Customer Reviews

Bombay Time: A Novel

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4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

In Bombay Time, Thrity Umrigar focusses on a small neighbourhood community of Parsi Indians. All share a common bond for the apartment block that they share, and a common bond of heritage and religion.On the face of it, the characters all have a reasonably high standard of living, but Umrigar scratches the surface to guide us to the real hearts of the characters.

The starting point for this exploration is the tail end of a wedding reception for the son of one of the couples, when the only guests left are those that have grown old together. The groom, Mehernosh, has grown up in the company of all the favoured guests, and has surprised most of them by returning to Bombay after studying law in the US. Each successive chapter concentrates on one or two of the reception guests, and reflects upon formative incidents in their lives. These incidents may have left them physically or mentally scarred, but all have grown through their pain into new more fully-fledged people.

For the final two chapters, all the characters are brought together to share joy and fleeting pain, and all again finish the evening wiser than they started. Although very much in the background, the city of Bombay too develops its character as the novel progresses.

Umrigar writes beautifully and sensitively, and I recommend highly this delicate and thoughtful novel.

Some of the characters are interesting and come to life. However, there is a tendency to purple prose (one of the characters hears the sound of his heart breaking), too many cute little Indian phrases, and the occasional howler: as an example, "valorized"(!) instead of "valued". There is no real story, just a series of vignettes. This author just is not in the class of Rohinton Mistry, S. Taroor, or Jhumpa Lahiri.

This book was good all around. A very light and easy read.

1. It shows us that people seem to like to be miserable wherever they are and at whatever time we choose to observe them. It doesn't seem to depend on anything.

2. The length was neither too long nor too short. Some books just drag on and on and on. In addition to the strong characterizations, the author gave us an idea of the magnitude of poverty in India and the destructive nature of the caste system that people don't seem to want to emerge from no matter how many centuries pass.

3. The characters were very well developed and believable. Again, just enough detail was used-- but not too much. And many of these characters are something that we might imagine having seen in real life.

This beautifully constructed novel quickly seduces the reader with strong imagery, pitch perfect dialogue, vibrant characters, and beautifully realized interrelationships which extend well beyond the bounds of the apartment house they share in Bombay. All the characters are attending a wedding reception hosted by successful lawyer Jimmy Kanga for his son Mehernosh, the wedding reception serving as the loose framework on which the author hangs the characters and their stories.

While this is not a plot in the traditional sense, Umrigar uses this device very effectively. As the festivities begin, each character privately recalls how s/he has been affected by some early love and/or loss, and the reader comes to know the characters and their stories intimately. We see how the characters relate to each other and interact, we care for them, we silently scold them for their blindness, and ultimately, we hope for their eventual happiness.

Unique aspects of Parsi heritage and history, the pressures of life in Bombay, the attraction of educated Indian youth to England and America, the unbridgeable chasm between middle-class Indians and the masses of homeless poor, the marriage customs, and the changing role of women in India are just a few of the fascinating subjects which Umrigar manages to weave into the stories of her characters. These personal stories take on broader significance in the light they shed on contemporary Indian society, and they achieve universality in their focus on love and loss.

As the novel comes to a close and the sweetness of young love and the wedding reception linger in the reader's mind, Umrigar injects an unexpected and powerful dose of Bombay reality, forcing the reader to see these lives in the even greater context of the human condition. This is a beautifully realized portrait of the lives of one group of friends in one building in one Indian city and how it relates to the world at large. Mary Whipple

Of late, a suprising number of novels coming out of the Indian diaspora have focused on small apartment buildings within Bombay: SWIMMING LESSONS, BEACH BOY, SUCH A LONG JOURNEY, and THE DEATH OF VISHNU are a few outstanding examples. Each has in common a deeply felt affection for the people and families who live in the building, many of whom have lived in close proximity for generations, and rich understanding of the complexities of the lives of these people. BOMBAY TIME can proudly take its place with these fine novels. Thrity Umrigar has a lively, sympathetic but unsentimental view of her richly diverse characters. Her writing is lush and sensuous, conveying in few words the smells and sounds and colors and heat of a decaying but vital community. Her ability to convey the heart of her characters is striking, making reading her work a pleasure.

Though each of these novels focus on a small Bombay community, each is its own gift. In the case of BOMBAY TIME, it is each individual character who provides a gift to the reader, the gift of understanding how another sees the world, and another way to make sense of the world. I finished BOMBAY TIME sadly, knowing I would miss each character, from the odiferous Tehmi to the rageful Coomi. Each character was memorable and gave me yet another little piece of India, another little piece of humanity. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I was completely enthralled with the book and the characters. I absolutely love Thrity Umrigar's writing style and the way in which she was able to make the reader truly identify with each of the characters, their lives, their pains. I have to say that the most disappointing part of the book, was when it ended.

I could NOT put this book down. This author has a special way of really making you feel like you are inside the characters heads and hearts. I think this is a wonderful book about India, but for ANYONE and EVERYONE, from any country in any culture. If you are interested in reading a book rich with emotion and culture, a book that you will think about long after you are finished, and make you hungry for more of these people, and this author, THIS is the book to read! I honestly cried at several points and had to put the book down to contemplate the emotion and thoughts that were conjured up in me. I also laughed heartily at moments.

I carried this book with me everywhere, stealing a sentence here and there while at work, and reading it everynight for about 3 days until I greedily ate up every word. This is a book you can finish in one sitting, but to savoir it, I would recommend spanning it over a couple days, if you can bare it!

Thrity Umrigar's Bombay Time is one of the best recent books from the Indian subcontinenet. It tells the stories of the residents of Wadia Baug, a block of apartments mainly peopled with Parsis. Each story is told simply and beautifully, with conviction and honesty. All the stories meld into a whole which is held together by the wedding of one of the residents.

Thrity has two of the most important attributes of a great novelist: a great ability to tell a story and a huge heart. Each character is made compelling by her compassion and respect for their meager lives.

It is somewhat unfortunate for Thrity that she is treading on the same ground as Rohinton Mistry who is another of the great novelists of our time. However, this should not in any way diminish her book except perhaps to those who read books from India as an exploration in the exotic rather than the universal human condition.

If you can afford only one book this year, this should be the one!

Thrity Umrigar has captured the essence of the experience of being a Parsi in Bombay, India and distilled it beautifully in her 271 page book -- Bombay Time. Reading this wonderful, complex story is like being wrapped in a quilt of stories of Parsis from different walks of life with the whole being greater than the sum of the individual tales. I must confess that I had some difficulty with Ms. Umrigar's writing style which I attribute to a matter of my individual taste. However, Ms. Umrigar is a skillful storyteller and I found myself unable to put the book down as it transported me back to the Bombay of my youth evoking tender, bitter sweet memories with every page. If you're interested in getting an insider's view of this endangered culture (the population of Parsis world wide is falling), I suggest you get yourself a copy of this book.

If you're not familiar with the term "Parsi" - they are descendents of a group of Zarathushtis i.e. followers of the Prophet Zarathustra (anglicized to Zoroaster) who fled Parsa (anglicized to Persia) and came to India some time around the 8th century (may be earlier). Though they've lived in India for well over a thousand years, they've managed to keep certain aspects of their culture distinct especially those that pertain to practicing their religion while simultaneously integrating themselves into the vivid heterogeneous cultural tapestry of India. Try an Internet search on "Parsi" for more information or better still find one and engage in a conversation.

This book is worth reading again and again. I loved Thrity Umrigar's descriptions of Parsi life in Bombay. A fabulous read.

Bombay Time deals with the Parsi residents of a Bombay apartment house in a delightfully fresh way. Always in the background is the setting of the huge city itself, which most of the characters feel has changed for worse during the their lifetimes. To a large extent the novel is really a series of related "mini-biographies" of characters who have known each other throughout their lives, with the focus shifting from time to time to a different character. As a novelist writing recently about Indian characters myself (in India Treasures), I greatly admire Thrity Umrigar's insightful and sympathetic portrayals. Compared to the multitudes of the poor outside on the streets, the apartment residents live a privileged existence, yet they have their own worries and problems. While focused on the viewpoint of one resident, the reader typically learns something about another character in the building, often one with whom there is some sort of conflict. Later in the book, the viewpoint shifts to that other resident, and the reader has the revelation of seeing how differently that person views himself from how he's seen by the other characters. The framework of the novel is a wedding that almost all residents attend, where most of the late-middle aged characters realize how much their lives have ended up disappointingly different from their plans or hopes when they were young; yet, in a short space of hours the characters come to see themselves and their antagonists with more empathy and understanding. Along with them, I found myself viewing people in general in a more positive light, quite a compliment to Thrity Umrigar's skill.