(This is a forthcoming graphic novel to be published in 2009)

The pre-history of our story is connected to an island far away from Mumbai. It starts during a time when the city itself was nothing more than a lazy collection of seven water circled spits of land, inhabited by a fishing community, birds, beasts, insects, some bored goddesses living in makeshift shrines and a handful of forgotten ancient monuments.

The island in our story still exists, around ninety kilometers south of Mumbai. It is overgrown with trees that have airoots sniffing for a whiff from the past. Remembering the days when it was literally a compact city. It’s twenty two acres of black stonewalls are littered with cave-like rooms and shelters, water bodies and the remains of an ancient, unknown shrine of a religion that does not resemble any of the known faiths that have known to have settled down in this part of the country; neither Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian.

Historians surmise that the unknown faith must have flaked off the thriving sea trade connecting Africa and India. They talk of trade, trafficking, wars, and even an African kingdom that ruled parts of western India for a few hundred years. A kingdom that controlled the seas, from one continental coast to another, harnessing the energy of a thousand exchanges, of goods, services, ideas, music, flora, fauna, and people. Near our island, there still exists a palace that belongs to that old African kingdom. We even know that its royal descendent still lives; in a large south – Mumbai flat.

Our story is half connected to his kingdom, and only partially connected to the region’s African history. Most scholars simply gave up trying to decipher the remains of what is known of that hazy period. No one could logically trace the trading routes that must have given rise to that mysterious faith, no one managed to trace the place they must have come from.

No one even knows that the neighbouring flat of the African king (who still lives in South Mumbai) is owned by a descendent of this lost kingdom.

No one knows that the children playing below the table in this image are supposed to carry on an old legacy, connected to the city’s hidden past.

Our story begins from under the table.