Fifteen years ago, Bombay stood for everything the country was not. Today, all it stands for is Bollywood, two of the largest stock exchanges in the country and 67 per cent slums. "India's trend-setting capital has fast turned into a cemetery of dead dreams," says Pinki Virani, who, aggrieved by the changing scenario, travelled through the various faces of the city to chronicle its voices in Once Was Bombay.Affirming that she is not anti-poor (a chawl in Mazgaon was her home for many years), Virani, of Aruna's Story fame, blames the politician-goonda nexus for encouraging slums at the cost of the middle-classes that form the backbone of what Bombay used to be."Our mothers, wives, daughters, all work. At the end of the day our husbands are exhausted and we still have to give an arm and a leg to buy a one-room flat in Nalla Sopara. And all we get in return is stones thrown at us in trains," lashes out Virani, a journalist of 18 years, who has combined the skills of a news person and an author bysequencing the disarray the city's history is in.The journey began three years ago, when Virani returned to Mumbai after spending eight years in Bangalore. Only to find that the city had reached the point of no return. "Money had religion too. Women dangling between chiffon and choola were going insane. After the riots, the city was working only because of its trains (ruined with slums along the tracks) and BEST, the money from which is being diverted to pay an overpaid corporation. Still we didn't get what was rightfully ours," she says.A faction (a factual piece written in fictional style), the book has four short stories and three novellas, which, while being interlinked, still stand apart. And so does the preface. Interviews with a repentant politician and a gangster who scoffs at the jet-set crowd - including stories where people refuse to repose faith in either ostensible intellectuals or politicians - form the better part of the book.As a solution, Mumbai should be made a union territory andthe corporation should be scaled down, suggests Virani. "But the politicians will never allow any of these. So, goodbye Bombay! Once Was Bombay will be released today. Price: Rs 295.
