Aamchi Mumbai

Aamchi Mumbai is Gulzar’s literary love letter to the city he has called home for more than seven decades. The book gathers 25 short stories and 36 poems, selected and arranged by Gulzar, with the original Hindi in Devanagari presented alongside new English translations by Rakhshanda Jalil. Moving through the city’s crowded lanes, local trains, seafronts, chawls, mills, migrants, dreamers, workers, and ordinary residents, the collection captures Mumbai as a place of hardship, ambition, humour, memory, loss, and unexpected tenderness. Rather than offering a guidebook view of the city, Gulzar presents an intimate Mumbai shaped by lived experience and imagination. Published by HarperCollins India in June 2026, this 512-page edition brings poems and stories together for the first time.