My gateway to India has been its contemporary writers and their passions for yesterday’s Bombay, a city now known as Mumbai,” says American photographer and photo-journalist, Betsy Karel. “The humanity, humour, and psychological intensity of their stories fire my imagination. I challenge myself to try to find visual equivalents of the jadoo – Hindi for magic – found in their novels. I have fallen in love with the mythic mid-twentieth century Bombay...”
Betsy, whose book Bombay Jadoo is ready for release, is obviously fascinated with the city. For her, Bombay is a city of tolerance, civility, and generosity of spirit; where the religious and the profane exist comfortably side by side, and where reality and fantasy slip and slide into and out of one another. “I am at the centre of a swirling, urban fairy tale on a peninsula in the Arabian Sea, one dotted with pockets of enchanted gardens as well as darker, more threateningly mysterious realms. Gods and spirits are consulted and invoked. In a blink, public spaces become private places – islands of intimacy.”
Although her first impressions were always those of chaos and a superabundance of stimuli, with time and patience Betsy could sense “levels of order within the congestion.” Her numerous trips to Mumbai began a decade ago in 1997 and each visit left her with scores of vivid, vibrant and delightful impressions. 
The 61-year-old photographer was born in New York City but now lives in Washington, DC. In the 1970s and early 80s, she worked as a photojournalist.
After an absence of 15 years, she returned to photography in 1998 to participate in ‘The Way Home’, a book and national exhibition on homelessness in America; the project was initiated by Tipper Gore, the then Vice-President’s wife. Betsy’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yale University Art Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the John F Kennedy Library. Betsy’s book, Bombay Jadoo, captures her variegated impressions of the bustling metropolis. The gaze of the photographer is clearly not on snapping some clichéd, picture postcard images but to focus on the city’s people and, their cluttered and chaotic life. In the course of her journey, Betsy sights the customary lifelines of the city that is the Western and Central Railway.
As vigorously does she peer into the street life in Dadar, Girgaum and Colaba, and the beaches of Chowpatty, and Juhu. Choc-o-block traffic at Bhendi bazaar, packed insides of suburban trains, weary inhabitants of Dhobi Ghat, senior citizens having a hearty laugh on a park bench, imploring worshippers, lively yoga practitioners, kids playing cricket on a rain-drenched beach, bouncy street performers, engrossed flautists of a police band, cluttered tea shops, wrestlers in a sandy ring, busy construction workers, fishermen with their catch...  Betsy has caught them all in fifty-odd striking monochromatic images.
In her acknowledgements, she reiterates her gratitude to “all of the writers whose novels have inspired me and those whose fiction I have yet to read.” Bombay Jadoo contains two companion pieces: Suketu Mehta’s recollection of his boyhood in Bombay, and an excerpt from Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy.
“The first thing I remember about Bombay was that I got into a room and it flew,” reminisces Mehta in his piece.
“I was six-years-old. In Calcutta, where I’d just moved from, I had never been in an elevator. Later I discovered that in Bombay, not just rooms but stairs also moved of their own volition.”
Recalling his rollerskating/ bicycling days down Teen Batti on Sunday mornings (on rented bicycles hired for a rupee), Mehta describes how the sound, colour, and moods of the sea lent heft and weight to his childhood.
The sea left its impression on Vakil as well. “In London it’s the birds, in Singapore it’s the rain, but in Bombay it’s the sea that wakes you,” he writes. “The curtain-like drawing-in of a wave or the spray of an incoming breeze. Morning and evening and afternoon and night..
“Even in the darkness of a cinema, watching Rajesh Khanna dancing and singing his way across the stage in Apna Desh, even here in the Citylight theater, there is a sense of water, brackish, dusky, murmuring in the distance.” Printed in Germany and published by Steidl, Göttingen, ‘Bombay Jadoo’ is being launched on July 26 at Bungalow 8, Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai; this will be followed by releases at Bangalore and Delhi in early August.