Haji Ali Dargah

This guide to Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai opens with a roadside miracle: a weeping woman, a merchant named Haji Ali Shah Bukhari, and oil gushing from the ground where he pressed his thumb into the earth to help her. It follows what that act cost him, as he gave away everything he owned and left his homeland in present-day Uzbekistan on a pilgrimage to Mecca, eventually settling on Mumbai's shores to teach. The guide lingers on the instruction he left before he died, refusing burial in any graveyard and asking instead that the sea decide where he would rest. Pilgrims today, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh alike, still time their visit to the tide that governs the causeway out to the shrine.