It’s nearing the end of a particularly torrid year and Vancouver has a specific way of reminding me that I am far away from home. I’ve been in Vancouver for a little more than three years, very nearly familiarized with its brand of damp and dreary weather (not counting the three odd months of glorious summer). But, the end of the year gets chilly. Rain in the winter still feels alien to me. Imagine being a plant optimized for a light sea breeze caught in a Martian sandstorm. This, a convoluted way of saying that the end of the year exacerbates my longing to be home. Home is Mumbai. Or Bombay, as it was called when I was growing up in its southern confines.
Ever since I left Mumbai as a teenager at the cusp of not being one, I’ve harbored intense regret for never being able to see Mumbai through the lens of a more self-assured and self-reliant adult. That is not to say that the city’s hubbub and chaos are unknown to me. I have a particular kinship with the city. I grew up there and spent many formative years of my life navigating its streets and peculiar geography. But, I’m only privy to its gears in a telescopic sense. Every time I go back home from wherever I am stationed for my studies, I am in transience. My eyes look at the city with the peerless gaze of a temporary guest. I’ve accumulated a trove of memories from a childhood spent in the city, but my adulthood has been cleaved from the city’s character. And so, I often find myself borrowing reading glasses from others so I can look at Mumbai more finely, more keenly, and patch up my broken understanding of the city I love and call home.
The genre of the Mumbai film and book is perhaps a made-up one, and often in disservice to the movies and books that are defined by it. Take, for instance, No Presents Please - a wonderful collection of short stories by a Kannada lyricist -Jayant Kaikini, whose cover even has ‘Mumbai stories’ as a subtitle. Most of Jayant’s stories aren’t driven by plots. They are just vignettes of people’s lives in the city. These people belong to a certain milieu but their stories don’t. You might mistake Katherine Boo’s narrative non-fiction book - Beyond The Beautiful Forevers as a journalistic chronicle of life in a specific Mumbai slum. But, the book is only as much about the social dynamics of Dantewada as much as The Wire was about Baltimore’s undercity.
Writers have unabashedly used Mumbai as a backdrop for their stories, primarily because it presents an unrivaled degree of dichotomies - extreme wealth in close proximity to extreme poverty, which Boo’s book so brilliantly dissects, and abject loneliness contrasted by an overwhelming lack of space, captured in Ritesh Batra’s films. In both, Lunchbox and Photograph, Batra’s camera captures Mumbai in its native mood, bursting at the seams with activity, and his central characters with a sense of impassiveness. Among films set in Mumbai, Black Friday by Anurag Kashyap (easily his best and most handsomely mounted film) stands out for how it chooses to show the city as it is, a beast in itself, rife with countless subplots and machinations outside the central story the film chooses to tell. Mumbai in Chaitanya Tamhane’s cinema is not merely a setting either. His stories - Court and The Disciple, could take place outside Mumbai and hold relevance in a far bigger universe. But, they make sense here.
Stories set in Mumbai always have a profound influence on me. I am aware that nothing can replace the lived experience of spending your twenties doused in the frenzy of Mumbai. But, I hope these stories can lift me from the limbo between an insider and outsider existence; and carry me further away from the latter. In this process of playing catch-up, much of my childhood too gets contextualized in a manner I wasn’t equipped to do years ago. Oddities that were never pondered upon get viewed under a new light. Relationships that were never acknowledged, get a newer meaning. Hindsight is often wonderfully revealing.
In its wellspring of infinite stories, Mumbai is full of glorious infinities too. It presents as broad a canvas as there ever was to paint on, and in its tapestry, I am always sure to find a piece of myself. As Varun Grover puts it in this incredible piece - “Life is complicated. I’m looking for a complicated city too.”
This is one of my favorite photographs among the ones I’ve clicked, of a street I often frequent when I am back home. But, if you took away something from this rumination, for me, it’s really about so much more.
You’ve put in the work of reading till the end so here are some more recommendations for Mumbai films and books.
I really enjoyed reading Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale. It follows the lives of a boy and a girl, ever-changing as the city around them.
The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar uses the relationship between a family and their house-help to talk about class dynamics.
Sir by Rohena Gera uses a similar set-up to delicately explore the concept of love and companionship. It’s a quietly devastating film that didn’t leave my mind for a long time.
Tu Hai Mera Sunday is a slice-of-life film, in as much a movie set in Mumbai can be slice-of-life.
And, finally, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped has a survivalist conceit that can only work if set in Mumbai. Rajkumar Rao plays a man trapped in a high-rise apartment for days delivers a knockout performance.
I also highly recommend film-critic extraordinaire Tanul Thakur’s meticulously researched and excellently written longread on Bollywood’s relationship with ‘outsiders’.
Thanks for reading. Here’s to stories. This newsletter is a potpourri of random thoughts littered with recommendations galore. If you liked reading it, please subscribe for more and forward it to friends.