Dhandapolis: Stories from Bollywood

by Salik Shah

Written between 2009-2012 in Mumbai, Dhandapolis is a set of three stories set in Bollywood. These short stories explore various facets of life and relationships through intimate and exasperating encounters in the city of dreams.

“Aaja Aaja Bombay” encapsulates the outsider experience in the film city.

“Dhandapolis” is a Kafkaesque take on the moral and ethical corruption in the industry.

“Love Edit” is a love story set in the heart of Bollywood. Renu Sharma is a film editor in Bombay, living an ordinary life with a struggling filmmaker for a husband. The quest for happiness and fulfillment through cinema brings their lives to an eventual freeze—until the man plots a new story about the two of them, a newborn child and the sea. “Love Edit” is a simple short story about love and its thousand shades: some beautiful, some ugly. "The good day doesn’t last. It’s gone before you take note of it."

36 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2018

About the author

Salik Shah is the founding editor of Mithila Review. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Juggernaut, among other publications.