Minaxi Kamath stumbled on a book manuscript by her journalist father Mohanlal P Gandhi, which he had sent as proposal to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay. This was after his death in 1996 when she was rummaging through his files left behind with her mother. “Once I read his work,” she writes, “I was struck by the depth of his research…” the Making of A Metropolis: The Story of Bombay (Spenta Multimedia Ltd.) is what Kamath calls an authentic reproduction of a manuscript written in the 1960s. 

Hailing from Movia in Gujarat, Gandhi, the son of a cotton merchant, was fluent in both English and his mother tongue when he joined the Daily Gazetteer, Karachi’s English language newspaper as writer-translator, and continued his journalistic career in Mumbai after he was forced to leave Pakistan with his wife and five children following the Partition. He retired from Vyapar, a pink paper in Gujarati, in 1974, but continued to read, research and write, says Kamath.