One page. One map. Both tucked into one chapter of our History textbook.

This was a recollection that dates back to when yours truly was probably in class 6 or 7. As students, this was the sum total of our understanding about how the island city of Bombay/Mumbai came to be. Of course, this was a different time, when a majority of schools followed the SSC curriculum, when satellite television hadn't invaded our homes, and when the frontiers of knowledge for impressionable kids like us, began and ended in a far smaller circumference. We hadn't even realised that the city, our Bombay (then), was a creation that had spanned centuries of trade, commerce, migrant communities and conquests. We were unaware of the wonderful chronology around its seven islands that been strung together by a collective of scholarly and visionary minds, and leaders who dared to believe that the land on which stood was meant to be the city of dreams, eons ago.