The Statue the Sea Gave Back — Koli Fisherman and Mount Mary

In 1700, Muscat pirates rowed ashore at Bandra hunting temple gold in a church. Finding none, they took their disappointment out on the wooden Madonna — hacking off her right forearm, supposing even that painted wood might hide treasure. (Bees, the parish adds with a straight face, attacked the pirates till they fled.) The mutilated statue was stored away; a substitute — Our Lady of Navigators — took her hill.

Then a Koli fisherman, Christian of the sea-folk, dreamed a strange dream: she is in the water; bring her home. And in the water she was — a Madonna floating in the Arabian Sea, sometime between 1700 and 1760. The parish records keep the wonder carefully hedged and warmly believed: a Jesuit letter of 1669 already testifies to the hill's miracles, and the recovered statue drew crowds that never left.

In 1761 the broken Lady was repaired — a detachable Child Jesus set in the crook of the wounded arm, as if heaven itself had supplied the prosthesis — and returned to her Mount. The substitute went home to St. Andrew's. And the thanksgiving fair the fishermen started has run three hundred Septembers since: wax limbs and houses, guava cheese and chikki, Hindus and Muslims and Christians climbing one hill for one Mother.

The sea took her arm. The sea gave her back. Bandra has been saying thank you ever since.