'Muses Over Mumbai' review: Tales from a city that's constantly changing

I have my very own story about my very serendipitous connection with Murzban F. Shroff and his two short story collections, both about Mumbai. The collections, I mean. But also the story, the story of my connection.

What happened was this: I remember the first time I read Shroff’s 'Breathless in Bombay' very vividly for a very particular reason. I had been on a personal quest to read everything that I could get my hands on about Mumbai, the city of Shroff’s dreams and realities, which also happened to be the city of my dreams and realities. Because Mumbai, to both Shroff and me, is home; but more than a home, it is a city that utterly confounds and fascinates and disappoints and delights us. My quest, such as it was, was not because I wanted to satiate any sort of curiosity about the city, or that I had any research ambitions, no. My reading was simply because I was away from Mumbai, living in a distant Chennai, and pining to relive all the aforementioned emotions. It was that basic. And it was this basic romanticism that I had decided to turn even more romantic by attaching it to a literary quest (I was quite young).

The long and short of which is that I read 'Breathless in Bombay' quite breathlessly while sitting in Chennai. Cut to eight years later, when I was asked if I could read Shroff’s latest collection, 'Muses Over Mumbai'— as I sat inside a PG in Gurgaon. Away, once again, from Mumbai; pining, once again, for home.

Life is hard, but it also has a way of being weirdly funny. And so I started reading Shroff’s 'Muses Over Mumbai' that way: thinking about the circumstances, and the ways in which life can be hard, but also funny. Which also happens to some of the characters in Muses: their lives are a struggle, they are ordinary, and they are mundane; but there is a tinge—perhaps intended, perhaps unintended— of how amusing the business of living can sometimes get.

Take for instance the story ‘Mind over Matter’, a neat philosophical musing that has at its heart an inventive narrative cycle, and which starts off with an absurd swap— Ramesh Malpani, a “racing magnate, film financer, takeover tycoon and a lover of all things unattainable” becomes the chauffeur to his chauffeur, complete with the “white uniform and cap that went with it”; “No one,” writes Shroff, “was surprised”— and then turns rather dark rather quickly, until it makes its point and crosses the finish line a definite winner.

Or take the next story, called ‘Something to think about’, about a broke writer who visits a builder who has established his office in Sewri, “in the compound of a defunct mill”. When he is ushered into the builder’s office, he is greeted with a barrage of expletives related to the human anatomy. “You are a Parsee,” says the builder to the writer-narrator by the way of an explanation. “I love Parsees. I can be myself with them.” It’s a peculiar story, too, about ghostwriting and infrastructure and the unrelenting and unending cons of the book-selling publishing business, and while I didn’t think all of it worked, I certainly thought the story and Shroff’s writing were attuned to the bottomless absurdity of living in the city.

Living in the city reminds me of another story from the collection, called ‘Accidental Karma’, in which an ad agency ‘creative’ is dragged on the streets of the city by an errant taxi driver. When this executive wakes up in a hospital, he is told that he had to be rushed there in the same taxi that dragged him, because no other cab could be found. “Peak hour traffic,” an office colleague explains. It reminded me of the wonderful Taxi No. 9211, asking questions similar to the ones the comedy-caper asks: why was I tied to his destiny? Why was I sent his way?

In one way or the other, in ways subtle or direct, those questions hold sway over many of Shroff’s stories. And there really is no concrete answer—there never can be, especially in a city as bemusing, sprawling and oft-times overwhelming as Mumbai. In Muses, as he did in Breathless, Shroff manages to juggle the universal with the particular, capturing the particular by the way of telling details, and the universal by the way of his people. Because his stories are actually closely observed character studies—stories, for Shroff, are those that are found in life’s humdrum; discovered on the faces of people we pass by, on the footpath, inside the Virar fast, over the foot-over bridge, at the vada pav stall. These stories always unfold in the nooks and corners and clubs and pubs and shanties and residential complexes of Mumbai. And these stories, one imagines, stem from certain other questions: who makes this city? And what do they make it into?

There are no easy answers. But in Constable Tiwari, and in the plush-living Anuradha, and in the struggling Shraddha, and in the weary lady at the bank, Shroff tries to search for them. And in the process, he reveals a city that seems to be constantly on the cusp of changing, and is changing—often, lately, for the worse—and yet, somehow, it is also a city that remains as it always was: demanding; spirited; cruel; welcoming; dismissive; kind; weary; jovial; terrible; big-hearted; feeble; a city that can make you long for it; in Chennai, in Gurgaon— and, inevitably, in Mumbai.

Atharva Pandit is a JCB Prize-shortlisted writer

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