Perhaps, there is a gold-hatted Jay Gatsby in every big city. As I gaze out at the nocturnal skyline of Gurugram, the razzmatazz of its nighttime deception twinkles like a New York apparition. And I see a ‘Gatsby’ reaching out to a distant mysterious light, somewhere far, where, perhaps, resides his unreachable love.

The short verse attributed to D’Invilliers is an epigraph from the novel, reflective of its plot and characterisation — written by F Scott Fitzgerald, taking on a pen name to keep distance from the main narrative.

As Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic ‘The Great Gatsby’ turns 100, there is a roar of celebrations across the world — on the Broadway, in jazz bars, in high school drama clubs and among highbrow literary circles. The media is on insatiable drunken ‘highballs’ with the novel’s refills and retellings. Among the cinematic adaptations of the novel — four till date — the last one in the 2013 by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was a grand moment, transporting viewers to the 1920s’ Jazz Age. In India, the movie got a huge publicity buzz, as our very Amitabh Bachchan supposedly had a ‘pivotal’ role in it. That, of course, turned out to be a hugely disappointing, entirely forgettable cameo, even though he was playing the important but dubious character of the mysterious ‘businessman’ Meyer Wolfsheim, the hidden hand behind Gatsby’s wealth.

Rereading the slim little classic for the nth time is to uncover hitherto hidden meanings, layers and contemporary truths about American greed — being played out once again in the Trump-era capitalism on steroids.

Jay Gatsby is the chief protagonist of the novel, seen through the eyes of his neighbour, Nick Carraway, an aspiring Wall Street bond salesman with a Yale degree and a philosophical disposition. Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan, whose husband Tom is a crude womaniser and bigot — old money gone bad. Gatsby ends up dead, shot by the wronged jealous husband, and Nick is left to rue, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and… then retreated back into their money… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

What is the secret lure of the literary masterpiece? Putting it across in a simplistic and naive way — at one level, it’s the grand passion and unfulfilled love of Yash Chopra’s ‘Silsila’. On another, an epic Salim-Javed intensity, starring Amitabh Bachchan. The narrative power of the dialogues evokes the imagery of the novel’s era, which became iconic literary quotes.

The giant-sized ambition and scale of New York City buzzes with many architectural metaphors woven into the novel. Midtown, Times Square, Plaza Hotel, Wall Street and the Queensboro Bridge, among others, are locations threaded seamlessly through the plot, propelling the narrative into a relatable contemporary reality. The Art Deco and Neo-Classical style of the Gatsby house and the Georgian mansion of Buchanan old money, solidify the narrative with brick and stone.

“I began to like New York,” says Nick Carraway, narrator in the book and Gatsby’s neighbour, “the racy adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.”  The Queensboro Bridge, connecting Long Island, where Gatsby, Nick and Buchanan lived, was the gateway to Manhattan. “The city seen from Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world,” observes Nick.

Is it sheer coincidence that Long Island is also the location where the Corleone family of the ‘Godfather’,  too, lived? And is the same address for PG Wodehouse to make his home after exile from Britain. Literary critic Matthew J Bruccoli writes, “As an impressionist, Fitzgerald sought to convey, by means of language and style, the emotions associated with actual and fictional settings.”

Fitzgerald and his wife too lived there — their time on Long Island becoming an inspiration for his novel. Published when Fitzgerald was just 28 in 1925, ‘The Great Gatsby’ received mostly favourable reviews, though some felt it did not equal his previous writings. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda’s gravestone in Rockville, Maryland, is engraved with the last line from ‘The Great Gatsby’ — “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”