‘Raavan & Eddie’: Remembering Kiran Nagarkar’s funny, incisive novel of how Bombay became Mumbai

My first copy of Raavan & Eddie by Kiran Nagarkar went the way of all paper, especially the kind of paper on which definitive novels are written. I fell in love with the story of a Roman Catholic boy who joins the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS) and the Hindu boy called Raavan who falls in love with the fluid magic of Taekwon-do. I met the author shortly afterwards and told him that he had stolen my story. It was something I had always wanted to write about, a story set in a chawl.

He was gracious. “You should write your book anyway,” he said. “There isn’t enough writing about the city.”

When I told him how my copy had gone AWOL, he gave me his last hardback copy and wrote another inscription on it. As an object, it has not aged well. The cover is by the inimitable Manjula Padmanabhan who plunges off a balcony. But the production values themselves belong very much to that time.

Raavan & Eddie (yes, yes, Randy) started life as a screenplay, a four-and-a-half hour screenplay, that didn’t get made. Nagarkar wasn’t going to waste his work. He simply re-purposed it into an all-time Bombay classic.

To begin with, it was funny and...

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