MUMBAI, April 26 -- We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time, wrote Suketu Mehta in 'Maximum City' about a city in transition. In his twin projects spanning a decade in the making photographer and filmmaker Sunhil Sippy, 55, presents two sides of Mumbai. The recently released 'Raceday' is an extensive photo essay through 150 frames documenting the Mahalaxmi Racecourse and the synergies that make it thrive; and 'Eastward' is a collection of 35 photos from the old industrial eastern flank of the Wadala-Kalwa line, where his grandfather's steel factory once stood -- where the mill sites drummed and fell silent. The latter project will be exhibited at a south Mumbai gallery next month. In a diptych-like chronicle, one reflects a world on the precipice of change and the other derelict. Sippy's draw to the east was somewhat subliminally through memories from summer vacations to Bombay from London (where he grew up), when his grandmother drove him from their residence in Carmichael Road to Wadala and Kalwa to see the steel factories, while the racecourse project, he says, emerged serendipitously. "I don't plan anything. I take pictures, until I find a story," says Sippy. Having photographed the Mahalaxmi Racecourse since 2013, the image that was to change things to come was of a horse bursting through the early-morning mist, a half-built flyover looming behind it. Over dinner at a friend's place, he showed the frame casually to Subhag Singh, a junior horse trainer at the time, who encouraged him to shoot the inner world of racing, following which Shujaat Hussain, the racing administrator, allowed him access. Around that time the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) 100-year lease of the racecourse land to the Royal Western India Turf Club (RWITC) had expired and murmurs were rife in the corridors of power about the civic body's plans to take ownership of the land and convert it into a theme park. Word got around setting Sippy's focus on track. "Nobody had seen the workings of that world," he says; inadvertently marking its possible future epitaph. What followed over the years of privileged access was photographing a structured life -- jockeys preparing their saddles, the old stables, horses swimming in the pool, their morning rituals with the trainers - the animals emerging, circling the track, rolling in the soil - the spectators, punters, book-keepers. It was a static world; each element sequestered from the other. "Subhag wore the same jacket he'd worn in 2015, the gamblers would be arranged in the same positions, the jockeys weighing themselves on the same scales, maintaining the same focussed relationship with their bodies; with the exception of Lavani dancers who once performed before the crowds melting away to give way to sponsored events and fashion shows ahead of the annual derby." These snapshots are some of the 150 that make 'Raceday', with an essay by Sippy flowing through the pages like a quiet hum, not overpowering the subject. Two images however represent the essence of that life captured in time - twin pictures of a single jockey taken a decade apart that appear as mirror images. "It was and remains a blinkered world, like the horses themselves; while the world around the racecourse seems to be pressing into it," says Sippy. The city around the racecourse was changing in the span of Sippy's work. The definitive structure of south Mumbai - residences in the deep south, offices in Churchgate and Nariman Point, and mills in Parel and Wadala - had been redefined. Luxury residential towers circled the Mahalaxmi Racecourse and Parel, making the enclave a cynosure of realtors' eyes. The BMC is now developing the 211-acre racecourse into a Grand Central Park, keeping 120 acres for a public park while renewing the lease for 91 acres with the RWITC. The plan, to be executed by architect Hafeez Contractor, includes an underground sports complex, 3-level parking, a tunnel linking the park to the Coastal Road, and a new seven-storey clubhouse planned for the RWITC. The project has drawn criticism from the Mumbai Architects Collective (MAC), roughly comprising 100 prominent domain experts, regarding its impact on flood resilience, potential traffic issues and the loss of natural open ground, stating that the construction could weaken the area's role in mitigating climate risk. Sippy was documenting not just a tightly knit community but a relationship - between the world that had chosen not to change and a world that had no intention of stopping. The racecourse, with its rain trees and its sandy oval and its particular morning smell, was holding out, while the city was putting forward a bid. Not wishing to be a naysayer, he says, "There is a community in there that is robust, that represents continuity, that is innocent. They're not harming anyone. I would love to see that not get harmed. The place has depth. It's not just a land - it's memory, culture and practice." He pauses. "It has tremendous value to the city in its bones. Not just the surface." "What's nice is that it's raw," he says of the racecourse in its current form. "It's overgrown in the monsoon, and changes with seasons. One hopes it does not turn into a homogeneous thing." The least beautiful image therefore, he says, became the most compelling one in 'Raceday'. He writes of the frame in his essay in the book: "To the east, a massive flyover has begun to sprout, creeping into the northern end of the parking lot, winding through the mighty rain trees that once made this grand avenue - to where it leads, I am too afraid to ask." The book comes with inserts -- a cheeky gambler's booklet and transparent slides that can be held up to the light. "I hope this will be a document that sits on someone's shoulder twenty-five years from now; something referential," he says. 'Eastward' is an unconscious hat-tip to Sippy's maternal grandfather, Bhagwan Ramchand , who came to Mumbai from Karachi following the partition in 1947 to set up a steel factory - Krishna Steel - in Reay Road and subsequently in Wadala. He died young at 52, leaving Sippy's grandmother Maya to run the operation, until the factory closed down following labour troubles in the 1980s. Those stories - of furnaces and fire, of wire rods and warehouse floors, of his grandmother driving him in her old Fiat up to Kalwa lodged deep in his mind. The exhibition which opens at Gallerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, on May 15, is a collection of photographs stemming from memory; more distant than 'Raceday', it is formal and concerned with time as a geological force. There are images where mangroves push through the broken concrete of derelict godowns and salt pans catch the light before other plans for the spaces take over in the future. An image sequence shot at night in Cotton Green shows the lights of new residential towers in the background with broken walls of century-old factories occupying the foreground. There is a bridge in Kalwa, unfinished with both sides reaching toward each other across a gap, and mangroves jutting in between. Photographing the eastern parts, says Sippy, gave him an understanding of the nerves of the city - "the industries, where the water comes from, the nuts and bolts of the city" - if only lead him into an understanding "of where I am". The defining thread of the series hinges on decay, development and nature's pushback....