Bombay Time

A wedding brings the residents of Wadi Baug together, a middle-class apartment building in Bombay. The groom is a young man from the building, and the guests are the Parsi men and women who grew up there side by side. Watching the celebration, they look back on the idealistic people they once were and measure the distance since.

The book follows several of them closely. Adi Patel is sinking into alcoholism. Dosamai has a tongue that never stops gossiping. Soli Contractor carries the weight of a betrayal and a broken heart. Each is shown with faults and sympathies side by side.

Rusi Bilimoria watches it all. A businessman who has lost his illusions, he is trying to make sense of his own life while holding together a community that is fraying around him.

This is literary fiction about a close Parsi neighborhood, told through a cast of interlinked lives rather than a single plot. It is a character-driven read with a warm tone, but it does not look away from failure, disappointment and regret. The attention stays on what the years have done to people who once shared the same hopes.