The Literary Mirror

Kher's structural gamble is right there in the title: this is a novel of letters that the narrator, a Bombay-born accountant now settled in Pune, writes and deliberately does not post, to the city itself rather than to any single correspondent.

It's a device that could easily curdle into whimsy, and in a handful of the shorter letters it does. But the longer ones — one addressed to a demolished cinema hall, another to a train line that no longer runs the route it once did — carry real weight, treating the city itself as a character owed an explanation.

Letters I Did Not Post to Bombay is uneven by design, some entries slight, some substantial, in the manner of an actual drawer of unsent mail. Read as a whole rather than dipped into, it adds up to more than its shakiest pages suggest.

“Kher's letters aren't undelivered by accident. Every one of them was written to stay unsent.”