RAM RAHMAN: Manto is a quintessentially urban writer, and for him Bombay was its amazingly cosmopolitan populace. Christian secretaries, Jewish actresses, handsome, penniless Muslim rakes and other strange and troubled characters people the 1940s Bombay depicted in his fiction. His searing, graphic descriptions of the communal violence which tore apart the subcontinent just before Independence and Partition are a vivid record of how communal politics unravelled that cosmopolitan camaraderie. This spring I went on a journey in search of Manto’s city with the journalist Rafique Baghdadi, flaneur par excellence of Bombay. Rafique himself could have stepped out of one of Manto’s tales. He lives in a tiny single room near Mazagon docks, surrounded by canyon walls of books stacked floor to ceiling. A narrow passage of floor leads to a table and chair by the window. Rafique not only has an encyclopedic knowledge of Bombay and its history, he has also walked all of its streets. He seems to know every shopkeeper in every quarter of the city, and he is steeped in the world of cinema. More here.