Mumbai Meri Jaan

If you happen to read three relatively recent books on Mumbai, Shantaram, Millennium City and Sacred games, you will not fail to notice that Mumbai continues to be the most captivating city in India both in terms of dreams and aspirations on one hand and the reality. Shantaram is a narrative of the experiences of a man, Millennium is part fiction part truth and Sacred Games is a pure fiction based on "what possibly happens" in Mumbai. But if you read them together, you will realise that so far as Mumbai is concerned it is difficult to tell where fiction ends and facts begin. To me they appeared interchageable so far as the great city is concerned.
Another striking point is that once you start writing about the city, you just can not stop. Look at the size of all the three books I mentioned.... each of them looks and feels like a brick. Of course Sacred Games takes the cake followed closely by the other two. It would seem that the authors just could not stop writing. And if you keep in mind that all three books describe incidents of only a few years and not decades or centuries of the city's history - you ought to be impressed.
However, missing is all these mega narratives, although there are slivers of this in all and most notably in Shantaram, is the life of the ordinary person. It would be fascinating to chronicle the life and times of an ordinary citizen with all its ups and downs. Unfortunately, I do not read Marathi very well and have not had an opportunity to look for Marathi books on the subject. I am sure there are a few around. However, I have had the opportunity to read a four volume biography of a Bengali who was born in 1899 and became famous after he fled home in Calcutta. Among the various places he fled to was of course Mumbai. The name will not be known today but he was a cult director in 1930s and 40s making such movies as Yahudi Ki Beti. Premankur Atorthi was his name and his voluminous biography is titled "Mahasthabir Jataka" .
Not too many people can read Bengali these days, I am therefore, planning to translate the book and I can assure you Atorthi's description of Mumbai before the first world war will give you goosepimples and put many of the recent authors to shame. Especially fascinating for me was his description of pavement dwellers and fighting among gangs of beggars.
I hope I will find some time to soon to start translating the book.