Book Title: The Only City: Bombay In Eighteen Stories
Author and Editor: Anindita Ghose
Publisher: Fourth Estate India
Number of Pages: 352
ISBN: 978-9369893256
Date Published: Oct. 24, 2025
Price: INR 477
Book Excerpt
Speedboat
Raghu Karnad
Now back to the city, while it was still light.
Red eyes at rest behind reflective sunglasses, shoulders cooling under layers of lotion, cotton and now the bay breeze, they flip-flopped down towards the end of the pier. Som led the way. His party straggled behind him. He turned to watch them, hoping they would see him answering the phone.
‘The ferry is reaching now,’ the man’s voice said. ‘You have to wait.’
‘How long?’
‘Just, you have to wait.’
The pier was where the public ferry embarked, and where their private boat would pick them up in between the ferry schedule. But they were late. The guy on the phone was testy. ‘Just be there, on the side,’ he said and hung up.
Som went on ahead, entering the shade beneath the roof at the end of the pier. There were many people here. Low cement walls ran around the area, and down one side, a chain of wheeled metal barricades were set up to force ferry passengers into a queue. The barricades divided the end of the pier lengthwise—into the wide expanse where Som now stood; and a narrow channel along the wall, filled with a restless mass of bodies silhouetted in the false dusk under the roof.
In the empty space on his side, Som was alone. The breeze ran through his hair and over his scalp. He patted it without thinking, a habit he had acquired when his hair began thinning; encouraging it to stay put, as if it might just rise off his head one day and float away into the world. He took off his sunglasses.
His party had closed in together at the sight of all the ordinary people. It cut into their buzz, and Som was glad. He had suggested—but not forcefully enough to take credit now—that they get to the pier an hour ago. That would have been just after the previous ferry went out; this place would have been empty. But, well, they were all trapped in the prism of the poolside, stupefied by sun and water. After lunch, which was late as always, the girls had gone off to the terrace to get high. When they came back, they gave up any conversation, or even speech, and it was best just to let them move from deck to pool and back, dousing hot skin or drying slippery shanks on the tile and wood.
They even ignored their phones, which were placed safely away from puddles of beer and the water running down their arms. Then evening laid its cool hand over them, and someone brought out cups of espresso, and the girls rose to go shower and moisturize.
Sadiqa was at his elbow. ‘Boat here?’
Som shook his head. ‘Sorry. You see this queue? We’re at the end of it.’
‘Meaning? They don’t look like they’re waiting for a speedboat.’
‘No. But our speedboat is waiting for them to be gone.’
‘You’re not serious.’ Her lips thinned. She looked for a moment as if she might throw open her arms and appeal to the hundreds to step back for a minute, so they could squeeze past.
‘It won’t be long,’ Som said. ‘It’s past six as it is. Are we all here?’
They turned to count their party. Sadiqa’s husband Leo came strolling into the shade, the black swallowing up his pale legs and blue cotton shorts. Behind him, the kids lingered together in the sunlight. Their group lengthened as one fell back to take a photo, then compressed together again for selfies. They were all knees and shoulders and lengths of bare skin tipped with candy-coloured accessories.
Som’s daughter Zia moved with a lolling gait, and even when she stood in one place, she swung her arms around, pushed the brim of her baseball cap from side to side, front to back, mimicking a graceless child. His son Yash carried the icebox.
There was a flicker and a flash, a grid of tubes lit up in the tin roof overhead. The silhouettes were banished and the crowd bathed in sudden, shock-white fluorescence. At once, Som was aware of the eyes in the ferry queue, scrutinizing his family without the benefit of reflective sunglasses.
‘Zia,’ Som said, as his daughter arrived. ‘Put something on please, it’s getting cold.’ Even in this light, she had the afterglow of a day spent exquisitely and expensively bored. Not least of her entitlement, he thought, was her ability to just stand here, in front of a hundred men, in what people no longer even bothered to call short-shorts.
She tilted her chin at him. ‘You’re cold?’
Som was in shorts too, and flip-flops. A crumpled linen shirt.
‘That’s not … it’s going to be cold on the speedboat.’
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Excerpted with permission from The Only City by Anindita Ghose, published by Fourth Estate India.
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