Madras on My Mind (A City in Stories)

Once upon a time by the sea, there was a story – and another and another – and some wandered into these pages to make up a city.

So meet, among others, a travel guide who falls for a French tourist, a rice merchant with Kollywood dreams, a god whose editor proves elusive, a portly musical lawyer caught in a noir plot, and a man in search of family in the Great Madras Flood.

Find yourself, among other places, in Town, at that gastronomic oxymoron, the Udipi cafe, in Velachery, looking for pot or maybe for love , on Kaanum Pongal day all across Madras, even in a fast car on East Coast Road , Feelings the city – till it lures you back with its lovely lies.

It’s all here: the salt in the breeze, the eternal summer, the swing of the sea.

It’s Madras on your mind.

Chitra Viraraghavan has worked in academic publishing, taught English, and is a book editor, school textbook writer and author of The Americans: A Novel. She is working on her second book, a work of historical fiction. Delhi Thatha, a children’s book about a philosopher, is forthcoming.

Krishna Shastri Devulapalli is a humour writer, cartoonist, columnist and the quintessential Madras-Chenni novelist. Ice Boys in Bell-bottoms is a chronicle of a 1970s childhood in the city while jump Cut is a seriocomic thriller with the Madras film industry as its backdrop. His comic epistolary play, Dear Anita, sends up the Indian publishing industry, as does a work of nonfiction, how Be a Literary Sensation. His most recent novel is The Sentimental Spy.