How Anuradha Kumar makes Mumbai come alive in her novel Coming Back to the City

Book Review by Namrata

Coming Back to the City_Front Cover

Title: Coming back to the city, Mumbai Stories

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books, 2019

‘She’s from Amrika, your new tenant, Pooja. A gori.’

Thus, begins the interwoven tale of lost souls living in the city of dreams, Mumbai by Anuradha Kumar.

The city of Mumbai is as mysterious as it can be. On one hand it is called the eternal city of dreams, meaning a place where people come with their dreams and work hard to get them fulfilled. While on the other hand, it is also known as the city which never sleeps. So, either the dreams you have are the ones you see wide awake or it is a contrast, signalling at the sleek chances of your dreams coming true. Whatever be the deeper meaning, it has never stopped people from aspiring and dreaming to live in this city.

Bringing together her experiences of living in Mumbai for 14 years, Kumar creates a moving tale from the great metropolis with stories both heard and unheard.

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Book Excerpt: Coming Back to the City, Mumbai Stories by Anuradha Kumar

Coming Back to the City_Front Cover

Title: Coming Back to the City, Mumbai Stories

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Year of publication: 2019

Links if any: Speaking Tiger

Pooja: The Evening of the Immersion

The bulldozer moved over the uneven road, lurching over potholes, and scattering the broken stones. Pooja heard the sound fleetingly, muffled by the rain drumming outside. It was a bit after twelve.

Pooja stood in the darkness thinking over her recent conversation with Gauri Tai. Tai had been hesitating, as if she was trying to hide some anxiety.

‘Pooja?’

‘Tai.’ The stove near Pooja sizzled.

‘Do you know where Mahesh is, Pooja?’

‘Mahesh?’ Pooja felt a blankness descend on her. For some days now Mahesh had become someone she didn’t know and now Pooja found she couldn’t conjure up his face at all. All that came to her, almost with the force of the blinding sun, was her shock at seeing that gun under his pillow. There it lay, a neat brown-black thing, its imprint marked on the sheets and still warm from the pillow over it. The gun had seethed with menace and all those secrets she had never wanted to know about Mahesh.

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Poetry: Dance Poem — Boat Song by Sonia Mukherji

Sonia Mukherjee

Sonia Mukherji was born in Kolkata and recently moved to London after living in New York for ten years. She graduated from the Kundiman fellowship program and her poetry has been published and translated in the U.S. and internationally in literary journals including Stylus, Shampoo Poetry, Urhalphool, Kolkata’s The Little Magazine, Prothom Alo, The Dhaka Tribune, Bhorer Kagoj and the J’aipur Journal. She was a finalist for the Amy Awards and the AALR a lettre initiative. She was given an international poetry feature in Kolkata, which was held at the cultural institute Nandan, hosted by the Bengali poet Subodh Sarkar, reviewed by the literary journal Bhashanagar, and televised.

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Poetry: Journey to the Center of the Fruit by Aditya Shankar

Aditya Shankar is an Indian poet, flash fiction author, and translator. His poems, fiction, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the Moon Park Review, The Ghost Parachute, Indian Literature, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Little Magazine, The Ghost Parachute, Canada Quarterly, Chandrabhanga, Asiawrites, The Four Quarters Magazine, Muse India, Anti Heroin Chic, Dissident Voice, Cliterature and elsewhere. His published books of poetry are After Seeing (2006) and Party Poopers (2014). He lives in Bangalore, India.

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