Shanghvi writes: 

So when did the love affair with Bombay start to crumble? Events need their invitation, writes James Salter in Light Years, dissolutions their start. There are three chief reasons I decided to leave Bombay: the failure of aesthetic, the failure of conversation, the failure of love. The year my father was diagnosed with brain cancer, a developer bought the bungalow next to my house in Juhu, demolished it overnight, built an eight-storey building. This structure is an ode to ugliness. The solitary reaper: “I’d come to Matheran chiefly to think about the nature of loss,” Shanghvi writes as he traces his life in a small forest town As my father struggled to recover from cancer, the developer put up vertical parking, so apartment owners could disembark from garages to proceed into drawing rooms. But the vertical parking was a sham for it was soon converted into living rooms, temples and gyms. Repeated complaints to the BMC eventually brought a directive that was quickly quieted by a stay order from the court. In spite of the order, work carried on. Today, I live alongside a building where the ‘garages’ have marble bathtubs and shrines to Laxmi. This building became a metaphor for Bombay’s greed, political complicity, farcical civic bodies, weak justice system, lazy neighbours and webs of intractable, genius corruption. Bombay had turned into an ugly city and I do not mean this only visually: there was so much more that there was nothing left to see. I noted the death of conversation in two opposing quarters. At Vinod Book Mart, I noticed the vendor no longer discussed the next stock of books coming in, didn’t offer his tart views on a Bollywood siren or a sleazy MP. By the time I had graduated, Vinod Book Mart stocked only stationery and computer accessories. The old vendor was replaced by his young son, who spoke with me in English. I wondered about his father, and the time I had sat next to a giant black weighing scale bargaining for tattered paperbacks and he had doled out the best piece of advice I received for writing fiction: Hurry up. Recently, I went back to Vinod Book Mart, where the absence of banter struck me as sad, as if I were entering a once-familiar room stripped bare, no fabric, no console, no photographs.

These impetuous originals, failed writers, glamorous impressarios, sexual renegades had come through slaughter and then gone on to tap dance or ride bareback, or sit at a desk to write letters in longhand. I’d look out of the cab window, the Bombay air humid and exhausting, the neon lights pink and bright, the lovers on Marine Drive no longer audacious. People who live here, I reminded myself, read novels written by management school graduates.

Speaking for myself, I veered to the tragic mode: there was consolation in the essential impermanence of things, a relief in knowing it would all come to end. The tragedy was not the end but a knowledge of the end foreshadowing all things. However, my brief time in Matheran makes me believe that life might not be as tragic as I had originally believed, but comic – possibly even a total and complete farce.

Everything, it seems, is ultimately drowned out by a great laughter in the distance. Karen Blixen, the great Danish writer, after losing her farm in Kenya, and her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, in a flying accident, returned to Denmark in 1931. She came to writing, she said, with ‘blood on her hands’. She took on a nom de plume – Isak, which in Danish means ‘the one who laughs’. Finally, this morning in Matheran, before light breaks, at this hour of a clear darkness, I know why she chose the name she did.