Murzban Shroff’s Muses Over Mumbai, a collection of 17 stories, captures a city on the edge — where construction chaos and human connection collide, and survival is the only anthem left to sing
In the introduction to Muses Over Mumbai, his new collection of short stories, Murzban Shroff writes rapturously about “the soul of the city” which remains steadfast even while its body is being “slowly dismantled and its face botoxed”. It is this quality that brings its diverse citizens “under a single canopy of perseverance” with a will to “live and resist and triumph” over their circumstances.
Reading this makes one shift uncomfortably in one’s seat. Are these tales going to be paeans to the so-called spirit of Mumbai? Are they simply going to laud the resilience of its residents while ignoring institutional negligence, not to mention systemic cruelty?
An ‘enterprise of humane understanding’
Fortunately, this turns out not to be the case. In these 17 stories, most of them previously published in Indian and international literary journals, Shroff embarks on an “enterprise of humane understanding”, as he describes his brand of didactic social realism. He holds up a mirror to ordinary and not-so-ordinary lives with their eccentricities and changes of heart, labouring as best as they can under messy urban circumstances.
Most of the stories do not operate in terms of conventional notions of plot. Rather, Shroff’s technique is to take an incident — sometimes prosaic, sometimes peculiar — and describe how people react to it. In the process, the stories reveal truths about their attitudes and concerns. In ‘Ruffled Feathers’, an errant pigeon stuck in the plumbing shaft of a south Mumbai building causes divisions amongst its residents. In ‘The Mochi’s Wife’, a roadside cobbler’s consort has to deal with the unpleasant occurrence of her partner being beaten by the cops for alleged drug dealing. And in ‘All that We Own’, the wife of one of the city’s wealthiest men, who runs a celebrated fitness centre, has to shut it down because of a property dispute.
As with his earlier collection, Breathless in Mumbai, the characters are from all walks of life. If some frequent exclusive clubs and inhabit posh high-rises, others live in the slums and on the streets. There are roadside vendors, police constables, bank tellers, self-justifying construction magnates, and writers looking for a break.
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Some stories hinge on contrasts between dissimilar characters. In ‘Hafta’, a Brahmin police constable grapples with feelings for a so-called lower-caste garbage scavenger. And in ‘Mehrunissa’s Story’, the first-person narrator bumps into a former college friend, now an orthodox burqa-wearing Muslim. Both of these, it must be said, verge on the tendentious, especially with sentences such as: “How I hated to see beauty denied, freedom curtailed, youth truncated...” Some of this tendency is visible in other stories, too, notably ‘Conversations with a Terrorist: Reflections on 26/11’, which unfortunately comes across as little more than a rant, however well-intentioned.
The Mumbai mayhem, and bonhomie
The more interesting stories are those that empathetically twist and turn along with their protagonists’ states of mind. In ‘Something to Think About’, for instance, a struggling writer ponders over whether he ought to take up an assignment from a small-time trader turned upscale builder. In the same vein, the narrator of ‘The Lady at the Bank’ takes an avid dislike towards a lackadaisical bank teller, only to find that her hapless attitude is but a reflection of an overall culture. Again, in ‘Mental About Mumbai,’ a middle aged woman angry over unplanned development realises that not all modern-day conveniences can be shrugged aside.
In the longer stories, Shroff brings out how characters enmeshed in a corrosive social system still harbour a deep-seated need for belonging and purpose. In ‘Scent of a Meal’, a garbage dumpster operator concerned about the fate of two stray dogs discovers dregs of humanity in a ragpicker’s life. In ‘The Earth Shall Be Enjoyed by Heroes’, a doctor implicated in an Ibsenesque plot finds support from a local police inspector.
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All of Shroff’s stories have at their heart a great love for the city he lives in, and an equal sadness for its current state. Some characters speak evocatively of old haunts and their charms, with familiar grocers, tailors, temples, and Art Deco buildings: “Sights of old Bombay do this to me: stir my sense of belonging, my love of heritage.” Yet the threat of their disappearance is always present: “Where would all these people go once the gated community was up and running?”
An epidemic of construction turns up in many tales, as well as a virus of greed “which had gripped the city’s caretakers and driven them mad”. As one narrator, stepping out for a walk in his neighbourhood, laments: “my city, my beloved city, is imploding before my eyes…no guardian deity on earth is going to save it”. Having no option, he braces himself to become a survivor: “I will call this new universe Mumbai mayhem, as opposed to Bombay bonhomie.” It is just this mayhem, occasionally relieved by bonhomie, that is captured in the pages of Muses Over Mumbai.
