It's nothing if not a city of contrasts. It's ancient and modern, dirt poor (home to Asia's second-largest slum) and filthy rich (stomping ground for countless millionaires). It parties till dawn yet still prays at daybreak. It has has nightclubs and temples, socialites and mystics. It's the most densely populated metropolis on earth, and it has a beach for a backyard. Some say it's too fast, too big, too much—and not to be missed. It even has two names.

I am going to Bombay to become a movie star. Like millions of others who arrive each day in this island-city by car, plane, bus, or boat, I too have my Bombay dream. I am comely, buxom even (thanks to Wonderbra), and I can giggle and jiggle with the best of them. Age is an issue—I am forty-two—but there's nothing a nip and tuck won't fix. So I am going to Bombay to become a movie star. Why not?

Every country in the world, if it is lucky, has a city that allows people to create such gauzy fantasies unfettered by the grim shackles of reality. It would be wrong to say that these cities offer their citizens "the space to dream," for most such places—Rio, Tokyo, Cairo, and New York—are insanely crowded. Still, they thrive and inspire, catalyze personal transformations and fuel creativity, not through wide-open spaces but through vibrant congestion.

Bombay (or Mumbai; locals use them interchangeably) reaches out into the Arabian Sea like an extended palm; and like veins traveling up the arm, its roads and subway lines run on a north-south axis—akin to Manhattan's, actually. The city is narrow, also like Manhattan—divided by Mahim Creek into North and South Bombay (NoBo and SoBo). The neighborhoods are as evocative to Indians as those of that other island it vaguely resembles are to Americans, with edgy Colaba its TriBeCa; Nariman Point its Wall Street; the Gateway of India its welcoming arch and lookout point; all the way up to Bandra, as wholesome and hip as the Upper West Side; and the suburbs beyond—Ghatkopar, Malad, and Thane.

Bombay is India's dream weaver, its cockaigne for consumers, its paean to possibilities. Here are the origins of five percent of the country's GDP, forty percent of its income tax revenue, seventy percent of its capital transactions, one-third of its industrial output. It is the place where pretty young things get off the train with one suitcase and the phone number of a producer relative; where indigent street children dance salsa in the hope of getting onto a reality TV show; where the dhobi who washes clothes for a living gazes at his client's Mercedes with aspiration, not envy. Bombay is the rising spires of Nariman Point, to which bankers like my husband commute each workday to move millions, but it is also the stench and sewers of Dharavi, Asia's second-largest slum, where Muslim tanners toil alongside Hindu potters. Bombay is where Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, is building a twenty-seven-floor home for a reported two billion dollars, with a staff of six hundred to serve his six family members. It is also the crowded by-lanes of Null and Chor bazaars, where artisans from Lucknow live and work in dark, dank rooms, embroidering stunning yellow butterflies that take flight on silk fabrics destined for Europe. Bombay is the city where the inchoate yearnings of a largely repressed nation burst forth into rapturous rainbow reality. For the destitute lad trapped in India's hinterlands, Bombay could well be El Dorado. More than any other global city—save perhaps São Paulo—Bombay is a study in contrasts, contrasts which keep getting starker.