Murzban Shroff Captures Mumbai's Soul Through Stories

Excerpts here:

Q. Everyone may say there are classic ways of writing a story, but everyone brings their uniqueness to the table, wouldn’t you say?
A. Whenever I begin a new book or project, I start with two basic questions: What do I have to say that's any different? And why do you need a book like this? Similarly, with Muses of Mumbai , I began by exploring certain key questions about the city.
Going back a bit, when I was working on Breathless in Bombay, my feelings towards the city were quite ambivalent. With Breathless, my focus was on understanding the have-nots of the city, delving into migrant communities, and trying to sensitise the haves to the struggles of the have-nots. But with Muses, I found myself directly engaging with deeper questions. I wanted to explore how serious the vegetarian and non-vegetarian divide really is, whether the rich in Mumbai are any less vulnerable than the poor, and whether all gurus and godmen are conmen. I was also interested in how newly arrived migrants navigate the city and what specific challenges they face.
These were the kinds of questions that shaped Muses of Mumbai and inspired many of the stories in the collection.

Q. There’s a sense that the stories leapt out at the author—perhaps from a newspaper clipping or from something overheard while walking through the city. How did this book come about?
A. Not so much newspaper clippings. But it’s interesting because let me give you an example. In my first book, while working with migrant communities, I had written a story on the Dhobi Ghats where I anticipated that builders might eye the ghats for development. Two years after the story was published in the US, the Mumbai Mirror broke a front-page story confirming just that.
I believe literature—and writers in particular—often have an underlying objective: to anticipate where the environment is headed. In that sense, there's almost a kind of clairvoyance involved. And how does that come about? Simply by being a flâneur, as you rightly observed.
Yes, I write a lot from observation and detail—but not superficial detail. It’s not there just for environmental precision. It’s detail that creates immediacy, wraps itself around the reader, and feeds into the vision I’m trying to convey.
For instance, in Muses of Mumbai, there's a story called “Neighbours”. I was walking through a part of old Bombay with strong community feeling—where vendors knew each other—and suddenly I entered a stretch gripped by chaotic development. I call it the contrast between Bombay Bahami and Mumbai Mayhem. That kind of insight only comes when you're walking the city like a flâneur, with antennas up and eyes at the back of your head, constantly absorbing and sensing where the city is headed.

Q. You make the reader look more closely than they otherwise would. Would you say that’s what allows fiction to anticipate reality in ways journalism sometimes can’t?
A. Oh, absolutely. To understand this aspect of my writing, I think one must first understand why I’m here—what my role is, how I see myself as a writer. I don’t work out of plot. For me, life itself is the plot. Just following life as a plot works beautifully for me.
To expand on that, I work with characters and I work with issues. I get fascinated by certain character types and try to understand how the city shapes them. At the same time, I focus on issues. So, what are some of the issues I’ve explored in Muses of Mumbai?
So I start with the vegetarian–non-vegetarian divide, then move on to alcoholism, terrorism, corruption, civic apathy, corporate greed and apathy, communal and caste prejudices, the usurpation of green zones, and the destruction of green cover. Lastly, I talk about the conspiracies behind urban development.
But my real epiphany is: what does all this do to us as individuals? What does it do to us as human beings? How does it affect our relationship with the city? My writing is social realism in fictional form. It has a strong non-fiction base. I use that foundation to establish a leap of faith—with either the characters or the issues—and then take a leap of imagination to bring in the fictional elements, making the story more human and relatable.
It’s reality-based writing—what I call storytelling that grinds its way to a deeper reality.

Q. Would you ever explore a short story that isn’t grounded in non-fiction or reality? Would you be able to write something completely imaginative?
A. Oh, absolutely. There are two kinds of writing I do—one within my milieu and one outside of it. By “within my milieu,” I mean writing rooted in my environment—Mumbai or even pan-India, especially when exploring cultural issues. “Outside my milieu” refers to the lives of the invisible—the migrants, the homeless.
Then there’s another kind of writing I do: work that’s close to the bone, close to home. By that, I mean deep psychological excavations into human nature. You’ll be seeing more of that soon. I attempted it in my novel Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, where I explored the lives of four friends engaged in alternate thinking.
That novel wasn’t research-heavy; it was drawn from material close to home. In it, I dealt with two central questions: How do you define success? And what’s the difference between success and gratification? India is in the throes of commercialism and a transitional economy, and those questions felt urgent.

Q. What is it about the short story form that appeals to you?
A. I reserve the short story form mostly for my issue-based fiction because, when covering a territory like Mumbai, it’s difficult to weave everything into a single overarching theme. Mumbai works best as a polyphony of class and cultures. There are multiple issues operating at multiple levels, and the short story allows me to represent that diversity more effectively.
To expand on that—Muses of Mumbai has 17 stories, two of which are almost novelettes, around 15,000 to 17,000 words. Each story is completely different, not just in subject, characters, and socio-economic backgrounds, but also in writing style. Some use elements of memoir, some essay, some whimsy. The styles themselves reflect the city’s diversity.
That’s why I find the short story form so powerful. It’s a wonderfully promiscuous form of writing—you can explore a situation, a cameo, a predicament. A short story can raise questions and be deeply introspective, unlike the novel, which often feels the need to resolve itself.

Q. You don’t think a short story needs to resolve itself—it can just hang?
A. Well, if you look at the Chekhovian model or the modern short story format, the short story often aims to raise questions and encourage introspection more than entertain. An analogy I use is that a short story is like an affair—you’re on someone else’s time, so you must deliver quickly, and it’s open-ended. A novel, on the other hand, is like a marriage—there are good parts and bad parts, but you stay with it.

Q. In your opinion, what defines a good short story?
A. I think a good short story has to be taut, with a certain compact elegance. It needs a strong narrative pace and must take the reader on a journey of the soul. It should unfold truths that might otherwise go unnoticed and single-mindedly pursue a line of questioning or introspection. There has to be growth by the end—some form of cerebral or emotional shift. At the very least, it should get the reader thinking.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over the Mountain is a beautiful story about an elderly couple where the wife develops Alzheimer’s and falls in love with another patient in the care home. Her husband, while grappling with his own emotional journey, ultimately accepts her reality with grace and generosity. The story ends with a sense of growth and dignity—showing that such largeness of spirit is possible.
Another example is Chekhov’s The Chorus Girl, where a woman confronts a sex worker involved with her husband. Chekhov builds deep pathos for the sex worker, who tries to redeem herself in the eyes of the wife. That’s what a good short story does—it deepens your understanding of human nature.

Q. Who are the short story writers you admire?
A. I like Jennifer Egan, Ben Fountain, and Richard Yates. But my reading ethic is a bit different—if I take to a writer, it doesn’t matter whether they’ve written a novel or a short story collection. What matters is that the writer fuels my own growth and reading repertoire.
I’m a voracious reader. Writers I enjoy include Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, DH Lawrence, Chekhov, Dostoevsky—I love the Russians. Among the French, I admire Flaubert, Michel Houellebecq, and of course Camus. Richard Yates has become a recent favourite, and when I discover writers like these, I make it a point to read all their work. I also do a lot of rereading, because once I embrace a writer, I know they’re there to stay.
Among contemporary writers, I admire Edward P Jones, Ben Fountain, Jennifer Egan, and Robert Olen Butler. Among Indian writers, I enjoy Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, and Salman Rushdie.

Q. What is it about the short story—compared to the novel—that appeals to you, and which writing style do you prefer?
A. With a short story, you can tackle a cameo, an incident, an episode, or a character crisis. But with a novel, you create an entire universe. It’s not that I start with a predetermined form. The subject matter often dictates the form.
Mumbai, with its many layers, lent itself beautifully to the short story. Similarly, in my India collection Third Eye Rising, I explored issues like caste, dowry, child apathy, and female exploitation—drawn from experiences in tribal and rural India. There again, I was working with issues, so the short story format suited the material. I was trying to understand the two great institutions that bind India—family and spirituality.
For my novel, I wanted to create a universe. I set it in the late ’80s and early ’90s, an era of independent and alternate thought. The novel follows five friends from different communities, united by their love for books, films, and ideas, reflecting a moment of national unity and intellectual freedom. That vision required the length and depth of a novel.
So for me, it’s always the vision that determines the form. Every story or idea presents itself in an embryonic form—a vision or a character’s dilemma. That vision has its own trajectory, and at some point, the character begins to reveal whether it’s a long marathon—a novel—or a brisk walk—a short story.

Q. You had to go through three years of court cases. How did that experience impact your writing afterward?
A. It was certainly a dark phase in my life. I was completely unprepared for it and realised early on that it was politically manufactured. I lost three years—wasted time, resources, and a huge drain on my energy. I was completely derailed from the project I was working on.
To answer your question—how did it affect my writing? Was there any self-censorship? Actually, the opposite happened. I decided that if I could be sued for no fault of mine and my life could be turned upside down, then I might as well write exactly what I want, the way I want.
That’s why I wrote Waiting for Jonathan Koshy. It was a satirical work on what India was becoming, and through the novel I could say things I wanted to say.
It actually emboldened me. I found my voice, I found my turf, and I decided—I’m going in guns blazing.