: What reading Farrukh Dhondy’s ‘Poona Company’ means today to a Pune resident #IndiaNEWS Things which had once existed both did and did not exist anymore. The past lay like a corpse amongst these

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What reading Farrukh Dhondy’s ‘Poona Company’ means today to a Pune resident #IndiaNEWS
Things which had once existed both did and did not exist anymore. The past lay like a corpse amongst these houses and thoroughfares, and the present with its successive accretions had become its shroud.I was standing in the midst of Farrukh Dhondy’s Poona, a world he immortalised in his book of short stories Poona Company. Published in 1980, it is peopled with unforgettable characters from Dhondy’s boyhood: Men like Soli Kolmi, the crafty bookie who “was constantly bent over double like a prawn�; Samson, the Parsee body carrier who “walked in the fashion of ‘heroes,’ his arms stretched into stiff bows on either side of his body, ...supposed to tell people who were watching that your muscles were so thick they prevented movement;� Minocher Toot, the penny-press baron who ran tirades against anyone who provoked his ire; and Confession, the Jesuit Catholic who turned rogue, converted to Hinduism and changed his name to Prabhat. But besides these, there is another character, diffuse and omniscient, seeping into everyone and everything in the book. This is the city of Pune itself, or more appropriately, a very particular Poona of Dhondy’s boyhood...because Dhondy did not grow up in the city proper, but on its outskirts, in an...Read more

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