Reading Alice in Bhuleshwar

“How do we see the city?…The very streets we walk, and the buildings we see…are patterns of change and history… the neighbourhood offers a kind of visual chaos, incomprehensible to the unexercised eye, .. it is the bolus of hidden visuals, the misplaced stories, the dusty and crumbling city that the city needs to see to understand to these neighbourhoods.” — Kaiwan Mehta, Alice in Bhuleshwar, Yoda Press.

Alice is back. We’ve received more copies of this precious book – a literary, historical, visual survey of the many-layered, complex, and thoroughly captivating history of Bhuleshwar and its environs. Have you seen the gothic building where Bombay’s first publishing house began in 1912? Did you know Bhang Wadi, the last theater where plays were performed, also had dwellings for performers and a company kitchen? Where theatre books were sold? As Mehta says, “A walk in the city is a walk within a logic… a perspective, a frame, a proscenium with a backdrop, a story that we all know, but we have our secret stories within it too.” An important addition to your collection of books about the city, where we always hope there is ‘Wisdom above Riches’