Mumbai medley

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Mumbai has been the backdrop for myriad tales. Be it the underworld, films or the business world, the city has come alive in the stories of narrators. In her latest work, poet, novelist and translator Sampurna Chattarji weaves together a confluence of her experiences in the city in all its speed, squalor and soul.

Aptly titled Dirty Love, the book deals with love for the localities, food, people, traditions and idiosyncracies through a series of short stories.
“Dirty Love materialised as a series of accretions over the years that I have lived and worked in Mumbai (I moved here from Kolkata in 1995). I wanted to inscribe and celebrate the city that I observed and experienced. In it readers will see the dream worlds of commuters, keychain sellers, the glancing encounters between inhabitants of different worlds within the city. They will also feel its murk, its smells and its visceral presence,” says Chattarji.
Earlier she had penned poems like, Dogs, Mobs and Rock Concerts and Boxes about the city. But she felt there was much more to be captured. And so she began writing the short stories, some of them — like Burn, Hungry, Magic Show, The Saint Who Resurrected a Goat — were among the early ones.
“By the time the book found a publisher, the city had changed substantially, as had my relationship to it. I had moved to Thane, and I went into the city (specifically South Mumbai or Juhu) to get my occasional shot of adrenaline, to recharge myself. I was no longer a daily traveller sweating it out on the local trains or losing years of my life sitting in the midst of ghastly traffic jams. The other stories were written around this phase,” she adds.
The other stories are a result of Sampurna’s constantly evolving relationship with Mumbai. The city acts as her muse and she presents her love for it in the most matter-of-fact way.
Born in Ethiopia, Sampurna’s parents shifted to Darjeeling when she was eight months old. She moved to Delhi to complete her graduation in literature from Lady Shri Ram College, worked with an ad agency in Kolkata and finally moved to Mumbai in 1995.
“Growing up in Darjeeling was a blast. It’s there that I started writing and became the obsessive bookworm that I still am. It was an ideal environment to grow up in, ours was a household full of books, none of which were forbidden. My parents knew I’d give up if what I had picked up was too much for me. For instance, I attempted to read Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum at the age of 10, and got so psyched out by the first few pages that I never went back to it until many years later,” recollects Chattarji.
Poetry, short stories, novels and translations, Sampurna has been adept in all forms of writing. Be it her novel Rupture, poetry books like Sight May Strike You Blind and Absent Muses, or the translation of famous Bengali children’s author Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol into Puffin classic Wordygurdyboom!, she has managed to win the hearts of young and old alike. So what is on the anvil?
“After my unreserved love for Mumbai, I am working on a collection of short stories about Kolkata and translating Joy Goswami’s poems from Bengali,” she concludes.