Having been raised here, Uncle Rocky developed a deep affinity for it. In his teens, he helped save many people from drowning—my mum says that once, on seeing someone drown, he jumped out of the window of the chawl where they lived, which skirted the tank, right onto the steps and dived straight into the water.
When the tank fell into ruin and became polluted in the 1970s–80s, he single-handedly undertook the initiative to clean it up, often spending money from his own pocket. When he became corporator from Malabar Hill in the early 1990s, saving Banganga became his mission, and he convinced the municipal corporation to assist in rejuvenating, restoring, and rebuilding the tank.
For close to five decades, uncle would be seen walking along the stone steps, looking after the ducks that populated the tank, monitoring what was happening within the neighbourhood, ensuring the ancient statues, a few of which he had discovered while diving into the deep end, were safe and untouched. They can still be found here.
As I kept returning to Bombay during my childhood, I became very attached to Banganga (still one of my favourite places in the city), felt great pride in what my uncle had done, and came to see, through him, why we need to preserve our heritage, our stories, a way of life.
He passed on this week, a few months shy of 80. My mother lost a father figure. I lost an uncle who taught me how to love my city. And Banganga lost its foremost sentinel.
I didn’t know what i was signing up for until i read this magical tale.
So far fetched my connection with the catholic and christian community, the 1990’s bombay. Yet, i felt like i couldn’t have read anything better. This book made me realise not all books have to be relatable , sometimes i words are enough to cast a spell in your heart.
My ratings?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thank you @janeborges87 for writing this.
#bookstagrammer #books #janeborges #bombaybalchão #fypppppppppppppppシ゚viral
In this special International Women’s Day Lecture, Jane Borges helped us understand the stories and contributions of Konkani Catholics in Old Bombay, with a specific focus on stories of women from the community. The Catholic community from the Konkan region has played an instrumental role in building, shaping, and reimagining the city.
@soboicar is an oral history project (conducted in partnership with @citizensarchiveofindia ) that documents the lives of people who migrated from the Konkan to South Mumbai. Through this project @janeborges87 hopes to map and explore how this community interacted, integrated, and engaged with other Indian communities in Mumbai, and how they shaped many neighbourhoods that are slowly vanishing from the city’s consciousness.
Come join us for our next lecture over drinks 📝 🍻 🧐 in Mumbai.
On Sunday, April 5th 2026 we will get a chance to listen to the architect and author, Kaiwan Mehta (@kaiwanstudio ) talk about navigating the city that remembers and forgets through an exploration of its changing neighbourhoods.
On Sunday, April 12th 2026 we will get a chance to listen to the researcher Sujay Jadhav (@sujoyness ) from @edurved talk to us about how stars and planets are born and how astronomers detect planets around distant stars.
Ticket links in bio 🎟️
🎥 📝 by @maheema.misra
