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 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.

Not all the stories are well done. Long stretches are overwritten, some of the characters remain stereotypes, and there is a certain annoying naivete about some of the lives described. But in the more satisfying pieces, there are sudden, shining moments of description that are pure Mumbai. Such as this serene morning at the dhobi ghat: “The air would be sharp with the smell of bleach; the breeze would bring its own fragrance — of freshly washed clothes wafting down from the ghat — the sun would rise and glower down on the clothes; the clothes would soak in the warm rays eagerly, gratefully; the women would tiptoe down, taking care to avoid the burning hot rocks that could scald their feet; the men would stretch, yawn, and dream of lunch and of a good sleep thereafter.”

Like the motley group of residents who come together to protest against an eviction notice from the housing board, the characters in these stories, inhabitants of a claustrophobic city, find moments of comfort when they can relate to each other. Such a retired syce, now operating an old Victoria cab outside the Hilton, befriends a sex worker and helps her to bring up her baby, getting up three times at night to check on the six-month-old infant. Or the old Parsi woman who, when her war-hero husband dies, sets out to keep his memory alive — by keeping alive his “theory of trust, his motion of full confidence, reposed boldly and unconditionally in his fellow human beings”.

Sometimes such comfort is offered in the words of strangers — like, when an unhappy young woman, just coming out of a dysfunctional relationship, is offered a green coconut by a coconut picker on Marine Drive. As it is his first pick of the day, he offers it to her free — but hardened by life in this city, she is reluctant to accept it without paying something for it. The man urges her to accept the little gift with faith: “See what a great fruit this coconut is: it grows near the sea, near the ocean; it grows on salt water, which you and I can’t bear to taste; and yet, when it comes to us, the water inside is always sweet, always delicious. And now, if our minds were like this, we took the bitter and we made it sweet, we would never need to worry; we can learn to live and trust each other.”
A naive and obvious message, one might say. But sometimes such words need to be spoken over and over again for the city to hear them and grasp their wisdom.