BackCity Chronicles
Mockery is Tyrewala's style. The idea for the title story came to him when he saw hoardings with mangled spellings of hindi television serials
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Sitting in the seventh-floor canteen of Altaf Tyrewala’s office, situated in a high-rise glass building in Andheri, Mumbai, one mulls over the 37-year-old author’s reluctance to call himself a chronicler of the city of Mumbai. He shrugs. “I’m not a self-conscious city transcriber. I just need geography for my fiction, and this city happens to be it."
Back in 2005, Tyrewala wore the mantle of chronicler with ease when he broke on to the literary scene with his first book, No God In Sight. The novel, if one may call it that, broke rules of form and content as it mapped several characters of Mumbai whose lives overlap, not always intentionally. Unlike the conventional novel that demands teleology, and greater cohesiveness of narrative through plot and character, Tyrewala’s resembled a collection of modern-day folk stories, where the connection between characters derived less from a moral imperative and more from the gossamer connection forged through crowded, cruel urban living.
The engagement with Mumbai in his fiction, says Tyrewala, who grew up in an Ismaili Muslim neighbourhood of Clare Road in Byculla, began when he wrote a story called The Abortionist in 2001. The first-person narrative of a doctor who performs abortions in a seedy by-lane of south Mumbai’s Colaba shows the effect that his profession has on his personal relations as well as on his state of mind. Quite like the Jataka Tales, The Abortionist gave birth to several stories, many of which made it to his first book. Some, like the story about the abortionist’s wife, haven’t been published yet. But the story on a domestic help who has a bottle of water chucked at her by a passenger of the local train that the abortionist takes to work in the mornings—Nice Water—forms part of Tyrewala’s new book, Engglishhh: Fictional Dispatches From A Hyperreal Nation.
Although he may think otherwise, Tyrewala’s writings point to an engagement that goes beyond geography. In Nice Water, Nanda, the domestic help, walks away from the train tracks—where she is assaulted with a bottle of packaged water, a rarity for her—and goes to work in the neighbourhood of Byculla. She hopes that the lady on the sixth floor will allow her to keep the bottle in the fridge—“It’ll be nice to have cold water with lunch." The lady doesn’t, and the slightly bizarre denouement reveals the author’s unflinching engagement with a city that is pretty damn cruel. His intuitive understanding of Mumbai’s psyche is visible in New And Secondhand, the first story of his latest book, where a second-hand bookshop owner offers a monologue on the dissolution of youthful passion, deriding the “Lamenters of Fading Bombay", who “fetishize the doddering, the decaying, the outdated, while ensuring that nothing and no one threatens their state of belonging to the swanky, the newly constructed and state-of-the-art".
Disillusionment, however, is not Tyrewala’s style. Mockery is. The idea for the title story—numerology infiltrating the very language we write and speak in what can only be called the post-colonial world—came to him when he saw hoardings with mangled spellings of Hindi television serials. Tyrewala calls this the “Ekta Kapoorisation of our world", but the story is more biting.
The author’s concern with the city’s psyche extends beyond our meeting. Later, a thoughtful and polite text arrives explaining the small bit of conversation we had around the 26/11 Mumbai attacks of 2008. “This was the first time the city experienced suicide terrorism. This was not murderous cowardice, it was an uncaring of one’s own well-being. I wonder if this ceasing to care has tainted the air forever." This, coupled with what the author perceives as the “docility and quietism of the EMI generation", is plum pickings for anyone concerned with writing about Mumbai.
As a resident of Mumbai for the most part—he studied in the US and married an American citizen of Indian descent, thus living in India and the US for a while in the 2000s—Tyrewala is no stranger to this city’s pettiness. “I am reminded of my religion when I look for an apartment each year. That’s when everything comes up: where I’ve come from, who my father is, what my name implies, and therefore the largesse that I will have to depend upon, if I want to live in peace in a city like Mumbai." Yet, he says, the resultant “reservoir of anxiety and anger" isn’t something he wishes to dip into while writing. “One can’t hold only one thing as the basis of one’s identity," he says.
Oddly enough, that’s a very Bombay thing to say.
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