
Murzban Shroff’s ‘Muses Over Mumbai’ review: An ode to the Maximum City of hopes and heartbreak

Summary
Murzban F. Shroff’s new collection of Mumbai stories chronicles the decline of the city, while celebrating its resilienceFew Indian fiction writers have taken up the mantle of being the chronicler of their home cities with as much zest as Murzban F. Shroff has. For the last few years, his short stories, collected in multiple volumes, have captured the pulse of Bombay, now Mumbai, with the acuity of a city reporter, the passion of a resident civic activist, and the shrewd eye of an inveterate storyteller.
Shroff’s latest volume, Muses Over Mumbai, a collection of 17 stories, proves his gift for sniffing tales out of every nook and cranny of his rapidly transforming home. The faceless millions that come under his scrutiny become fodder for his fictional mill, be it a bank teller always occupied with her meals, or the man who crushes piles of garbage every night with his JCB for the trucks to carry it away.
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A strong thread of civic-minded concern runs through nearly all the stories in the volume, but it is usually a patina that hides other human complications. Ruffled Feathers, the opening story set in a posh high-rise in South Bombay, is ostensibly about a pigeon disrupting the peace of the residents. Even as the well-heeled neighbours try to put up a united front against the menace, longstanding tensions begin to chip away at the fragile foundation of faux harmony on which they stand.
Soon, inter-faith conflicts and petty strife come out in the open but, most significantly, this absurd storm in a teacup affords Shroff a chance to focus on the inner struggles of a retired army major, who works as the manager of the building. By zooming in and out of his characters’ lives, Shroff strikes a deft balance between conveying the ceaseless bustle of the metropolis and the invisible undercurrents that churn beneath its surface.
Even when it comes to events of staggering tragedy, such as the 26/11 attacks on the city, Shroff is able to peel a layer away from the obvious, except in one story based on the event, Conversations with a Terrorist, which is the weakest in the volume. Burdened with raw emotion, it sits uneasily with Mehrunissa’s Story, where the terror attacks play a significant role as well. But the eponymous protagonist in this story, offers a startling perspective on the attacks through her religious and gendered experience of it.
Like James Joyce’s Dubliners, Shroff’s collection is affectively linked with stories about the evolution and degradation of a metropolis. But in this volume there is a stronger investment in depicting the erosion of moral and public values through brazen acts of corruption or venal politics.
In Something to Think About, a writer facing penury confronts his dilemma about working on the biography of a builder who has made a fortune with blood money. Even though he frets over the proposal long and hard, redemption comes in the end from the city itself, as it offers its own unique retribution. A similar denouement unfolds in the concluding piece as well, The Earth Shall Be Enjoyed By Heroes. An upright doctor, framed for rape, breathes easy once the culprits are identified through a tense night of police investigation.

While a gentle strain of humour runs through nearly all the stories, sometimes touched by dark comedy, the most acerbic of the lot is Accidental Karma. A bright young advertising executive meets with a freakish accident when a taxi driver takes umbrage at his high-handedness, landing him in the hospital for a prolonged recovery. While the young man’s recovery is no less eventful—he narrowly escapes being murdered—the high point of his stay is the unlikely friendship he forges with an ailing spiritual guru. The ending turns out to be unexpectedly whacky, which is also the case with stories like Mental About Mumbai and Auntie Elena’s Revenge.
In spite of the limpid writing and the controlled pace, one minor quibble does come to mind while reading the stories. At times, Shroff seems too earnest, even naive, about his faith in the inherent goodness of his fellow humans. The good are almost always rewarded and the bad punished, if not overtly then through some cosmic price that is exacted from them in some distant future. Shroff perhaps brings in strain of resilience to celebrate Mumbai’s status as the proverbial “Maximum City," in spite of all the damages that have been wrought on it over the years by floods, terror attacks and indiscriminate destruction of mangrove land by builders.
Mumbai may no longer be recognizable to many as the beloved Bombay it once used to be, but as the master of his fictional universe at least, Shroff wrests back some control. The characters who walk into his pages still nurse hope for deliverance from the technopolis that their beloved city has been turning into, ruled by unscrupulous politicians and plutocrats.