Book Review | City That Let Its Boomers Out

There are five main characters in this book: three people, a room and a city. And they are all inextricably connected; every move by one affects the others. Why the city? Bombay is an alluring draw for Prem and Raj Suri, the writer Manil’s parents, with its freedom from the past and family ties. This is a familiar trope for many who move to Bombay: rather than bog you down, it lets you out. But there is a price to be paid for freedom and that is where the tiny living spaces come in. The single room is full of shortcomings and conditions. It becomes a trap amidst the sense of freedom. Uncomfortable and increasingly inconvenient in itself, but impossible to leave because of its location. A quintessential Bombay problem.

So we have a mismatched couple, from families torn by Partition and big Bombay dreams of the film industry. A room in an apartment divided up between three and then four families, with shared bathrooms and kitchen, but so desirable because of its location — South Bombay, somewhere near Kemps Corner.

Into this, a child is born.

A Room in Bombay is a chronicle of life in India in its early days as an independent nation. Of being young in the 1960s and growing up in the 1970s. Of finding your way in a mixed society of different religions, ethnicities and personality quirks. The city is always the backdrop, drawing you in and keeping you there.

There are several threads running through noted author and mathematician Manil Suri’s memoir. The soap opera quality of life in Razia Mansion, where owners and tenants fight constantly and yet share everything. It is about another sort of Bombay and India, where one Hindu family lives with three Muslim families. You are kept in a perpetual nail-biting stage as some new controversy develops over the use of the kitchen or the state of the loos.

There is the story of Suri’s mother, dissatisfied with her husband and her constrained space, but unable and unwilling to move out, to consider a life in the suburbs, or even, horror of horrors, move to Delhi. Of a woman trying to break out, and be herself. It is the story of a marriage, where the dreams of a young man to work in the film industry is not always successful and as he falls into despair and alcohol, the one room gets tinged with his failure.

It is also the story of a boy growing up as the great love and one binding factor between a married couple. There is no privacy and somehow there is space. There is no money at times, and yet sacrifices are made for luxuries.

And at the end, it is the story of love, the strong relationship between a mother and son, and the lives affected by that. The last chapters of Prem battling with age and Manil’s intertwined guilt and love are sometimes heartbreakingly painful and poignant.

A Room in Bombay is terribly moving and beautifully written. It draws you in, instantly. For some because they know the city; for others because the story draws on your own strings of memory and longing. It is paean to love and longing and a chronicle of the human condition.

A Room in Bombay

By Manil Suri

HarperCollins

pp. 341; Rs 699/-