Kevin Fernandes

Read this one on my Kindle, after "Love and Longing" by the same author, and watching the Netflix series, also scripted by VC. For those of you who've watched the show, it borrows the same menagerie of characters from the book, but the relationship between characters, their individual developments, etc, are vastly different, my favourite being that of JoJo and her sister, and their relationship with the other characters, like Gaitonde and Sartaj. No spoilers here! But fair to say, all the action happened in my mind with the memorable faces and sets of the Netflix series. I incidentally also read Zaidi Hussaini's "Dubai to Dongery" (on the Mumbai underworld), which VC heavily borrows from, before this. Another favourite character would be the aunt of the Muslim don (I can't remember her name for the life of me!). Despite not being a fan of magic realism, this novel had me hooked. Perhaps because a city like Bombay can only tell it's many stories that exist side by side, each with their own brand of violence, indifference and pathos, with a little bit of magic. Or rather, magic is the only way we, who have been schooled into neat, right little boxes of compartmentalization, can deal with these coexisting inconsistencies. Kudos to VC for being a prophet for our times.