Mapped
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Mistry never names the city by the sea, but its stations, promenade and slums are unmistakably 1970s Bombay, today's Mumbai. Under the 1975-77 Emergency the map runs from a great railway terminus and a seafront drive out to the pavement stretches and the bulldozed slum colony where two tailors, fleeing caste violence in an inland village, try to hold a life together.
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Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Saleem Sinai's Bombay, from Independence in 1947 to the Emergency of the mid-1970s, seen mostly from the hillside villas of Methwold's Estate on the Warden Road rise. The map holds to the elite crescent of Malabar Hill, Breach Candy and Cumballa Hill, with the school in the Fort and the sea at Chowpatty; the family saga's far excursions to Kashmir, Delhi, Karachi and the Sundarbans sit outside this frame.
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Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
The 1980s Bombay of an escaped Australian convict who remakes himself as 'Lin': a city of Colaba tourist cafes and Gateway crowds, of a sprawling seaside slum, the red-light lanes of Kamathipura and the underworld that runs beneath them. The map anchors in South Bombay around Colaba and reaches north to the prison on Arthur Road.
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