Bombay Brides (HarperCollins) is a new book by Jewish author and artist Esther David, who is 73. It’s about 18 stories of love and loss set in a flat in Ahmedabad, India, that is rented out to people from the Bene Israel community. David, who won the 2010 Sahitya Akademi Award for The Book of Rachel, talks about what it’s like to be the last people left in a community. Excerpts:
Bombay Brides was made up of 18 stories. How did they all come to be?
When I wrote my first novel, The Walled City (1997), I came up with some Jewish characters. I brought them back in the Book of Esther (2002), which was based on four generations of a Bene Israel Jewish family. This family lives in Alibag, which is where Bene Israel Jews, or “children of Israel,” first came to land about 2,000 years ago after a shipwreck. During the British Raj, the men of this large extended family all served in the British army. Most of them were doctors, and they moved from Alibag to Pune, Mumbai, and then Ahmedabad, where they lived for a long time. Later, more people moved to Israel, the United States, Canada, and other places. People from The Walled City, The Book of Esther, The Book of Rachel, and other books almost came to life as I put them in different situations in Bombay Brides.
