Review: Bombay Balchao

Bombay Balchao by Jane Borges
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: A community of stories from a Goan wadi in the corner of Mumbai as colorful as its occupants

The book gets a lot of things right. An assortment of stories and relationships you'd expect in a closely placed community if not close knit. It mirrors with the colonies, chawls of yesteryear which formed the entire definition of city life for its occupants - rarely did you step away from that 5km radius in your lifetime. The feelings of love, envy, bitterness, pain over years are mixed dressing like that of the balchao pickle across each of the short stories around this corner of Mumbai , Goans had made home christening it Cavel. Through the stories, there are nuggets of history and tussles of the Catholics in Mumbai, the great dock fires in the 1940s, the water struggles and so much more that make it relatable to everyone yet unique to the inhabitants of Cavel. It took me a while to realize the recurring characters across each of the stories and how they made appearances in each other's tales as side actors in some and heroes in the next and you felt you could imagine the on goings of the Bosco mansion as people age. The mixed timelines made it confusing and it did take a while to settle into the rhythm of life here and the eccentricity of all its inhabitants.

As for the individual stories, some made for interesting reading like the "twain shall never meet" love track between Ellena Gomes and Michael Coutinho, the water pipeline story when the Braganzas moved in, the sketch Mario made of his dad, his cruciverbalist days while some went down a cliched path like the exorcism of Michael, Benji's death.

The book is like a walk through the corridor of a Mumbai chawl - you overhear enough to get a glimpse of the occupants' life styles but not their life stories.

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