Em and The Big Hoom – Jerry Pinto
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.
Between Em, the mother, driven frequently to hospital after her failed suicide attempts, and The Big Hoom, the father, trying to hold things together as best he could, they tried to be a family.
The Age of Shiva – Manil Suri
India, 1955: As the scars of Partition are beginning to heal, seventeen-year-old Meera sits enraptured: in the spotlight is Dev, singing a song so infused with passion that it arouses in her the first flush of erotic longing. But when Meera’s reverie comes true, it does not lead to the fairy-tale marriage she imagined. Meera has no choice but to obey her in-laws, tolerate Dev’s drunken night-time fumblings, even observe the most arduous of Hindu fasts for his longevity. A move to Bombay seems at first like a fresh start, but soon that dream turns to ashes. It is only when their son is born that things change and Meera is ready to unleash the passion she has suppressed for so long.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity – Katherine Boo
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting“ in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter — Annawadi’s “most-everything girl” — will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”
But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
In less than 48 hours, my parents land in Singapore. So here are some throwback photos of Mumbai!
I have been so busy that I've not had the time to do a proper post, so here are some Mumbai throwback photos
Memories and Such 