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Take a dive into Mumbai's evolving social fabric over the years with this novel
Updated On: 23 July, 2023 08:24 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Author-journalist and mid-day columnist Lindsay Pereira’s soon-to-release novel revisits an Indian epic and a time that redefined the social fabric of Mumbai
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Radhabai Chawl in Jogeshwari East where six people were burnt to death in January 1993. This incident became one of the defining moments of the riots that many including Pereira say, changed Mumbai forever. mid-day file photo
Lindsay Pereira’s second novel has been in the making for nearly 15 years. “I kept thinking about it in some form or another. But, I would keep putting it off, because it was really easy for it to tip over into cliché,” he tells us over a call from the US. Where his first book, Gods and Ends, offered a telling portrait of a motley bunch of Catholic residents living in Orlem’s Obrigado Mansion, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Penguin Random House), takes us into the decrepit chawl of Ganga Niwas in Parel, which becomes the canvas for his retelling of the Ramayana. “Everyone has their version of the epic, and everyone assumes they know it. So, I was quite wary. I started writing, and then abandoned it, and even asked myself, ‘Why I am doing this?’ But it got to a point, where I thought if I don’t do it, I would never be able to get it out of my system.”
One thing was certain, though. Pereira wanted to tie his story to an event that he says was important to him: The Mumbai riots of 1992-93. “I still feel very strongly about it,” he says, “I draw a straight line from when it happened to the state of Mumbai today, and hold the riots responsible for the irreversible damage to the fabric of the city—the ghettoisation, the rise of bigotry and the insistence on people conforming to ideas that come from a certain set of politicians. What hurts me the most is that people who were responsible for it, have been absolved of all responsibility over time.”
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