Bombay Ducked!

Thrity Umrigar's Bombay Time exploits the dollhouse technique—take the lid off and let the reader watch the clockwork inhabitants go about their business. She applies this assiduously to an entire neighbourhood, the close-knit community of Parsis in Wadia Baug. Their disparate (but horribly familiar) stories are tied together by the device of a party, held outside home turf, which unfolds magisterially across 274 pages. The party trick's a drag, enforcing the use of interminable flashbacks and internal monologues to tell each character's story.

The faces are all recognisable: there's the neighbourhood gossip who once had a heart of gold, the local boy who made good but couldn't cut the apron strings tying him to Wadia Baug, the estranged couple fading into old age, still tied miserably together, the bachelor with an unfinished love story behind him. It's better than it sounds. Umrigar's style is of a friend whispering confidentially into your ear, and has a deft sense of the comic. Her characters are vivid enough to survive being placed under the microscope.

But Umrigar aims to go beyond compiling a community family album. Her novel is to be nothing less than an elegy to a golden Bombay of yore; indeed, the stench of nostalgia overwhelms Bombay's usual odour of drying fish. Inevitably, her characters begin to sound like the more sensitive of the French aristocracy just before the guillotines interrupted their handwringing: "How could they enjoy their wealth, watched as they were by the accusing eyes of naked and hungry children?" Despite all her compassion, the naked and hungry in Bombay Time follow the same rules as in the real world: they squeeze into the margins of the story here as well.