By Shakir Reshamwala

MUMBAI: A leafy cemetery tucked behind a wall off a busy road in South Mumbai is the final resting place of many Kuwaitis who spent their entire lives in India. The names on the headstones of the gravesites, some decades old and others relatively recent, reveal a who's who of Kuwaiti merchants, diplomats and seafarers who called erstwhile Bombay their home.

The upkeep of the cemetery and a mosque attached to it off Charni Road in Mumbai is managed by a Kuwaiti family, whose members visit the city regularly from Kuwait to oversee the running of the place and pay their respects to the departed.

Kuwaitis have longstanding ties with India, even before both countries became independent from Britain. Kuwaitis visited India for trade in the pre-oil era, and the Indian rupee was in circulation in Kuwait and the Gulf till the sixties. Many Indian words also entered the Kuwaiti lexicon and dialect, and are spoken to this day. The lives of Kuwaiti families in Bombay of the '40s have been serialized in 'Mohammed Ali Road', a fictional Netflix series whose Season 2 is out now.

Even after the discovery of oil, when the tide turned, with Indians now heading to the prosperous Gulf country, some Kuwaiti families preferred to stay on in Bombay, even choosing to be buried there. The tranquil cemetery and quaint mosque are a testament to the deep bond the peoples of the two nations share.