BOMBAY BALCHAO ( PAPER BACK )

About the BookBombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the nineteenth century: among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans. Looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena).Lovers and haters, friends and family, married men and determined singles, churchgoers and abstainers, Bombay Balchao is a tangled tale of ordinary livesof a woman who loses her husband to a dockyard explosion and turns to bootlegging, a teen romance that drowns like a paper boat, a social misfit rescued by his addiction to crosswords, a wife who tries to exorcise the spirit of her dead mother-in-law from her husband, a rebellious young woman who spurns true love for the abandonment of dance. Ordinary, except when seen through their own eyes. Then, its legend.Set in Cavel, a tiny Catholic neighbourhood on Bombays DLima Street, this delightful debut novel is painted with many shades of history and memory, laughter and melancholy, sunshine and silver rain.About the AuthorJane Borges is a Mumbai-based journalist. She currently writes on books, heritage and urban planning for Sunday mid-day, the weekend edition of mid-day newspaper. She has previously co-authored Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands with S. Hussain Zaidi in 2011.