One day it was said at home that we would be moving to Bombay. I was born in that city, and had afterwards spent summers there at my grandparents' house. So I knew that in Bombay people lived in buildings and they played cricket in the parking lots of these buildings or on their terraces. When the ball fell over the terrace wall they called out to passing strangers, who placed their briefcases or polythene bags on the road a moment and slung it up five floors. We were moving to Bombay after six years in a small town called Secunderabad the kind of town where houses might have wells in the backyard and goats at the gate. For me at the age of nine, it was Bombay, home even in 1988 to perhaps 10 million people, which felt like a very small place.
The Bombay building we came to live in stood six storeys high on a small square of land. The ground floor contained a post office, a bhajan hall, a charitable dispensary and a dental clinic. Above, we occupied an apartment among 34. In these compartments different feuds, scandals and repressions bloomed. There were pistol-shot deaths of wives alleged to be murder, and passionate love affairs of adolescents conducted through the simple act of staring. There were suicides of maids and there was the subsequent terrorisation of girls by their ghosts.
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