Mumbai montage

A collection of original short stories edited by Anindita Ghose adds to the rich literature on the metropolis

- Uttaran Das Gupta

The Only City Edited by Anindita Ghose 352pp, ₹699 HarperCollins

In Shanta Gokhale’s short story, The Storyteller’s Tale, the narrator Kinnari buys an anthology of stories from a bookstore in Mumbai.

“(E)everybody was reading it and raving about it, and I.. was looking forward to reading and raving about it too,” says Kinnari. However, by the third page of the book, Kinnari is bored by one of the stories, which is about “a company executive who battered his wife on a regular basis”. “The blurb praised the author for the delicacy of observation she brought to human relationship,” says Kinnari. “What delicacy?” Then, she reveals her real-life experience of her drunken father regularly assaulting her mother, and her mother sobbing at his death. “Now, explain the delicacy here,” demands Kinnari. “Delicacy of observation, my foot.”

Kinnari is a 35-year-old Mumbai resident, evidently from a working-class or lower-middle-class background, who grew up in a chawl. She has had the benefit of a good education, even learning French in school. Her brother has become a journalist, who gets invited to literary soirees and book launches. Kinnari likes collecting stories, closely observing life in the metropolis in which she lives.