Profiles of Bombay’s rush and repose
A city can dwarf anybody. With its sheer size, its dizzying heights and its many people, it can reduce anybody to nobody. For Arzee the Dwarf, life begins at a natural low. Chandrahas Choudhury’s debut novel captures two weeks in the life of a very short man. Two short weeks that span a long journey from hope to disappointment and back.

But it’s not just the story of Arzee. It’s also the story of the city, its people, its little landmarks and its in-house ghosts—Ranade, the stockbroker, who was “someone so in love with this world that even death could not tear him away from the established routine and unfinished business of living” and who even sent off a person “with advice to hold on to Larsen & Toubro and sell India Cements”.
Among the living, there is Dashrath Tiwari, the migrant taxi driver in Mumbai from Uttar Pradesh, with whom Arzee shares chai and conversation and “who spoke as some people orated”, with his “rich, measured, and lilting speech, the polished pebbles of his syllables” rolling off his tongue.

The constant backdrop to these stories is Noor, the old cinema house where Arzee works, “so old and decrepit now that most of the light had gone out of its name, its power”. The Noor is Arzee’s workplace and his sanctuary, a place where “Arzee always felt secure and well-defended”. It’s also where the head projectionist Phiroz K. Pir had worked for thirty years before deciding to retire. His retirement is a source of hope and happiness to Arzee, who finally finds himself close to a promotion he has yearned for. But Arzee’s story is also of best laid plans coming to nothing as he hears of the Noor’s impending shutdown, its slow end hurried by the rush of multiplexes. As he says, “I set up my own fall by imagining it a victory!”

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