When Rucha Chitrodia began to write her debut novel, she was sure that the city she lived in and loved would be the main character in it. And ”Also About Mynah” succinctly describes Mumbai and its legendary textile mills.

With so much focus on the area where the story is set, locale is king, with the protagonists in it only to throw the setting into relief. Which is why the book’s title includes ”also”.

Chitrodia tells PTI about penning an ode to Mumbai’s gritty past, its resilience and spirit, and how her profession as a journalist informs her fiction. ”Also About Mynah” was published recently by Amaryllis.

”None of us lives in a vacuum. More so, in an intensely populated city like Mumbai. We are all products of our surroundings and this is a very temporal book. I wanted to tell stories of people while mirroring the city’s crowded matrix, especially of its mill areas,” she says. The mills, she says, were a throbbing, vibrant microcosm till the unending strike of the early 1980s which was never officially declared as over. The stories of mill workers left bewildered and devastated by the abrupt end to their work lives and their consequent struggles wove into the city’s tapestry.

”Disruption–the word du jour due to the spiralling changes in technology and its impact on life as we know it, especially after the pandemic–has always been a reality of human experience. This book is an attempt to map the disruption in the characters’ journeys juxtaposed against the fate of the city’s mills and what followed. What can follow disruption is what this book postulates,” says Chitrodia.

Mynah, a Bengaluru girl who migrates to Mumbai to join an ad agency, would not have moved into Lalbaug and got a job in Parel — both former mill areas – ”if the labour strike had not happened and then the land had not been repurposed to make way for residential highrises and offices”.

Today, many work at or land up in the former mill lands that boast corporate offices and financial institutions, studios, malls, shopping hubs and leisure centres ”with their lovely high chairs and flashing strobe lights. I have danced under them too”, says Chitrodia.

”I would look up at the extraordinarily high ceilings of the redeveloped spaces and often think that once they were live workspaces that employed thousands.” She met up with progeny of the mill workers and read up on the mill hubs of yore.

”I heard their stories. The research then also spilled over to other parts of Mumbai and homelands of its other migrants that make the city, to use a comfortable cliche, the melting pot it has always been and I am confident will continue to be. So while this book is predominantly about the erstwhile mill lands, it is not limited to it,” says Chitrodia.

Somewhere in this mix, a tender coming-of-age story also unfolds. Mynah must deal with a ghosting boyfriend, she must face up to the reality that her birth mother had abandoned her. Her father, in turn, must learn to cope with the fact that his daughter is now an adult. Amidst this, an unlikely friendship blossoms between Mynah, her dad and her landlady in the new city. ”We see families that fit our concept of ‘picture perfect’. But what happens to the others,” asks Chitrodia.

”Perhaps, by some astral alignment these three people who have been dropped by significant others come together and develop a kinship and form a quasi family. A quasi family formed in the aftermath of disruption in each of their lives.

”A quasi family that has taken form in a residential building that came up in a former mill land where workers had toiled and then watched the padlocks on the locked doors rust. Now, whether this quasi family eventually becomes a bona fide family in the classical and legal sense of the word, who knows? Is it even important? They have found one another. Isn’t that enough?” PTI ZMN RDS RDS

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)