A twenty-something crime reporter remaps Mumbai
Abir Ganguly works on the crime beat for a Mumbai tabloid. He files man-bites-dog stories day after day and spends the rest of the time dreaming up wisecracks. He likes the weather in Mumbai — inside the air-conditioned malls, that is. He talks to a lizard that inhabits a corner of the wall in his Andheri one-BHK. He gets attacked and pinned down by female mannequins — in his imagination. Oh, and he has a vivid imagination.

No, Abir Ganguly isn’t as clever as he thinks, he is not even as cynical as he thinks, but you can cut him some slack: he is only 23. So when a police inspector calls him on his cellphone one evening and asks him to come along for a little jaunt down to Mahalaxmi, he goes. When the little jaunt turns into a gunfight that kills a man — who, by the way, happened to be a Muslim — Abir returns to the office and files a report: “Cops Kill Gangster in Gunfight”.

A week later, when Abir is asked to profile the dead man, the “gangster” of the report, he discovers that there is much more to the story. There is, in fact, a whole life. How he sets about to recreate that life might have been the subject of this novel, but it is not. My Friend Sancho is, instead, about the friendship that develops between Abir and Muneeza, the daughter of the dead man.

... contd.