Muses Over Mumbai (Bloomsbury), reads like a love letter, a love song to the original version of Mumbai. Authors find stories in what they love, experience, and relate to. What are this city’s qualities that inspire you to write about it in the guise of fiction?
Murzban Shroff: WHEN I started writing the book, I wrote out an admission. It flowed spontaneously and went like this: “Call it Bombay or call it Mumbai, my city remains the story capital of the world. There are no limits to the inspiration it delivers, no end to its generosity.” I could afford to feel this, and say after two decades of writing about the city, understanding what it represents to its people, what it delivers, and what makes it tick. The special thing about Mumbai is: it will test you to the hilt, it will thwart you, frustrate you, confuse you, overwhelm you, but it never fails to deliver a sense of realisation, a modicum of personal and spiritual growth.

To live in Mumbai is to be conscious of a larger design of life and illumination at work. It is this illumination that finds its way into my stories that unravels through the personal conflicts of its characters, and becomes the epiphany on which one thrives. It is fiction born out of reality, to reveal a deeper reality of the self and of your environment.