From 1975 to 1983 we lived at Pedder Road, Bombay, as paying guests. Vijaya and I were recently married and the one-room-bath-kitchenette accommodation suited us fine – especially after the few months we had spent in a shabby and claustrophobic place in Kurla East, with a nosey landlord as bonus. What hastened our exit from the Kurla place was that one day a chunk of the ceiling plaster came crashing down. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

The landlady at Pedder Road was a jaded and quirky film star of yesteryears and my first meeting with her had evoked a strong association with the Gloria Swanson character in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. She (the landlady) had advertised the PG room in the TOI (we had become voracious readers of the “accommodation available” columns after the plaster falling incident) and I had written her a postcard saying I was interested and would like to check out the place. She had phoned me after a couple of weeks and I went over to meet her.

She looked at me with her cat-like green eyes, sizing me up.

The usual interrogation followed. Soon, she agreed quite readily to rent the place to us. I was thrilled, and paid out a month's rent in advance. Before leaving she let me know that the one thing that had greatly weighed in my favour was my handwriting – it was neat and clean, she said. Later on I was to understand that a good hand is the written equivalent of a good voice.

Soon we settled down in our new digs – we bought a second-hand fridge, an old cassette player and a used (now, pre-owned) Jawa motorcycle – not all of them at the same time. One of the things our hidebound landlady was very particular about was the doorbell ringing protocol. Our visitors, she insisted, had to ring the bell twice. Hers, once.

Easier said than done. And this became a constant source of irritation and friction. On weekends, our small place would invariably turn into an adda with many of our friends simply forgetting the golden rule. Holy cow! The arguments over recently watched movies at the Alliance Française or Max Müller would grow progressively louder with Rashid Irani flying off the handle if someone even mildly suggested any shortcomings in the movies of his “sacred” pantheon of directors – headed by Werner Herzog. Vijaya and I would try, in vain, to coax our friends to keep the decibel levels low.

The impromptu bar in the kitchen would be depleted by midnight and every one would make their way home after grabbing a few bites of the food that someone had brought along – very often kababs and nans from Sarvi in Nagpada. Bombay, at that time, was flush with creative energy – in cinema, theatre, poetry, and fiction. It was a very stimulating period in our lives. It was at this time and place that I first started writing the Shorty Gomes stories. I was by now on a regular reading regimen of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – with James M Cain, B Traven and JD Salinger completing the eclectic mix.

Then one day something very strange happened.

At a party at a friend’s place we met a Bengali woman – plump, self-assured and quite drunk. Making conversation, I asked her what she was doing with her life generally. With a deadpan expression she intoned, “I work for a private detective agency.”

I almost dropped my glass of rum and soda, complete in the surprise of what she’d just said in her deep, husky voice. Keya Dutt was to become one of our dearest friends during that time and we would often go to her place in Andheri on my Jawa to while away the hours in the company of her friends – all Bengalis – and listen to Keya’s exploits about her matrimonial snooping on husbands cheating on their wives, and wives cheating on their husbands. She told us a hilarious story about a guy who was cheating on his wife with not one EMA (agency jargon for extramarital affair) but three!

Meeting Keya provided further impetus to get on with my writing. (The character of the cunning, corpulent Madam Flora in the story The House is inspired by her.) After much procrastination and rework I completed the first story and got started on the second – writing longhand on ruled A4 size paper.

I would be constantly bothering Vijaya with spellings and connotations of certain words and phrases. (I became “comfortable” with English a little late in life because my formative years were spent reading and writing in Hindi in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, where my father was a successful furniture contractor – the business he summarily lost after Partition.) By now the buzz about Shorty Gomes – the Goan-origin private eye, operating from his flophouse in Dhobi Talao, then known as the Little Goa (now being gentrified into a mini Connaught Circus) – was doing the rounds among our friends and acquaintances.

Another good friend, Uma Ranganathan (who later wrote a novel, From Bombay to Eternity) one day surprised us with the “loan” of a Brother typewriter lying around her house where we used to hang out quite often. What a find and boon that little machine turned out to be! Vijaya got down to typing the first story (Diamonds), and the comforting sounds of keys hitting the paper on the roller and the swish of the lever return filled our little room – crammed with big black-and-white posters of Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe taped on the walls. These collectors’ items, brought from Paris by another dear friend, Edwina Alva, got sadly misplaced in the many relocations that were to follow in our lives.

We met Edwina in S. Xavier’s College, Bombay, where we studied, at an enchanted time in the history of this iconic institution. We got married in Edwina’s apartment in Colaba – while her father was at work – when a deputy from the Marriage Registrar’s office presided over the simple ceremony, with a roomful of supportive friends and one solo close relative, my to-be brother in law; followed by catered biryani and some unremarkable wine. (Edwina would, later on, very graciously agree to become the godmother of our two children. Bravo!)

I struggled on with the second story as Vijaya completed typing the first.

On an impulse, I got a few cyclostyled copies made of Diamonds and left them at Jaico Book Shop, then managed by our good friend Rafique Baghdadi. People were ticked by the story and its sardonic, world-weary, rum drinking protagonist, Shorty Gomes, and the story got a few brief mentions in the book review columns of some papers and magazines. Largely the work of friends.

It was about three years later that I managed to complete the first three long-short stories in this collection. There were too many distractions – a full time job, for one (with a “diversified” Sindhi-owned company that, among other things, exported beef to the Middle East and imported pacemakers into India). At last Vijaya and I were admiring the full-length manuscript, neatly typed (double-spaced) and spiral bound.

Now what? Then the spiral of rejections started. There were no takers, as if publishers had never heard of this popular and populous genre! I would console myself with the typical writers’ conceit that my work was ahead of its time, at least in India.

Among the very first publishers I has posted the manuscript, at considerable expense, was to Penguin India based in Delhi. David Davidar – the editor, then, and the poster boy of Indian publishing – sat on it for months on end. Then he wrote a belated note saying something to the effect that his editors in England thought the work to be too “derivative” for an international readership. Derivative was a euphemism, I suppose, for not being path-breaking enough for Penguin. There we go again, I thought glumly.

Of course, these stories bear the burden of a heavy influence of Hammett and Chandler, who were my role models in this genre. My motivation was simply to pay a tribute to them and to learn the craft. I didn’t have the advantage of a magazine like Black Mask to sharpen my writing skills.

Anyway, the two towering detective noir writers did not write about crime in India, nor were their stories based in Dharavi, Nagpada, Dhobi Talao, and Altamount Road or across the harbour at Mandwa, where the Page 3 types of Bombay have their hideouts. Chandler’s detective was Philip Marlowe, not Shorty Gomes. Interestingly, the advice that Chandler would give, in his later years, to budding writers was this: “Analyse and imitate; no other school is necessary.”

He himself had come up the hard, plodding way. According to his biographer Frank MacShane, “Chandler began by studying the work of Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner to see what he could learn from them. He copied their techniques and wrote and rewrote many stories in their styles until he understood the medium.” Of course, things have changed dramatically in publishing today. You can write about your pet dog or your mango tree and get published to international acclaim.

In late 1983, I moved to Pune with a new job with an eccentric Parsee company, where everyone was strictly addressed by their first name. Vijaya and our seven-month old son, Akil, joined me soon as the PG room in Bombay had run out of enough space for an active, fast-crawling baby.

Now I was in the midst of Parsee bosses and (some) Parsee colleagues in Pune, which reminded me of our many Parsee connections in Bombay – particularly of a zany young woman called Farida Vakil. She lived, with her mother, on Gamadia Road – connecting Pedder Road and Bhulabhai Desai Road. We would spend many Sunday afternoons at her sprawling apartment, soaking in her exaggerated accounts about her relatives and friends.

One of her stories that stays with me goes like this. One of her Parsee friends who was pregnant and not too crazy about being a mother (in a miniscule community) would go jogging on the beach every day hoping that the strenuous exercise would induce a miscarriage. What eventually transpired was that she gave birth to a healthy baby boy weighing eight pounds; her designs to shortchange the Parsee community of a valuable addition to their numbers was divinely thwarted.

The spiral-bound Shorty Gomes manuscript was forgotten while we were coming to grips with life in the slow lane in Pune, a city dubbed a Pensioners’ Paradise and the Oxford of the East.

We were neither students nor retired people, and for the first few months we sorely missed our many friends in Bombay and our small, lively, smoke-filled room at Pedder Road – where our friends were expected, like the postman, to ring twice to avoid a chilling confrontation with our landlady with her cat-like green eyes.

In late 1992, out of the blue, I received a letter from Rupa & Co. asking me if I would be interested in publishing these stories with them. I was thrilled. So the Rupa edition came out – The Days and Nights of Shorty Gomes – with a print run of 3000 copies (now out of print; though a few collectors’ copies are available at Amazon and other online bookstores for 15 US dollars!).

My career as a “spin doctor” was doing fine and Shorty Gomes was soon a distant memory in the frenzy of writing press releases, organising press conferences and editing a highbrow corporate house magazine. Our children – our son, a rolling stone, and our daughter, a would-be dancer – went through school and college and now they were on the threshold of deciding what to do with their lives as young adults.

Fast forward to 2010. We were busy packing our precious books and DVDs for our move to Goa after my retirement from the Parsee company. Ironically, we had decided to leave Pune, the pensioners’ paradise, which an architect friend described as “a sprawl without a centre or a soul.” It was during this chaotic time that I wrote the final story Nagpada Blues which was first published in the crime anthology Mumbai Noir in 2012. And coincidentally, in this story, Shorty Gomes decides to quit gumshoeing for good and return to his roots in Goa.

In the seventies and eighties there was an overnight ship service between Bombay and Goa and back. Travel on this “slow” ship was a magical experience. People would be drinking, singing, chatting or simply gazing at the stars. Goa, in those days, was as close as you could get to the idea of paradise.

Today there is a sea change. Mining (now suspended, at the time of finalising this manuscript), mass tourism and reckless “development” have taken a heavy toll. Corruption and greed is rampant (cocaine, anyone?). The small state is literally choking on garbage strewn all over the place. It also has a seamy reputation for sex tourism; paedophilia is practically on the menus of some of the beach shacks. The writing on the wall is clear for anyone to see – a soiled and bruised paradise, if you ever saw one. But the politicians and other power groups are in total denial.

By the time we were just about settling down in Goa with our three dogs, I received a mail from someone I didn’t know. The sender, Sajith Pai, wrote that he had read a blog about Shorty Gomes recently and would I be interested in publishing an e- book of the stories? Sure, I said. We tried to work on the e-book project but it fizzled out. Then, Sajith (whom I still haven’t met face-to-face) sent the last traceable hard copy of the book to Popular Prakashan. And they asked me if I would be interested... and serendipity, once again, or so I thought, pulled Shorty Gomes back from the brink of oblivion.

In the story Shadows, Shorty Gomes, feeling deflated after a confounding and frustrating case, rues: Crime now sits in high places – insular and mocking.

Don’t be fooled. It still does. Even higher. That’s why you need people like Shorty Gomes, more so today, who at least try their damnedest to get to the big-time, brazen bandicoots. (The miniscule number of crime’s artful practitioners who are lodged, from time to time, in Bombay’s Arthur Road Jail, or in its more famous counterpart, Tihar Jail in the capital, is just the tip of the iceberg.)

Amazingly, the publishing saga continued. After signing a formal contract in October 2011, I eased off and waited for the nitty-gritty things to happen. I checked the proofs and returned them promptly to the publisher; after that the trail became absolutely thanda. I waited. After some fruitless follow-up I received a mail from the PP editor in October 2013 (after two years) that cleared the fog. In effect, it said that Popular Prakashan was bleeding financially and the management had changed hands. They had decided to discontinue publishing fiction titles and concentrate on nonfiction (read, cookery books) on their auditors’ advice.

Now, as far as I know, auditors are not very avid readers of fiction or nonfiction if you discount the arcane tomes on income-tax and company law they have to pore over. The famous Billy Wilder line, “In life, you got to take the bitter with the sour” specially rings true for writers of pulp fiction, like me. Then when things had psychologically hit rock bottom, I got a call from Frederick Noronha of Goa,1556 suggesting that we try out the crowdfunding option to partly finance this edition in your hands.

Thirty-plus friends and well-wishers were backing us within weeks. Wow! A happy ending after all the agonising. No doubt they see Shorty Gomes as a man in the crowd, even with his trademark brown fedora.

Excerpted with permission from the Afterword, Shorty Gomes by Ahmed Bunglowala, published by Goa 1556.