Saumya Roy's Reading List

"A chawl is like a tenement. It’s these long, low-slung buildings that really characterized Mumbai at one time. Some had sloping red tile roofs. It’s communal living in a way, these one-room houses, with long corridors and a shared bathroom and toilet at the end, maybe among 20-30 families. So, again, foods are melding when somebody is cooking, going into someone else’s house, children are all intermingled, you don’t know where your child is at the end of the day. Often the design is that there’ll be a courtyard in the middle. Mill workers lived in them and maybe they were made originally for single men, but then later they just bulged with families like you see in this book, 8,10, 12 members of a family living in one single room. They became so characteristic of Mumbai at one point, with all kinds of festivals being celebrated and movies made about living in a chawl. The famous Aesop’s fable of the hare and tortoise, there’s a Hindi movie of it, about these two neighbors living in a chawl. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In Ravan and Eddie , Kiran Nagarkar has used that thread of intertwining communal living to show so many things about Mumbai city. Ravan is a Hindu and Eddie, his neighbor, is a Christian. He shows how their lives are tied together in the most comical, irreverent way, and yet with bits of darkness, tragedy, seriousness. It’s very humorous. We see everything through the lives of these two children, who we see right from birth until they are older and coming of age. They’re intertwined from birth, I’ll tell you how: Ravan, as a baby, had fallen from the window of his chawl onto the father of Eddie who had died when trying to save him. Then the mother is taking him in an ambulance and Eddie is born. So their lives are stuck together forever. It’s very characteristic of Mumbai city where different religions and different languages mix in the most unexpected ways. It is Eddie who joins the Hindu right-wing RSS and it is Ravan who drops out and ends up uninterested in right-wing Hindu nationalism and doing totally different things. It’s very irreverent, very funny and, at the same time, underpinning the comedy is the pathos of living like this, the tragedy of living like this, of families living these outsize lives in this very small space and with very little. It’s set in the 1950s. So there is still a patina to Bombay city, it’s still nice, it still feels a little sanitized, a clean space for ideas, a space for thoughts, which is also what you see in this book. It’s one my favourite books about Bombay, just for its sense of fun and unexpectedness. It’s a great entry point for someone. Although it’s set in the 50s, ultimately it’s about two boys having a wonderful childhood."

"It’s about a family, the mother and two children. The mother suffers from bipolar, and the two children are remembering growing up with her. When she is lucid, she has the most beautiful memories of her long courtship with their father. When she is not so lucid, she is very acerbic, sharp, with a temper, and then you see her completely in the throes of depression and the children having to deal with that. It’s deeply emotional while, at the same time, having that sharp, raw voice. The way he’s shown family life with such tremendous emotion, it just breaks your heart completely. Mingled with everyday mundane things that happen in families, suddenly it could be that the mother needs to be taken to hospital, or there’s blood on the floor. That mingling of the mundane and the heightened emotional experience of the mother just totally grips you. He’s also used dialogue very beautifully. What is Bombay English? This is a great example. The city is such an amazing character in the book because Jerry has lived in this city his whole life. He was born here. I’d also like to mention his other book, Murder in Mahim , which is a murder mystery. Em and the Big Hoom is set in this particular part of the city called Mahim, where a lot of Catholic people live and he is one. The seasons, the trees, the flowers, the urinals, everyday life is mixing with this very emotional experience of living with a mother who has bipolar—facing it every day, living with it, you almost being the adult sometimes but then the mother being the mother sometimes. It’s just beautiful and moving. That’s not about his family, it’s a murder mystery. In both the books the city and this area, Mahim, comes out as an amazing character. You see the trees, the seasonal flowers, the urinals, the trains, the smallest railway platforms, the Sunday lunches. He’s used the character of the city so beautifully in both these books."

"We’ve touched upon it even with Ravan and Eddie. It’s called the RSS and it’s a Hindu nationalist organization. It was meant only for men, and they wore khaki shorts. They would go out to do exercises every morning, but they were also learning many cultural aspects. They were being taught right-wing thoughts. For many years it was reserved for men, but if you see the cover of this book, the main character is a woman wearing khaki shorts and high heels. So you know right away that this is a genre-bending book. This is part of the reason why I chose it, because it has these two women characters who completely defy any stereotype: they are irreverent, sharp, fun, unexpected, which makes them such Bombay characters. This woman in the shorts, Akhila Iyer, is trying to make prank videos (this is pre-Tik Tok), where she corners men and asks them uncomfortable questions. She has views on everything: she doesn’t like anyone who is a socialist, Marxist, environmentalist, eats salad and she wants to corner them by making videos. Akhila finds this very Bombay incident of a building collapse. She’s just gone out for a run and a building has collapsed in a heap. She’s called to extricate a man who is stuck in the debris. This man is muttering some secrets thinking he’s going to die, and through those she uncovers what is called an ‘encounter killing’, a police shootout. It’s based on a real-life incident. A young, suspected teenaged woman terrorist has been killed by the police for being involved in a plot to kill a person who later became Prime Minister of India, who happens to have been a member of the Sangh. He is a thinly veiled character in the book. There are lots of thinly veiled characters, lots of satire, and I love that there are women at the center of it. So this encounter killing, this ‘shootout’, was a very much publicized incident where a teenage Muslim girl had been killed and there was this whole debate about whether she was a terrorist or she was not a terrorist. And so while this is a piece of fiction, he uses it as an entry point, through the debris of that building, to make these irreverent but at the same time, very, very sharp, observations about the city, about the country, about what is going on in our country. It’s some of the sharpest social commentary you will see about our times. And he spares nobody. I think you would enjoy it anyway because it’s full of his sharp commentary and full of humour. Manu is known for his clever insights and it’s full of them. So you will enjoy it anyway and it will give you a wonderful understanding. The rise of the right wing is not only in India, it is also happening elsewhere in the world. It gives you a sense of what is happening here, but it does give you a sense of what is going on elsewhere. And it’s full of these outsized, unforgettable characters."

"This book is by Kalpana Sharma who is a doyen among women journalists in our city. It’s about Dharavi which is known as the largest slum in Asia. To outsiders, even within the city, but especially to westerners, slums feel like dark, uninviting places almost, but she takes us into Dharavi and just makes it so full of light and enterprise and this tremendous, wonderful, positive energy. It’s a microcosm of the city and of the country because she shows you how all these people from different communities, from different parts of the country, came to occupy this place. So, say, Tamilians came from here and set up tanneries and Gujaratis came from there and set up the potters’ community. All these communities have their own little lanes, their corner of Dharavi is a microcosm of where they came from. They speak their languages, continue the businesses of their ancestors, and eat those foods. Then there are the fisher folk who were supposed to be the original inhabitants of Dharavi, but then the sea got reclaimed and the city grew over it and people came from all over. She is showing us how the city was built. When I started my nonprofit, we also began a lot by working in Dharavi, so these lanes are very familiar to me. The sun does not seep into them, but you will find fish drying there, home made crisps drying there. I don’t know how they dry in the dark, but they do. You’re walking on drains, turning corners, going down blind alleys and suddenly finding, ‘Oh, there’s a glove factory here!’ There’s beautiful embroidery being done; expensive wallets being made. Some might be sold as European designer labels, maybe. It’s like a microcosm of the whole city, of the whole country, of the whole world in this tiny place. She talks about it in her book, I talk about it a little bit in my book, in Manto’s book he talks about it. Bombay was a city where because of the lack of physical space there was tension, but there was a lot of intermingling also. It was home to wealthy Muslims, the biggest movie stars were Muslims. So this was a city where people mingled, life mingled, food mingled, but certainly after the 1992 riots—which she talks about and I talk about—there has been a ghettoization in the city. Muslims have moved out to the flinty suburbs of the city. Housing has become segregated in the name of food. That bias associated with militant vegetarianism is more in Bombay than in any other city. So you can only live in some nice buildings if you’re vegetarian, which Muslims and some other communities of course are not. It’s a way of keeping them out. So the city has become segregated, and then there’s redlining, which I talk about. If you now live in that flinty suburb, your pizza will not get delivered to you, credit cards will not be delivered to you, banks are not there. Life now has got segregated; I don’t think it’s fair to say that it has not. What can I say? My book is about the dumping ground which is now mostly Muslim: those who could move out moved out and they were mostly Hindus. They do. I have a great love for Marathi language which is the language of Bombay. I was born in Pune which is just a few hours away and is a much more Marathi speaking city. It was in Marathi that the city was originally called Mumbai. So when I speak in Marathi, I will always call it Mumbai. But Bombay is also a colonial city and they called it Bombay. Bombay is the city we grew up in."

"Before he became a celebrated short story writer, Manto was the ultimate Bollywood struggler. He wrote scripts for Hindi movies which hardly anyone has seen. Actually, I suspect he wanted to be in the movies and write movie scripts just as much as he wanted to write short stories. When people from small towns come to Bombay, they love it like ‘stars from another sky’. They love that starriness of Bombay city. This is the first of that kind of writing, where he is wanting to mingle with the movie stars. He’s making friends with them. He’s talking about their life. He wanted to make it in Bollywood more than anything. So he’s talking about Bombay of that period. It seems to be more progressive than Bombay of today’s period, which is what I love about this book. “There is that sense of possibility that I could be somewhere, that I could be someone” He talks in this book about some real-life incidents. How when Partition happened, he had to leave. He was having a conversation with one of his friends who was a Hindi movie star, and Manto said, ‘If the rioters come won’t you save me?’ And the movie star, who was a Hindu, didn’t say anything. Manto was heartbroken and he ended up taking the steamer and moving to Pakistan. After leaving Bombay he lived a truncated, difficult and unhappy life in Pakistan. He died in 1955, when he was pretty young, 42. He became increasingly alcoholic. He has written, ‘I’m a walking talking Bombay, I exist because Bombay exists’. It lived on in his memories, and in the form of this book. He wrote it when he was totally broke and needed to drink. He would land up at the offices of newspapers and say, ‘Hey, I knew so-and-so Bollywood star, I can write about them’. He would sit there and write on a typewriter, write stories about movie stars, they would pay him and he would buy alcohol and get drunk again. That’s what Stars from Another Sky is about. It is these beautiful, real-life portraits of what the city was like at that time: progressive, glamorous, forward-looking, colourful, completely outsized. I feel Bollywood was more colourful then than it is now. That is what I found very interesting. People are eloping, coming back, beginning to shoot movies again. All kinds of things are going on and you can see why he’s completely enraptured by the city. He was from a Kashmiri who grew up in Amritsar. I was a big fan of Manto and I actually went and searched for his Bombay house, where some of these stories are written, where movie stars came to meet him. You see these portraits of them as shining Bollywood stars that he is enraptured by, but you also see them as people who he’s hanging out with, whom he’s trying to understand as a writer. He’s giving us these beautiful character portraits of people we’ve known and loved on-screen. Yes, it does. Like I said, even the waste pickers said they came with dreams in their eyes. And they were making a living by collecting what was left over by the city. Everyone can hope to have some place in this tiny city. Yes, certainly. For the purposes of this book, I got many writing residences, and I traveled in many parts of the world. I would say that Bombay is one city where women can still take public transport or walk around the city, at any point of the day or night. I live by a sea-facing promenade, and I see women alone walking along it at two o’clock in the morning. There’ll be tea vendors serving them tea, there’ll be masseurs giving foot massages. I never felt unsafe. There is someplace for everyone, and I think that gives people that confidence. Cities like Mumbai give you the feeling that you can remake yourself as you would like. You came here as someone, but you don’t have to just stay in that place. You could end up in a very different place. Which is also the dream of the Ambanis, right? Even most taxi drivers will tell you, ‘Did you know the father started out in a gas station in Yemen? See now he owns that house.’ As I said, it is a somewhat unreal dream, but there are lots of people selling tea and driving cabs in this city looking up at that house. I found the book hugely readable. There is this feeling that policy and all the workings of an almost non-working city should be so boring, but both with Kalpana Sharma’s book as well as this book they make it so interesting. One of the lessons for me as a writer was that we should not be afraid to talk about policy and think ‘oh the reader is not going to read if we talk about this.’ They are, and Lisa Björkman shows how. What she did with her book helped me with my book because I was talking about waste and looking at the city through its waste. She’s looking at the city through its water supply, as Kalpana Sharma is looking at city planning through Dharavi. Pipe Politics is about the city’s water supply from colonial times to now. There are some incidents that are like movies just etched in my mind from the book. Nobody has a map of the water pipes, but Lisa Björkman gets one somehow and she has it in her house. One day, a BMC engineer comes to her house and rings the bell. She asks him what he wants, and he says, ‘Do you have that map?’ She says she does, and he asks if he can have it. She says yes, but that she’ll need some time to look for it. And he says, ‘No, no, we need it now!’ Then she looks out of her window and sees there’s a whole bunch of municipal engineers waiting outside. There’s a water pipe burst in the city and a stretch of street is flooding and they don’t have a map. Without it, they don’t know how to fix it. No, we always have water in Bombay and we always have power. But she’s shown us how tenuous that is, the policy—how it all works, but almost doesn’t work, or doesn’t work, but almost works. ———————"