Dangerlok

Dangerlok, she says, all dangerlok. It’s a word she’s made up and covers all occasions. Dangerous people, tiresome people, people she doesn’t like. Dangerlok’. Rina Ferreira, middle-aged and single, lecturer of English literature, tentative poet, owner of two parrots and a flat in the Queen’s Diamonds building, will live nowhere else in the world except in the squalid corner of Bombay she inhabits. It is not an easy life. Daily she comes across some dangerlok around her—the autorickshaw-walas who clog her lane with their double-parked vehicles; the neighbour who objects to the ‘kept’ woman in the flat below hers; the lecturer who comes to the staff room, has a dosa and leaves without teaching a single class; students who wonder if she wears a nightie or has any friends; politicians who tear down mosques. With her cigarettes and mug of jungli tea, Rina observes them all, and dashes off letters brimming with the details of her life to David, and old flame now in America who calls up to talk about his girlfriends when sober and to profess his love for her when half drunk. Funny, irreverent and sad, Dangerlok is the story of an urban life, with all its absurdities, loneliness and, of course, danger.