Until last week we didn't know who SM Edwardes was. We found his name - regarded as one of the greatest historians of the city - in the footnotes of Jerry Pinto's Postcards from Bombay (Scholastic India), which releases today. A quick web search reveals he died of bronchial pneumonia, a detail that we weirdly can't seem to forget, not that it is insignificant. So, we get to reading Edwardes' fascinating By-lanes of Bombay.

That's what good books do; they lead you to other good books. In his latest title for young readers, Pinto stitches together the histories of people and places that form the Mumbai fabric - in its true "Bombay" sense. You meet the Bawas and the Kolis, take a trip from Nalla Sopara to the now-shuttered Bhulabhai Desai Institute, and when you step away from reading, there's still so much more you want to know. So, we decided to get a curious mind on board — 12-year-old Vrishin Parmani from St Mary's ICSE who makes a bookmark for every book he reads, mainly fiction, we're told — to interview the author at Kitab Khana.