CITY OF DREAMS
This anthology of stories about Mumbai is like the city itself—crowded and chaotic, but ultimately illuminating
Reading Maya Nagari is a little like crisscrossing the city in a BEST bus. Not one of those brisk routes that takes us along broad highways in a businesslike manner, but a ride that loops around neighbourhoods and meanders through narrow bylanes, oering glimpses into mithai bhandars, marriage mandaps, first-floor windows, the lives of others. Edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, Maya Nagari possesses the haphazard, mosaic-like quality of the city that holds this anthology together. The 21 short stories traverse neighbourhoods, economic classes, communities and seven decades. Befitting the multilingual nature of Bombay-Mumbai, they represent works from eight languages. And in a nod to the higgledypiggledy nature of the city, the stories have been arranged without organisation, structure, chronology. The outcome is a book that is crowded, chaotic, confusing, overwhelming—but ultimately illuminating and true. “You cannot catch a city in words. You cannot catch a city at all,” Pinto writes in the ‘Introduction’, making it clear that these stories do not claim to encapsulate the city. What they hope, however, is to spark reflection and understanding. For, as Gokhale writes, “I see this collection as an invitation: read it to know something of Mumbai, but also to know something of your own city, your own self.” The collection is also an invitation to know something of the people at the periphery of our vision—the children who inhabit the dark regions beneath railway bridges; the lovers who spend stolen afternoons under the unforgiving sun on the rocks of Bandra Bandstand; the Danger-log who burn each other’s shops, attack each other’s children, and live to cause trouble. On these pages we meet an array of memorable Bombayites/ Mumbaikars. The oneeyed Englishman who refuses to leave newly Independent India in Ismat Chugtai’s plangent story ‘Quit India’. The alltoo-familiar residents of Batatyachi Chaal, whose attempts at coming together end with a petty squabble in Pu La Deshpande’s darkly amusing ‘A Cultural Movement is Born’. And the stubborn but powerless mother whose complaints against a blaring loudspeaker have unfortunate consequences in Manasi’s gut-wrenching ‘Civic Duty and Physics Practicals’. Alongside these motley guides, we travel through a multitude of Mumbais. The chawls of the mill workers during the collapse of the textile industry. The cushioned cane armchairs scattered amidst the tall potted plants and salty air of the Taj Mahal Hotel. The Parsi colony on Sleater Road with its nosy neighbours and neat compound. And with each of these excursions into the familiar and the unfamiliar, into brothels and bustling o¡ces, the attentive reader comes closer to comprehending the soul of the city.
I
IN THESE STORIES WE MEET MEMORABLE BOMBAYITES AND TRAVEL THROUGH A MULTITUDE OF MUMBAIS, FROM CHAWLS TO THE TAJ HOTEL