Review Details
The year is 2041. A huge fortress named Bombadrome, 500 sq. km in an area housing thirty million people stands against a towering sea wall on the soil of erstwhile Bom Bahia, Bombay or Mumbai. Equipped with the finest transport network, efficient renewable energy tapping mechanisms, near perfect waste management and ability to survive a nuclear attack, Bombadrome is revered as an emulation model for cities within and outside India. However, there is one failure that stares at it, the failure of monsoon for nearly three decades. The ominous rain-bearing clouds have remained indifferent to the land that juts out into the Arabian sea.
One man, the last serving civil servant from old Bombay days, Convent Godse (how he gets this name, his childhood years in Kerala and his becoming an IAS officer make an interesting story sprinkled with humour) feels that monsoons are not just a weather phenomenon but usher forgiveness, a chance for redemption. He believes sins have accrued since Ankur Lal Shinde (nicknamed ALAS), the current Chief Minister of Maharashtra was elected to office in 2008. Though for decades, ALAS has provided good governance and benevolent administration in the State and is expected to win the upcoming general assembly elections with a massive majority, Godse thoroughly despises him for he knows the dirty means ALAS used to rise to power.
Godse remarks about IAS officers: ‘We are witnesses of Indian history, charged only with remembering everything that has happened, even the things deleted from textbooks and erased from public memory. Remember, we are told but never reveal, unless perhaps a moment comes, which comes but rarely in history’ (p. 8). And that rare moment comes, for Godse turns a chronicler and prepares a report about the good old Bombay, imperfect, mysterious and even dangerous. He details how ALAS silenced his dissenters during decades in power, decimated Bombay and formed Bombadrome in its place where technologically driven and digitally authenticated lives are constantly monitored and tampered with to force equality and peace.
