BOMBAY TIME

A first novel trains an unflinching eye on Indians at home and abroad. Set in contemporary Bombay, Umrigar’s story is both a valentine to the past and a lament for the present of its title city.

The residents of Wadia Baug, a middle-class apartment building inhabited by Parsis, gather for a wedding. The journeys to and from the wedding form short narrative bookends for the wedding itself, the principal present action. The narrator, however, is more interested in past than present, and so the paragraphs devoted to the wedding are often just weak excuses to explore bygone times. The result is a thin present with little drama, but a rich past with detailed accounts, sometimes amusing, sometimes lyrical, sometimes sad, of the characters’ individual histories and their eventual intersectings, the whole sometimes reading like summaries. Dosa Popat, an embittered widow and Wadia Baug’s resident gossip, observes the guests’ departures for the wedding and reflects on their stories while lamenting her own unrealized life—a promising academic career cut off before its beginning by a drunken promise of marriage made by her father. Jimmy Kanga, father of the groom, oversees the reception while considering the huge trajectory of his life from orphaned adolescence to law degree at Oxford, return to Bombay and life in the fast lane as a high-profile attorney, then a rejection of the high life for a return to his simpler, safer, and more satisfying Wadia Baug roots. Rusi and Coomi Bilimoria bitterly and sadly recall the failure of their marriage, ultimately achieving a tentative reconciliation on the bus ride home. At the close, all these individuals recede into the fabric of the city.

Umrigar’s debut unfolds raga-like, the histories of its people forming sustained riffs that spring from and return to the same source. The minimal plotting is at times contrived and sentimental, but the portrait of the city and its citizens is authoritative, richly textured, and engaging.