On one of those early monsoon days when the heavens seem to have opened up, I find myself in a cab winding up Bandra’s Pali Hill. Through the grey haze and incessant, thick din of the downpour that defines the city at this time of the year, we stop at an unshowy white bungalow from another era. I am here to meet someone who started off almost as a castaway 76 years ago, a migrant like countless others in a city that has since given him everything and that he has now called home for decades. Gulzar (born in 1934 in Dina, present-day Pakistan), beloved poet, writer, filmmaker and lyricist in Hindi films, has brought out a new collection of poems and short stories from the 1980s, titled Aamchi Mumbai (My Mumbai). The anthology (translated by Rakhshanda Jalil; published by HarperCollins) is as open and tactile, as reminiscent of the salt-flecked sea air of Mumbai and as heterogenous, as the city’s capacious and chaotic heart. At times in the conversation, we might have come precariously close to invoking the typical clichés of a dream city but of course we don’t. Gulzar’s disarmingly accessible writing masks the way in which the poetic and writerly self remains grounded in the canny outsider’s persona with a natural distance from his material. And then there is the play of languages whose often alien idioms and rhythms might draw from North India, Urdu, his native Punjabi, and his fascination with Bangla, but are uniquely alchemised in his writing and concerns as a Mumbaikar in the here and now. Writing MumbaiIn the first of his striking series of Mumbai poems, Gulzar describes the city as a long fish lying in the water. Later, he compares the city by night to a black cat, with her claws tucked into her belly. In another poem, wryly titled ‘It is probably a city of advertisements’, he acknowledges that the city is driven by a constant ubiquitous marketing hype and the anxiety to sell itself. As the anthology progresses, Aamchi Mumbai makes way for darker and more unsettling themes: Whenever a strong wind blows in this city, my friend a few nests fall from the branches… picking every scrap and fragment of dream and attempting to stick them back together. Some dreams remain sobbing and sighing but some die…