Mumbai as Character

Roberts treats Mumbai less like a setting and more like a living person — loud, beautiful, chaotic, and startlingly generous. The slum where Lin, the narrator, ends up living is drawn with real dignity. Poverty here is hard, but it is never just misery: there are jokes, neighbors, weddings, and pride.

Lin lives a double life. By day he runs a free clinic for the poorest people in the slum; by night he works for the Bombay mafia. Roberts refuses easy moral labels. The same man who patches up sick children also breaks the law for a living — and the book never lets you settle on whether he is good or bad.