Hung up on Bombay

While growing up in Kalyan in the rsquo90s Bombay for Rochelle Potkar was an aspirational place a twohour train journey would take you to Kalyan back then wasnrsquot a satellite city but a small town And Bombay was a city of opportunities So when she moved to Santacruz she felt the same way a migrant from another state would In her latest book Bombay Hangovers Vishwakarma Publications the writer attempts to trace and record every inch of the city and those who inhabit it through fictionThe story Fabric is set against the backdrop of the Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982 Pic courtesyWikimedia CommonsA collection of 16 short stories Bombay Hangovers wasnrsquot a conscious book project the fourth story in the collection The Metamorphosis of Joe Pereira which revolves around a persnickety old man in Santacruz was Potkarrsquos first written in 2007 ldquoBy then I had lived long enough in Santacruz to imbibe a person like Joe Pereira into myself The last story for the collection was written in 2015 All the pieces were written at random points in time But when I was collating them I realised that all of them were about the city You have to find interrelatedness especially when yoursquore submitting your work to publishersrdquo she saysPotkar has been a wellestablished name in the Indian poetry scene with accolades like the Norton Girault Literary Prize to her credit She finds that therersquos a difference in writing about cities in poetry and prose She likens the latter to local trains that connect every station to culminate a journey ldquoChronicling life in poetry allows you to get very philosophical and abstract you could join invisible dots outside the canvas And it would be satisfying and fulfilling as an abstract piece Whereas in stories you realise you have to follow tangibilities such as character place or phenomena You are aware that this dramatic life of a character is happening on the canvas and not on an abstract philosophical levelrdquo she maintainsPotkar chose the title for two reasons she picked Bombay over Mumbai for a sense of nostalgia as the city has always been more than its name and lsquoHangoversrsquo because as a writer she found herself ldquohungover in the realms of intoxicationrdquoThe book traverses from the south and north of the city and even beyond to Thane From a perfume shop on Peddar Road to the mills of Girangaon each story brings to light social cultural and economic differences that exist between places Potkar now based in Borivali shares that the most challenging piece to write was Morning ldquoIt had nothing to do with the craft or components of storytelling but rather with writing about a character who is a rape survivor empathising with her and understanding her breach I wasnrsquot just talking about a survivor opening up herself to the world again Irsquom also saying that her mother hid her own experience of raperdquo she sharesPotkar also adds that when writing about the city the inception of ideas happens through its sensoria the city seeps into you through its spaces sounds and sights ldquoI have been practising Haibun a Japanese form of poetry that combines haiku with a prose poem for a long time The Japanese say the sixth sense is memory and I was wondering if the seventh sense would be nostalgia and the eighth prophecies When you live so long in a city you start prophecising what will happenrdquo she sharesSo even if a reader hasnrsquot been witness to cityspecific incidents in the narratives such as the Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982 Potkar feels that the obsolescence of life is the same ldquoThe pandemic made so many jobs obsolete Even the march of time and technology makes things obsolete so readers will be able to make a connection with these stories on a broader levelrdquo she says Is Bombay a microcosm of the world then Macrocosm Potkar reckons ldquoYou could get lost in its labyrinth Therersquos no other place like it Bombay is truly a lsquobhelpurirsquo cityrdquo