Anuradha Kumar’s Coming Back to the City brings the reader to Parel’s Jupiter Mills chawl, one of the last few that still remain in Mumbai, that City of Dreams that continues to attract countless minions who arrive here with nothing more in their pockets but only their dreams. You find yourself with an author who creates with great empathy a world inhabited by a host of characters.
There is, for instance, Pooja, restless and trapped in an unhappy marriage, who finds joy in her flourishing dabba service and her relentless pursuit of learning English; Pooja’s husband, Mahesh, whose only ambition is to zip through the streets in his boss’s yellow Mercedes-Benz; Dr Joshi, who has hidden away two paintings: one of a murder he witnessed, and the other a striking portrait of Pooja. There is also Vasudha, a scheming single mother who lives on with the hope of giving her daughter a better life in this quicksand of a city.
In the parallel Mumbai of high-rises live the affluent few: Suhel, a confirmed bachelor, who finds himself falling in love—first with a portrait and then its subject, Pooja. Ghatge, Mahesh’s boss and an upcoming politician of dubious repute. A young and disturbed journalist, Raina Gupta, who opens up old wounds as she interviews veteran activist Neera Joshi about the mill workers’ strike of the 1980s and her scandalous affair with its assassinated leader. Then there’s Dr Sneha Desai, a successful but lonely radiologist, fighting to restart her sex education classes for adolescents in a municipal school.
In the Mumbai of mills and malls where everything—especially land—is at a premium, the chawl becomes the bull’s eye of greedy real-estate barons and sleazy politicians, and that is exactly what draws together this moveable feast of characters. As vast and diverse as Mumbai itself, Coming Back to the City draws us effortlessly, completely into the lives of the people who animate the Maximum City, even as they are consumed by it—people caught in a web of unexpected love, desperate ambition and endless, addictive optimism.
Passion spins the plot as we hurtle through the turbulence of the Ganapati festival. The whole city is enveloped in that fever. ‘City squares, suburban town halls, school playgrounds, a corner of the railway station, every available public space was given over to the god, and statues of him were placed high on daises and pandals that stretched all around.’ Prayers are made to Ganesha, the giver, asking for money, a job, and even marriage.
But that is not of much help in trying to solve the attack on the art exhibition at the Taj Hotel—where news reports emerge of two injured victims. Ghatge, the slumlord, sets off to the TV studio to be interviewed where he struggles to mask his real self, even as he gloats over the fact that the Jupiter Mills chawl will somehow manage to survive.
How will this tale of romance between a rich man and a woman from the ugly underbelly unfold? I am not going to tell. Or does Ghatge, the grumpy slumlord, find his missing yellow Mercedez? You can look for all those answers and more in the blogs that have been punched into the last few pages of this delightful read.
Coming Back to the City
By: Anuradha Kumar
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Pages: 316
Price: `499