Mumbai Central

Of the authors who have written about Mumbai, it is Salman Rushdie who is the most lyrical. Saleem Sinai of Midnight8217;s Children grows up in the privileged enclave of Breach Candy, and characters from The Ground Beneath Her Feet and The Moor8217;s Last Sigh share similar backgrounds. The author once remarked that the Bombay of the late Fifties and early Sixties felt 8220;like a kind of enchanted zone8230; a wonderful, exciting, vibrant city to grow up in. And I fell in love with it then and forever8221;.

Much water has flowed down the Mithi River since then, and Catherine of Braganza8217;s bequest has changed irrevocably There has been a corresponding fictional shift, from a south Mumbai existence to the middle-class centre and the suburbs, notwithstanding Shobha De8217;s frequent forays into the lives of the cocktail-sipping class.

The hero of Ardashir Vakil8217;s nostalgia-filled 1998 Beach Boy, for example, though equally privileged, indulges in his adolescent passions from his parents8217; Juhu bungalow. Rohinton Mistry8217;s characters live in crumbling apartment blocks in central Mumbai, afflicted by fatalism while national events from the 1971 Pakistan War to the Emergency cast long shadows. Manil Suri8217;s mythological-themed though dreary The Death of Vishnu and his later The Age of Shiva depict a middle-class milieu in which people trapped in the pettiness of the present dream of a better future. Further down the scale, Kiran Nagarkar8217;s boisterous Ravan and Eddie spring from the teeming chawls.

Notwithstanding the preferences of Vakil8217;s hero, tinsel town glitter doesn8217;t feature too often in Mumbai fiction. Two contrived early-Nineties novels, I. Allan Sealy8217;s Hero and Shashi Tharoor8217;s Show Business, tried valiantly to marry Bollywood and politics. More recently, the protagonist of Amitava Kumar8217;s Home Products arrives in Mumbai with the aim of writing a film script, an unfulfilled ambition.

The city8217;s other visible symbol, its slums, plays a major part in Vikas Swarup8217;s Q038;A 8212; inventive, though with a whiff of the potboiler about it 8212; and in Gregory David Roberts8217; swaggering Shantaram. The latter dwells on that popular Mumbai pastime, engaging in underworld activities, and this is also at the core of Vikram Chandra8217;s mammoth Sacred Games, which can lay claim to being The Great Mumbai Novel. It encompasses not just the underworld but the city8217;s distinctive patois, cuisine, neighbourhoods and more, while narrating the cat-and-mouse game between don Ganesh Gaitonde and Inspector Sartaj Singh, a character from Chandra8217;s earlier, heartfelt Love and Longing in Bombay.

It turns out that one doesn8217;t need first-hand knowledge of the city to successfully write about it. Which may come as a surprise to Amit Chaudhuri, whose essays often dwell on his Mumbai childhood, and to Suketu Mehta, whose Maximum City is a nonfiction counterpart to Sacred Games. Take the case of H.R.F. Keating whose A Perfect Murder, the first of a series of detective novels featuring intrepid Mumbai police inspector Ganesh Ghote, appeared in 1964. Keating himself appeared in Mumbai for the first time a full decade after he made the city the backdrop to his novels.

With the new crop of writers, the city again assumes different forms. Murzban Shroff8217;s Breathless in Bombay revolves around those perched on the lower rungs of the social ladder: washermen, carriage drivers and pimps, while Nalini Jones8217; nuanced yet precise stories in What You Call Winter delineate people coming to grips with time8217;s passage in the suburb of 8220;Santa Clara8221;, a stand-in for Bandra. And Altaf Tyrewala8217;s No God in Sight ingeniously links the tales of those affected by an earlier Mumbai tragedy, the blasts and subsequent riots of 1992-93.

The recent onslaught on the city has been ineptly referred to as 8220;India8217;s 9/118221;. Well, one of the fallouts of the attack on the Twin Towers was the spate of 8220;9/11 novels8221;, from the unexceptional John Updike8217;s Terrorist to the overwrought Jonathan Safran Foer8217;s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to the elegant Joseph O8217;Neill8217;s Netherland. It remains to be seen whether November 26 will yield such fruit, but a pointer can be found in a post on India Uncut by blogger and debutant novelist Amit Varma: 8220;This book was written in a Bombay before these attacks; it will come out in a Bombay after these attacks, and it somehow feels8230; that it will be inadequate.8221; Ironically, Rushdie found himself in the same corner when he chronicled the life of New York, his adopted city, in the below-par Fury. The publication date of that book: one week before September 11, 2001.