Book Title: A Room in Bombay: A Memoir
Author: Manil Suri
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Number of Pages: 320
ISBN: 937307122X
Date Published: May. 18, 2026
Price: INR 587 / $25.34
Book Excerpt
Mumbai, January 2016
IT’S BEEN ALMOST three years since I’ve come to the city I grew up calling Bombay, and my cousin Sunilla has driven me to the building in which I lived. Little has changed since I last saw Razia Mansion—the shops on the ground floor are just as bustling with commerce, the empty residences in the three floors above are still boarded up. There seem to be a few more shadows from faceless skyscrapers going up, but many of the older buildings still stand—perhaps waiting, like ours, to be transformed. The road is as busy as ever, the scent of exhaust mixing familiarly with that of something tropical—fruit, maybe?—baking in the sun. I can neither see nor hear nor smell the sea, but am reassured as always by its presence just down the road. Sunilla insists we go upstairs, though I’d be fine just sitting in the car.
We enter through the small corner entrance and ascend the unwieldy concrete steps spiraling up to the floor above. The door to the flat is open, so Sunilla strides right in, pulling me along. The muffled sound of chiseling comes from somewhere inside the room to our right, the one our landlords, the Jaffers, used to occupy. I look around at the pocked and gouged walls and am startled at the degree of disrepair. A forest of metal poles stretches through the open verandah into the corridor beyond—bolted to the ceiling, the poles appear to be holding the place up.
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Sunilla takes me down the corridor past the shared kitchen and the Jaffers’ storeroom. Sunlight filters in through a half-ajar door ahead—in the room behind it, more bolsters rise from mounds of debris on the floor. The rest of the corridor is dark, but I can picture the pair of common toilets all the way at the end, next to the room still occupied by Zarina, the sole neighbor who remains. She’ll greet us in a few minutes when we ring her doorbell, looking old and harried and shockingly frail.
For now, we pause in front of a familiar door, which is locked. “Imagine,” Sunilla says. “All the years you lived in this room with your parents.” She tries to pry open the louvers for a peek inside, but they won’t budge. “Should we see if someone has a key?”
No, I tell her. I don’t need to see the room. It would be empty and ramshackle anyway—I carry a much more vivid picture in my head. I can place each piece of furniture, pinpoint every detail—the orange curtains in the windows, the old icebox in the corner, the money plant near the washbasin, the jumble of switches and wires next to the fridge. My parents and I playing cards on the two beds joined together, the TV on in the background, the sound of car horns coming in from the balcony, the fan above us churning away. An almost physical sense of belonging arises within me, and with it, a feeling of confinement, the sharp yearning to break away. This room that has been my crucible, controlled and tormented and driven me—how much has it shaped my history, my current self?
And my parents—Mummy, especially. She was even more in its thrall—did she ever truly escape the room as I did? Was the spell broken long enough for her to appreciate life beyond its walls?
“Are you sure you don’t want to step in?” Sunilla asks. “Just for a minute?”
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I’m sure. I’d rather not unlock the door. Not that I believe there’s something alive or malevolent or nurturing lurking inside, but why go looking? Hasn’t the room wrought enough, flexed its power across oceans, across continents? After everything that’s occurred, good and bad, I’m even with it. Let the next occupant open the door—though Mummy might have been the last to live in it.
“It’s no longer part of my life,” I tell Sunilla, knowing, even as I speak the words, that they’re not quite true. One can never come back home, but one can also never truly get away.
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Excerpted with permission from “A Room in Bombay”, Manil Suri, and HarperCollins India
