There are no signs of clouds, but with an umbrella tucked into his coat, Mohan Mayekar walks out of a run-down Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) office at Lakri Bunder to stride towards the wharves. As he nears the waters, an overpowering whiff of tar and wet ropes hits him. He tilts his chin up slightly to take in the view — the piece-by-piece breaking of end-of-life ships that sit like corpses in this graveyard, which is one of many along Mumbai’s 28 km-long eastern docklands that stretch from Colaba in the south to Wadala in the north.

For the last 30 years, the 58-year-old MbPT employee has supervised all commercial activity, largely surrounding timber trade, at Lakri Bunder, one of eight bunders, or piers, that dot the coastal city’s now derelict eastern docklands. The frenzy of commercial activity that he remembers from decades ago is only a memory. The port that helped catapult Mumbai into a trading station in the 19th century is now abandoned, and inaccessible to public. “They (bunders) are no more than ghosts of this city’s industrial past,” Mayekar sighs.