Imagine the densely intensely layered Bombay in a Sudhir Patwardhan painting. Imagine if you touche a part of the painting-a xerox shop perhaps, or a photo studio, a boy tenderly watering a plant in a Vanaspati ti— and it rippled into life. The boy momentarily catches your gaze and goes in and you watch as he tends the ghar-ki-baby as sweetly as he does the flowering plant. The young disabled woman in a photo studio glances at you wryly before she proceeds to perform her disability before the camera for a government document. The best friend at a wedding begins speaking, “Mandarmala Sakhardande Bhabiji, I will from now on only call you Bhabiji because your real name is longer than the title of Rajshri Pictures’ Dulhan Wahi Jo Piya Man Bhaye.” Bombay comes alive in its quixotic variety.

Reading Jayant Kaikini’s stories feels a bit like this. At the launch of the second collection—Mithun Number Two and Other Bombay Stories—translated with deft delight by Tejaswini Niranjana, we asked the question, what makes a story a Bombay story? Shanta Gokhale responded with “we all live in a different Bombay. We all write our own Bombay’s stories.” “Bombay is such a city”, said Kaikini “I am sweating and someone is wiping his face next to me. It is as if he is wiping my face.” This rhythm of the city, where we are joined through a kind of cinematic cut of humour, poignancy and coincidence, is what I think makes Bombay a city of fleeting intimacies. As we quietly observe each other, we also reveal ourselves to each other, across crowded trains and tube-lit windows. Watcher and watched in one frame, in a kind of equality.