We picked up Tristram Shandy, the fictional autobiography, as a compulsory English Lit text, without a clue about its author’s exciting local liaison. Now we know better. Laurence Sterne’s love story-turned-ghost tale is retold with considerable élan by Captain Ramesh Babu in My Own Mazagon: The history of a little island in the Bombay archipelago.   

Having served in the Indian Navy—as chief engineer of INS Mumbai and first Captain Superintendent of the ship repair yard at Karwar—and Mazagon Dock for 25 years, he documents evolutionary centuries of this harbour hub in progressively illuminating chapters. They flow in an easy, unhurried style, offering a fair amount of information, which will prove less known to several readers. The book is his parting gift to the city he loves, before retirement to the Kerala village, where he spent a childhood hearing his grandmother’s stories of Travancore kings and queens, Calicut Zamorins, Kochi Rajas, Rajputs and Marathas.