Most Indians are familiar with Shivaji Park. For some, it is where cricketing legends — Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar — honed their craft; for others it was where the Shiv Sena strongman, Bal Thackeray, rose to prominence. But few would know the fascinating history of Mahim, the cultural melting pot where this park is situated. Shanta Gokhale, author and journalist, has lived in Shivaji Park’s Lalit Estate — a building known for its curved verandahs — for 78 years of her life. She presents a picture of the neighbourhood where she grew up, woken every morning by the sound of Kohinoor Mill’s siren, feasting on Mama Pereira’s East Indian lunches, and playing with children from diverse backgrounds.

Gokhale shows that in spite of its cosmopolitan nature — the credit for this, she reiterates, goes to the people who have settled there and fought off the “pressure... to change it radically” — Shivaji Park is rooted in the cleavages of identity. Pratap Bimb of the Anhilpattan Chalukyas freed Mahikavati — present-day Mahim — from “forest-dwellers” and populated the region with 66 “high-caste” families from Champaner. This is how Gokhale begins her narrative, by digging into the Mahikavatichi Bakhar, an 18th-century history of Mahim. From there to the present is covered in the quick span of a little more than 100 pages, with Gokhale touching on a variety of topics but refusing to reflect on any of them for long. What is created as a result is a concise, but intuitive, biography of a place in which local, national and personal histories come together to form a tapestry meant to reflect the Idea of India itself. The protagonist is the park itself, serving as a metaphor of inclusiveness. The katta, the low kerb around the park, has its own dynamic, acting as a great leveller, where an affluent Gujarati merchant can share space with a peanut vendor and the locality’s strays.

Shivaji Park — Dadar 28: History, places, people by Shanta Gokhale, Speaking Tiger, Rs 499 Amazon

There is a strong visual element in Gokhale’s writing — some of her descriptions make Mahim come alive before the reader’s eyes. It is a pity then that she prefers a dry, factual approach over a descriptive one, which makes one want to skim over a few pages occasionally. But then one stands the risk of missing anecdotal gems that Gokhale slips in here and there. Take, for instance, the origin of the term, supari (arranging a mob hit), which has become inseparable from Mumbai in popular culture. She writes that whenever Raja Bimb had a “problem” he would invite local chieftains to a feast and place a supari (betel nut) before them; whichever chieftain picked up the supari would then be responsible for eliminating his problem.