As 'The Only City' releases, six authors dive into their stories about Mumbai

From the editorrsquos deskBombay is like that proverbial river mdash you can never step into the same Bombay twice Time here is composed of many ldquomoments of changesrdquo and for me this is what makes it so ripe for fiction photography cinemaPart of being an artist is to imagine alternate realities to capture subjective truths This city offers dual tones everywhere it offers polyphonic sound It is known for nothing in particular and it can be everything all at onceAnother aspect that draws writers is that by virtue of its commercial cultural and economic location there is a certain kind of covetous character that thrives in this city These are not characters who like idyll they are grasping ambitious and inventive Just a day in the life of a character like that presents the crests and troughs of a story Anindita GhoseShanta Gokhale The Storytellerrsquos TaleIt is a truism to say that a writer consciously wants to portray something specific when she writes a story When you inhabit a city with all your senses alive you get to know a wide range of people without actually meeting them The flow of the city is in your pulse Its places are your past and your present My story sprang out of knowing in this deeply connected way one part of the city Shivaji Park where I have lived all my life Not the new Shivaji Park of towers with closed faces but the old one of two and threestoreyed Art Deco residences with open balconies inhabited by the middleclass and bustling chawls with common corridors inhabited by the lower middleclass The lower middleclass in particular interests me because I see its aspirational struggles and its conservative ways from which astonishingly rise people who break norms and dare to live their own lives The lower middleclass Marathi woman is a force I observe her and love her To write a story about her was a natural instinctRaghu Karnad SpeedboatI dont want to preempt the story by saying too much but it uses one obvious thing about Mumbai as a starting point the density of human bodies here and the amount of touch you experience from strangers as a result To escape the crowds the suffocating proximity is a matter of privilege mdash but at the top of that economic ladder itrsquos possible to have the opposite problem Which is isolation The end of the story brings a different bigcity question into focus or I hope it does That one is important to me almost a question of faith and Bombay raises it in my mind all the time Irsquom looking forward to knowing how other people if they read the story answer this questionTejaswini ApteRahm Nurse ShantiFor my titular character Nurse Shanti Bombay is a stepping stone to bigger and better things The story is about hope about wanting more and dreaming big It is also about despair The central quality of Bombay that I wanted to portray was that the city can be a comforting place a place where you can nurture your dreams and find connections but that it is also a place where ruthlessness crops up in the most unexpected of places perhaps when you least expect it It is a city where one has to be on the alert and in that sense it can never fully be a place of rest Rest may come in snatches of time but is ultimately an illusion In a city teeming with life and friendship Shanti finds that it is also a place which can make you feel completely aloneRanjit Hoskote The Painterrsquos Last StopMy story evokes our cityrsquos artistic and intellectual milieu between the early 1900s and the 1940s a time of great cultural and political ferment BombayMumbai was not simply a metropolis based on the metrics of population density civic infrastructure and systems of governance during that period It was a multilingual multiethnic multireligious cosmopolis distinguished by lively debates publications lectures and informal interactions as well as feuds among its artists writers thinkers and patrons The history of BombayMumbai as a 20th century cosmopolis where the life of the mind embraced contemporary international questions as well as the problems of how to approach inherited tradition forms the cradle for my story In my narrative this history shapes the friendship rivalry and eventual antagonism between the key figures in the story both are painters as well as teachers at the cityrsquos most prestigious school for the fine arts So perhaps thatrsquos the real underlying BombayMumbai theme of my story competitiveness The manner in which strife over cultural prestige material success and the acclaim of onersquos peers can poison friendship and collegialityKersi Khambatta Hon SecyMumbairsquos real estate market has the worldrsquos most diabolical disparity between what it costs and what it offers like everyone should kiss its backside just for an opportunity to dwell in it Gentrification is a weapon And yet they pour in It is an ecosystem brimming with wonder and opportunity mdash and the worst bigotry humans could perpetrate on others The vegetarians loathe meateaters oddly the reverse is not true single men and women are all amoral sluts Catholics weed out the ungodly with Baptism certificates Parsees believe everyone around them are inferior and nobody apart from Muslims want Muslims There is a certain black comedy to this lsquoothernessrsquo Gothic and antediluvian as charming as the plague and resolutely immovable as the phantom smell of dogst on your shoe long after yoursquove washed it The noble folk who practise this otherness are sometimes called Honorary Secretaries of housing societies They do it for free In an anthology of BombayMumbai stories what better snapshot of the city in my opinion than the hardtoget housing for the millions streaming in and the endearing miniPol Pots who preside over themLindsay Pereira StraysWhat I wanted to portray was the strong streak of cruelty that I believe runs through this city Itrsquos what allows so many of its residents to look the other way and do this regularly without stopping to notice what they are turning into What people outside often refer to as the spirit of Bombay in the face of adversity is to my mind only an aspect of this complete disregard for life and the need for human dignity that increasingly colours my view of the city as I grow older I settled upon a protagonist from the margins because that is the space I have always been drawn to The way we treat the weakest amongst us has always been a reflection of who we truly are and I wanted my story to act as a mirror as well as an indictment of us all