Some Other City Chronicles

Abstract

Driving around the city in a fast car, singing film songs at the top of her voice, laughing and drinking beer on Chowpatty beach, a teenage prostitute has such an enjoyable night with her three clients that she returns the advance payment given to her, not sure why she should accept it. A knife-wielding gangster and ‘bhai’, the deeply feared godfather of a sprawling tenement colony in Faras Road, suffers a serious crisis of identity when circumstances force him to shave off his prized moustache.

A new universe was at hand, comprising an impatient aspirational class. To write of it, one would probably need to adopt the epic mode, or the expansiveness of the 19th-century novel, one of whose themes was the invention of fortunes — albeit of families, rather than of nations and cities. One could partake of this creation-myth by writing of Bombay, because it embodied its ambitions so vibrantly […].¹