The Stench

Gulzar turns his attention to the slums of Mumbai, and to the small, everyday things that make a place feel like home. A bitter-gourd vine climbs between two shanty huts. In the evening light, men sit on charpoys outside their doors and talk. Money is short and days are hard, but the life these people have is their own, and the book builds a portrait of it through a series of connected scenes.

Then one morning the shanties are razed. The residents are moved into tidy, sterile rooms and packed in out of the city's sight. Everything that grew easily in the slum suddenly has nowhere to go. Where does a family keep its goats and chickens on a third floor? Concrete gathers no moss, and nothing green takes root inside four unyielding walls.

Underneath the story runs a quiet question: is a life you have never known a life you would ever choose? Gulzar sets the loneliness and disorder of modern city living against the closeness of the community that was lost. The book gives a finely observed look at Mumbai's slums and at what is taken from people when they are rehoused.