Baumgartner winces in Colaba, Saleem Sinai sniffs in Breach Candy and Inspector Sartaj Singh waits outside a bomb bunker. Fiction has captured the metropolis’ incendiary dreams and nightmares
He spent his last years with stray cats in a seedy lane in Mumbai, a stone’s throw from Nariman House and the Taj. Had he witnessed the recent terrorist attacks, he would have shaken his head and spoken sorrowfully about his Jewish upbringing in Germany and the depredations of the Nazis.

However, Hugo Baumgartner walked the byways of Colaba only in our imagination. He is, of course, the protagonist of Anita Desai’s 1988 Baumgartner’s Bombay, just one of the works of fiction in English in which the city plays a role.

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

Much water has flowed down the Mithi River since then, and Catherine of Braganza’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 De’s frequent forays into the lives of the cocktail-sipping class.

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