Book excerpt: Durga Nivas , a fictional chawl in Matunga, Bombay, is home to a potpourri of people from different parts of India, who live cheek-by-jowl, sharing joys and sorrows, lending a helping hand to one another, and also, of course, squabbling – much like diverse members of a large joint family. This biography of the building takes us into the tiny one-room tenements of nine families on the first floor of Durga Nivas. We witness the whole gamut of human emotions – love in myriad forms, anger, sorrow, joy, pain, discord, friendship, innocence, and the loss of it – that play out from the 1940s on. We get to listen in to the conversations of the tenants as they wait in queue for their turn at the common toilets. Many a reputation is made or smashed during the daily ‘Loos Talk.’ As a new generation tries its wings and flies out of the proverbial nest, the hustle and bustle, the fights, tears and laughter of normal life in the chawl are reduced to memories. But some former tenants of Durga Nivas find that life is full of surprises, and the past has a habit of catching up. Durga Nivas is based on the author’s experience of living in a chawl in Bombay for the first 26 years of his life.