Breathless in Bombay
Murzban F. Shroff
Picador India, Rs 295
The city of Bombay, with all its excesses — gold and dirt, commerce and crime, celluloid and reality — continually challenges the imagination. Which of its stories to tell, among the millions that inhabit the city; how to tell them, who should be the storyteller, and who are the characters — these questions confront writers who set their tales here. All kinds of fictional wanderers have ended up in this city of migrants and settlers, such as Baumgartner, Anita Desai’s old German Jew who spends his days feeding stray cats and shuffling about in the bylanes of Colaba; Saleem Sinai, Salman Rushdie’s crafty, young storyteller who was born in the city and grew up here amid an ocean of voices; and Sartaj Singh, Vikram Chandra’s tired police officer, who struggles to maintain his integrity even as the city tries to take it from him every day.

Here is Breathless in Bombay, a collection of 14 short stories by Murzban Shroff. These are about the inhabitants of the city, mainly those members of the working class who keep the city running through the day and night — the dhobi, the cabdriver, the sex worker, the maalishwallah, the production controller on the film unit — and, yes, the writer who notices it all and sets it down. These stories are about the little tricks of the trade as well as the sheer doggedness that keeps the city going. Here is a mathematics professor who has made a lucrative business out of sending his students abroad; a taxi driver who refuses fares for short distances while he waits for a trip to the airport; and a socialite columnist who writes breezily about people she knows as well as about people she doesn’t know. In the title story of the collection, we are taken into the breathlessly lavish wedding celebrations of Mumbai’s Gatsby, a textile tycoon, a boy from the chawls who has now made it to the highest point of life in Mumbai: a bungalow on Carmichael Road.

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