Mumbai wakes before the sun, a city that carries its own tide—the steady, ceaseless swell of people, stories, and noise that never truly ebbs. Imagine a narrow lane near the docks where merchants haggle over crates of fish, spices in sachets perfume the air, and scooters thread like shoals through the morning. Here, under a sky the color of tea, the city reveals itself in fragments: a hand-painted sign above a doorway, a group of schoolchildren in crisp uniforms racing toward a rickshaw, the distant horn of a ferry slicing the bay.
