I’d heard of Rubina Ali in my earlier visits to the Gharib Nagar shanty colony outside Mumbai’s suburban Bandra station but had never had the opportunity to meet her. It took a raging fire through the colony to finally bring me face-to-face with the child star of the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire”.

On Friday night, after a long day out in the field covering various stories, I was finally on my way home. Suddenly I got a call from a friend about a major fire in the slums close to Bandra railway station in suburban Mumbai. I immediately called my colleague, Mumbai-based Reuters photographer Vivek Prakash, who lives quite close to where the fire had broken out. While Vivek rushed to the spot, I reached there shortly after. An inferno was burning in place of the small fire I’d imagined it to be.

Onions have been a very important part of Indian history. Governments have fallen here over the price of onions. So last week when our commodities correspondent Rajendra Jadhav suggested a story on the skyrocketing prices of vegetables, onions seemed the natural peg. The idea was to do something simple around the price of a vegetable as it changes from the field to the dinner table. Our destination was the wholesale onion market in Nashik, Maharashtra, one of the highest producers of onions in the country. Nothing had prepared us for what we were about to encounter.

On Monday, prices of onions nose-dived over a ban on exports by the government and the arrival of new stock through imports. Unaware of this, we went to the onion market in Lasalgaon.

The fishing harbor of Mumbai, India, has been one of my favorite hunting grounds for pictures in the city. It was one of the first places I discovered upon landing in the city seven months ago. The fishing harbor is small, a ‘little’ smelly and very crowded. You can’t stand in one place and if you do, then you’ll be pushed about and abused by the locals who don’t like tourists taking pictures during business hours.

For this particular picture I had to wait for almost an hour. I noticed earlier that cranes tried to swoop down on a particular kind of fish being carried by the fisher folks on their heads. Now I had to find a good angle and try to position myself from where I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way and there would still be some room to maneuver.