‘The Only City’ by Anindita Ghose: Sea-saw that is Mumbai

The city always begins with the sea. And in ‘The Only City’, Anindita Ghose’s new anthology on Mumbai, the sea keeps returning — not just as geography, but as memory, metaphor and mirror. It glimmers between paragraphs, drifts through train compartments, sloshes inside half-empty glasses of Old Monk. It carries lovers, strugglers, nurses, ghosts. It carries us.

Raghu Karnad’s story sets the tone — slow, sun-dappled, and full of sea spray. A rich man and a poor girl share a speedboat from Alibag to Mumbai. Around them, rogue chikoos roll, arms flail, and something tender almost happens. It’s a story that never hurries. You want it to move faster, but perhaps that’s the point — Mumbai, too, makes you wait for what it never promises.

Amrita Mahale’s ‘Aai-Tai’ is an easier tide to ride — a sweet, slightly surreal tale of a 19-year-old struggler obsessed with a four-armed baby. It’s playful, intimate, the kind of story you read on a local train, smiling faintly at the absurdity of hope. Mahale understands the girl-dreamers of Mumbai — their rented rooms, their half-written poems, their fierce hunger to be seen.

Ghose’s own story is among the finest here — polished, perceptive, quietly piercing. It explores the fragile negotiations of marriage and modern love, without melodrama. There’s no neat closure, only the ache of endurance. Her prose elegant but never ornamental, her insight sharp but never cruel.

Prathyush Parasuraman’s ‘Two Bi Two’ is another standout — set in the second-last compartment of a Mumbai local, the one known to “pick up” queers and middle-class dreamers alike. A man resists a fleeting encounter with a stranger. The story hums with restraint and empathy — a meditation on desire denied, and dignity retained.

Shanta Gokhale’s old-school playfulness provides a breath of light. Her prose is effortless, sly, alive — the kind that reminds you literature need not shout to be heard. ‘

Nurse Shanti’ by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm, too, stands tall — a tale of an old man, a nurse, and a mysterious package that unfolds into loss and memory. It’s eerie yet tender, domestic and devastating at once.

Lindsay Pereira’s ‘Stray’ stops you mid-breath. His portrait of a homeless man watching the city lose its soul piece by piece offers the collection’s most haunting line: “It felt as if the people of Bombay had lost something as well... where he had once found beauty in its wood and stone, there was only plastic and naked metal.”

Dharini Bhaskar’s ‘Silver Cloud’ offers another memorable image: “Mine was a Bombay without a sea.” What a quiet heartbreak — a city stripped of its pulse, its promise, its blue horizon. That’s the Bombay many of us now inhabit: one where rent rises, kindness shrinks, and the sea belongs to someone else’s balcony.

Kersi Khambatta’s ‘The Hon. Secy’ crackles with wicked Parsi humour, a reminder that satire is born of intimacy, not distance. Manu Joseph’s story about magic and schizophrenia is sly and subversive, evidence of why he remains my favourite contemporary writer. Jeet Thayil’s dystopic Mumbai closes the collection with a dark brilliant shimmer.

I’m glad ‘The Only City’ exists. It’s proof that the short story still endures. It is, after all, is like a window in a high-rise: you can’t live there, but you can glimpse the world through it. For a moment, it holds you. For a moment, it’s enough.

Like all love letters to Mumbai, the anthology is tender, chaotic, and irresistibly sincere. A reminder that Mumbai is not a city you arrive in or leave. It’s a story you keep rewriting — uneven, unending, entirely your own.

— The reviewer is an award-winning author