That evening, sitting at an outdoor table in Vihar, a restaurant on the eastern side of the Santacruz station, I began thinking, whom will I talk to in this city, how will I live here, when a tall fair man with a moustache came up to me.
"You're from Udupi," he said.
"My mother was," I replied. "I grew up in Mangalore."
"You have a South Canara face."
He was the manager; he told me that everyone in the restaurant was from around Mangalore. I watched them, chatting in Kannada or Tulu, wiping tables and buzzing about that humid kitchen. A tough life, but they seemed full of energy and hope for the future. It occurred to me that if I worked on my novel as they were working on the tables, I too would be taken care of.
We had water only twice a day in my building, so I had to plan things in such a way that I was free from seven to nine in the mornings, and six to eight in the evenings. The rest of the time I wrote. The broker who had found me the place called one day: "The neighbours complain that you make no noise at all." To frighten my neighbours less, and to give myself a routine, I took the train every morning to the British Council Library in Nariman Point; for a change I would visit the Prithvi Theatre's outdoor café, where, if the writing had gone well, I would buy a ticket for a play in the evening.
I made a happy discovery: my grand-uncle Suresh was still in Mumbai. In the 1990s, he had been a judge in the Bombay high court, where he had earned his reputation as an opponent of the Shiv Sena ("Who is this man Suresh, with only one name? He must be a Christian!" its newspaper Saamna had railed.) He was now retired and lived on the Juhu-Versova link road.
Grand-uncle Suresh is a talking man. He told me stories late into the night about the Bombay riots, of things that had been done in daylight and men who had never been prosecuted for doing them; I took the auto-rickshaw home, and returned to my novel.
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