Vanity Bagh – Anees Salim
Inside every big Indian city, there is a tiny Pakistan.
Inspired by the legend of Abu Hathim, aging don of Vanity Bagh, Imran Jabbari and his friends form a gang called 5½ Men in their mohalla of Vanity Bagh. They are hired to
dispense a batch of stolen scooters to different corners of the city; not until the city rocks with scooter bombs does Imran realize that they have been involved in a terrorist act.
One of the prime accused in the 11/11 serial blasts, Imran is destined to live in captivity for the next fourteen years. He kills time plotting jailbreak until he is assigned to the bookmaking section of the prison. The new job equips him with a new facility: each time he opens a book and stares at its blank pages, he sees them scribbled with tales from Vanity Bagh. Imran thus traces the history of animosity between Vanity Bagh, nicknamed Little Pakistan, and Mehendi, a Hindu neighbourhood.
In a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen in Mahim, Bombay, through the last decades of the twentieth century, lived four love-battered Mendeses: mother, father, son and daughter.
Janet Laird’s life changed the day she inherited her grandfather’s house in a faraway Indian hill station. Ignoring her son’s arguments to come grow old in their family castle in Scotland, she moves with her chatty parrot, Mr. Ganguly and her loyal housekeeper, Mary, to Hamara Nagar, where local merchants are philosophers, the chief of police is a tyrant, and a bagpipe-playing Gurkha keeps the wild monkeys at bay.
Twenty-five-year-old Jinni lives in Mumbai, works in a hip animation studio and is perfectly happy with her carefree and independent existence. Until her bossy grandmother shows up and announces that it is Jinni’s ‘duty’ to drop everything and come and contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections from their sleepy hometown, Bittora.Of course, Jinni swears she won’t. But she soon ends up swathed in cotton saris and frumpy blouses, battling prickly heat, corruption and accusations of nymphomania as candidate Sarojini Pande, a daughter of the illustrious Pande dynasty of Pavit Pradesh. And if life isn’t fun enough already, her main opposition turns out to be Bittora ex-royal, Zain Altaf Khan – an irritatingly idealistic though an undeniably lust-worthy individual with whom Jinni shares a complicated history…
