Book review: Madonna of Mumbai Cats

Short takes on everyday life

Sadiqua Peerbhoy's short story collection, Madonna of the Mumbai Cats, has Mumbai as its protagonist

The simple becomes poignant and feelings and thoughts hidden in deep recesses of the human mind surface, page after page, in Sadiqua Peerbhoy's recently published short story collection, Madonna of the Mumbai Cats. Bangalore-based advertising professional, Sadiqua revisits the Mumbai, or Bombay, of her childhood and adolescent days through the twelve stories in the collection and in each, the Maximum City comes alive as a protagonist.
But it is easy to step beyond the city and feel the universal scope of the stories and their characters, who are trying to negotiate life through situations and dilemmas. Within the few pages of every short story, Sadiqua has penned vivid character sketches -- all ordinary people but made interesting with Sadiqua's sensitivity.
Whether it is the teen through whose eyes we see the world in the story that has given the book its title or the young woman scheming to win love in 'Writing to the Dead' or the man who has lost his mother and discovers her anew in her death, the people in her stories are entwined in moments that any one of us could be caught in. But the beauty of Sadiqua's treatment of these normal subjects is that she makes them rise beyond the prosaic, diving into the psychological depths that ordinary people plunge into in their everyday lives.
Sadiqua's lucid, controlled prose, pregnant with emotions, and her first-person narrative style in most of the stories, give the stories a more evocative character. In the story 'Beginnings and Ends', she uses a double narrative technique, in which we hear the the voices of two characters in the first person alternately. One is that of an elderly woman, the other is of an 'idiot boy' and flipping between the two very different personas gives the story an added flavour.
Sadiqua's professional background requires her to be concise and this practice of restraint has made her comfortable with the medium of short story and she has done justice to the genre. There are some editorial fallacies that the publishers, Har-Anand, should have paid more attention to.

Shatarupa Chaudhuri
shatarupa@expressbuzz.com