Bombay Fizz.

(From Indian Express)

SITTING in her home in British Columbia, Canada, Hiro Boga has leaned across the continents, splayed her fingers in the sands of Juhu beach in Bombay and built a castle of memories. Parsi girl grows up, goes to study psychology in the US and decides to live her life in the West. Her protagonist Shahnaz's life is her own. Shahnaz brings alive a way of life in one of the richest Parsi houses in the '50s and '60s. The mansion by the beach has uncountable rooms with high ceilings and leather armchairs. Run by a battery of servants, the meal-time air sings with the aroma of goat-pulao-with-saffron-and-spices and thousand-almond-chicken-cooked-in-double-cream. Children get birthday headbaths with milk and rose petals. Every day, they are chauffeur-driven to private British schools in Bentleys and relatives live at Peddar Road and Malabar Hill. A world of the Gymkhana, weddings at the Mahalaxmi Race Course and parties at the Taj. In wafts the stink of the Bombay Ducks drying on Juhu beach; the sight of the municipal tap in the nearby hutments or the pus-filled stumps of maid Sunder's daughter hands chopped by her in-laws in nearby Poona. The author has managed to throw open an even spread of the sights and smells of the most alive city in the country. The novel's characters are not just Shahnaz, her manic-depressive mother and her slothful husband Shahrukh; under Boga's evocative spell, cities - Bombay and Eugene - too stir and take on a life of their own. Sometimes, the two meet. ("The somber mass of evergreens that stand erect as gurkhas at the end of our street.") Shahnaz By Hiro Boga Penguin India Price: Rs 295Shahnaz of two ages grows simultaneously in the chapters of Boga's novel: 21 and about to leave for college to the US with her husband, and 12, at the ...