Mumbai Noir

After the critical and commercial success of Delhi Noir part of New York's award-winning noir series comes Mumbai Noir which looks through a glass darkly at what is arguably India's most fascinating city. The stories in Mumbai Noir depict the many ways in which the city's ever-present shadowy aspects often force themselves onto the lives of ordinary people. The city's chroniclers-ts novelists essayists poets journalists and filmmakers-often seem overawed by the idea of Mumbai rendering its quotidian realities in brushstrokes of grandiose narratives. What inoculates the stories in this collection from the hyperbole of "maximum city"-that much-abused term coined by the astute Suketu Mehta to describe Mumbai-are the restraints set by the noir genre which stipulates among other things an unflinching gaze at the underbelly without recourse to sentimentality or forced denouements. When viewed from a plane (or hot-air balloon) any metropolis might strike one as jaw-dropping. For a majority of Mumbai's residents however the city's overcrowded public transportation and decaying infrastructure fail to provide even the minimum of relief ...