It is not easy to feel a city, to be able to understand its ethos and pulse, without being a part of it. Every city has its own flavour and specific feel to it, which goes beyond food, heritage and culture. The best way to know a city is to live there for a considerable period of time, but again, to be able to talk about the essence of a city is no easy task. And, one way could be through writing about it from the eyes of its inhabitants, seeing the city through their eyes, especially if the city is Bombay, the ‘city of dreams’.
Of late, there has been an upsurge of city books—not only metropolises like Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore, Madras and Patna are being written about, but there are books on Allahabad, Bhopal and Dehra Dun also, to name a few. Be it Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram) or Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) or Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes (Bombay Meri Jaan) or even Sa’adat Hasan Manto, who has written extensively about this city, there always seems something new to be written about Bombay and its enigma. However, the common thread that seems to be running through all the Bombay books, including Jayanti Ranganathan’s Bombay Meri Jaan, is the dream in the eyes of its dwellers.
Iss dil mein bas ke dekho to
Yeh shahar bada purana hai
Har saans mein kahani hai
Har saans mein afsaana hai
(Live in this heart once/This is an old city/There is a story in each breath/There is a tale in each breath)
The lines of a song from the film Maya Memsaab (1993) gives the impression of the city called Bombay. And, these are the lines, with which the book, Bombay Meri Jaan opens, and the author says that this song became her personal ‘anthem song’.