Kitab Book Festival
As the Kitab Book Festival gets underway in Mumbai, Time Out carries a piece by me on the city and its literature. Here’s an excerpt:
All I knew of Bombay during those early years were the Juhu hotels and drunken Goans shown in Hindi films – and the beginning chapter of VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness: “As soon as our quarantine flag came down and the last of the barefooted, blue-uniformed policemen of the Bombay Port Health Authority had left the ship, Coelho the Goan came aboard and, luring me with a long beckoning finger into the saloon, whispered, ‘You have any cheez?’”
A few more years, and everything would change. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children evoked, with a migrant’s ardent recall, the Bombay suburbs of his childhood. The novel began with the declaration: “I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.” In Saleem Sinai’s fevered imagination, Shivaji’s equestrian statue came to life at night and the horse’s “grey, stone hooves” galloped past Bombay’s landmarks, their names faithfully recorded in the pages of the novel. Saleem’s home was located in Methwold’s Estate – and he described, with a lump in his throat, the road turning off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops.
That turn of the narrow road past small shops and the confectioner’s, leading to large and crumbling, overpopulated villas – this was a turn also in the world of Indian writing in English. That same road from Midnight’s Children ran past Rohinton Mistry’s Firozsha Baag, and Au Revoir Exports, and Pleasant Villa. And the Central Works Department No 17 chawl in which Kiran Nagakar’s Ravan and Eddie lived. It went past the apartment building, where under the curving stairway, Manil Suri’s Vishnu lay dying. And young Altaf Tyrewala’s Flat 1203, 1302, 1401, and Flat 1602, 1503, 1404.
These writers had mapped an urban world of familiar places and people, or perhaps a world made familiar only by being thus named. What also made this city real was that, starting with Rushdie, writers had begun making use of Bambaiyya English, a mixed-up argot, street-smart and as infectious as conjunctivitis. But in the time that has passed since the publication of Midnight’s Children more decisive changes were to occur in Mumbai’s literary landscape.
That narrow road from Rushdie’s childhood would join a busier street and, with suitable special effects, explode into the teeming pages of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Like Naipaul in an extended part of A Million Mutinies Now, Mehta would show that a city is more than a sum of its parts because of its individual inhabitants and their unappeasable energies. Naipaul, Mehta, and even Chandra – unlike Rushdie, their writing about Mumbai has been based on a diligent search for material. These are works of reportage. It is crucial to grasp this break from Rushdie’s magical realism. The map that these writers unfold for us is not so much of a remembered place as of real people in real places.
