Bombay time /

The Parsi community of Wadia Baug is a close-knit group of families, bound to one another, and separated from their neighbors, by their religion and ethnic heritage. Umrigar's novel takes place during Mehernosh Kanga's wedding, at which his father, Jimmy, presents each of his Wadia Baug friends with a photo album, resurrecting the friends' memories of their lives together. In flashback, each of the wedding guests relives the significant events of the past: Jimmy's sullen childhood as an orphan; Coomi and Rusi's slowly disintegrating marriage; Adi's tortured relationships with women and his slow descent into alcoholism; Soli's love affair with a young Jewish girl who abandoned him when her family decided to move to Israel; and the explosion of the local chemical plant that killed Tehmi's beloved husband. Struggling to survive in tumultuous postcolonial India, the Wadia Baug residents respond to poverty, violence, and shattered dreams with love, compassion, and loyalty. Bombay Time is sweet, frightening, poignant, and chaotic as Umrigar dramatizes the power of community in the face of an increasingly dangerous and chaotic world. --Bonnie Johnston

The middle-class denizens of a Bombay apartment complex come to life in Umrigar's engaging debut, which tells the story of a half-dozen protagonists through the prism of a wedding hosted by respected lawyer Jimmy Kanga. Kanga's rise to glory is just one of several intriguing subplots. The novel begins with the story of Rusi and Coomi Bilimoria, a couple whose marriage becomes frayed when Rusi's business plans don't match his expectations and Coomi's mother-in-law turns out to be a live-in nightmare. Other interesting yarns include that of Dosamai, a bright young woman who, after her parents force her to marry down to ensure the future of her sisters, eventually turns into the local gossip. The neighborhood drunk, Adi Patel, also has a tale to tell involving a tragic interlude with the daughter of a laborer that effectively ruins his life, and the widow Tehmi Engineer takes an analogous road to ruin when her handsome husband, Cyrus, is killed in an explosion at a chemical plant. Umrigar is an accomplished, natural storyteller who remains an optimistic narrator despite all her grim plot twists, though she never softens the impact of the various tragedies on her characters. She also manages to work in a portrait of the decline of Bombay, delivering an impressive debut offering a glimpse into a cultural world especially that of the Parsis, an ethnic minority that most Westerners know only in its barest outlines. Regional author tour. (July) Forecast: Despite the rather drab cover design, this title should find a modest audience among readers of literary fiction and fans of other Indian writers. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A native of Bombay and a journalist for the Akron-Beacon Journal in Akron, OH, Umrigar presents a startling contemporary portrait of life in a Bombay apartment house whose residents are mostly Parsis. The book focuses on middle-aged Rusi Bilimoria, one of several residents, who made some questionable choices early in life and must live with the fallout. Now, even as the entire building celebrates the marriage of one resident's son, Rusi finds his own marriage falling apart. This debut shows that lives are always a work in progress: one never really arrives but is constantly traveling. In the tradition of Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa, Umrigar poignantly explicates the dwindling Parsi community, which does not feature prominently in current South Asian fiction. A wonderful addition to both public and academic libraries for its contribution to the emerging Third World voice in literature. Michelle Reale, Elkins Park Free Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A first novel trains an unflinching eye on Indians at home and abroad. Set in contemporary Bombay, Umrigar's story is both a valentine to the past and a lament for the present of its title city. The residents of Wadia Baug, a middle-class apartment building inhabited by Parsis, gather for a wedding. The journeys to and from the wedding form short narrative bookends for the wedding itself, the principal present action. The narrator, however, is more interested in past than present, and so the paragraphs devoted to the wedding are often just weak excuses to explore bygone times. The result is a thin present with little drama, but a rich past with detailed accounts, sometimes amusing, sometimes lyrical, sometimes sad, of the characters' individual histories and their eventual intersectings, the whole sometimes reading like summaries. Dosa Popat, an embittered widow and Wadia Baug's resident gossip, observes the guests' departures for the wedding and reflects on their stories while lamenting her own unrealized life-a promising academic career cut off before its beginning by a drunken promise of marriage made by her father. Jimmy Kanga, father of the groom, oversees the reception while considering the huge trajectory of his life from orphaned adolescence to law degree at Oxford, return to Bombay and life in the fast lane as a high-profile attorney, then a rejection of the high life for a return to his simpler, safer, and more satisfying Wadia Baug roots. Rusi and Coomi Bilimoria bitterly and sadly recall the failure of their marriage, ultimately achieving a tentative reconciliation on the bus ride home. At the close, all these individuals recede into the fabric of the city. Umrigar's debut unfolds raga-like, the histories of its people forming sustained riffs that spring from and return to the same source. The minimal plotting is at times contrived and sentimental, but the portrait of the city and its citizens is authoritative, richly textured, and engaging.