The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap : Writings From Bombay

At seventeen in the year 1957 Adil Jussawalla left Bombay for London in search of something brighter and grander. Thirteen years later he returned to the city of his birth and it was the beginning of a lifelong bitter-sweet love affair. The great metropolis became a defining presence in his poetry and prose and he an important and distinctive part of its literary landscape. This book brings together Jussawallas prose pieces on Bombay-Mumbai written between 1980 and 2002. His city as Jerry Pinto writes in the introduction is built of chance encounters of laughing liftmen of departed friends and other ghosts and his writing on it gives witness to its bigness and strangeness its absent-minded cruelty and sometimes an absent-minded kindness. Jussawalla writes about Gukulashtami pot-breakers and drummers who take over the streets and sewage workers in deep pits whom no one notices; about a young woman who drowned herself in the sea and pilots who would wave to weekend crowds on the beach from the Tiger-Moths that once lifted off the Juhu aerodrome. He writes of the epic drama of the monsoon ships and dhows on the glittering Arabian Sea the dis-housed and the property sharks dead flowers and angry parrots on his balcony a wall of books hiding a bookshop a sledgehammer on an ageing building a diamond-encrusted rat trap in a wealthy ladys collection of jewellery and antiques. In this splendid anthologyintimate informed humane and entirely free of both despair and easy celebrationJussawalla pays his city the ultimate compliment: concentrated and clear-eyed attention.