India, June 7 -- Given the brevity of its geohistory, Mumbai has attracted the attention of an outrageously large number of chroniclers. Eighty-five-year-old Adil Jussawalla is one of the city's best-known poets. Wicked, witty, and wondrous, he writes with an ease that signals an internalisation of the city and its people in all their complexity. The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap, which features 35 of his prose pieces written between 1980 and 2002, convinces the reader that when poets turn to prose, each word illuminates. In his introduction, Jerry Pinto writes, "I remember the exhilaration of seeing a Devnagari letter in an English book and thinking, 'Is this allowed?' But then Adil wasn't very interested in what was allowed and what wasn't. He was interested in words, he was interested in where he was, he was interested because that was another habit of mind: the belief that everyone mattered, and hierarchies were there only to be challenged." This is evident in the first piece, The Bombay Within, which begins with a bitter truth: "The waiters of the Bombay Gymkhana remain invisible." He follows this with: "So, when you think of it, does most of the city, most of the time. Do we ever look at its details?" Notorious for noticing things, the fine print interests him the most. How the protagonists of this piece - the historian Sharada Dwivedi, poet Rahul Mehrotra, and Jussawalla himself - exit the club is quite telling. There s the writer's sense of foresight too. The titular piece exemplifies this. In 1962, at an auction of a "collection of jewellery and antiques", his friend, Sunil, gifted the poet a late-19th-century article, a "diamond-encrusted rat trap" which contained a "tightly-rolled scroll". Jussawalla wondered if this was Sunil's way of jokingly "calling [him] a rat". But when he opened the scroll, there was a "repetition of certain forms, the gaps between each set of designs clearly indicated" it was some sort of encryption. He sent it to "Father Schiller of Ootacamund, an expert on... codes" and received the decoded text 20 years later, which is reproduced in full in this 1984 piece. The story reveals much: an obsession with the forbidden, a personal account of the Bombay plague of the 1890s, and the tangential story of Waldemar Haffkine, who was brought to India to create a vaccine for the epidemic. The concluding paragraph signals that Jussawalla reads the city better than most: "It's a hot month and my wife and daughter have left the city. Looking at its lights from my balcony, I think a lot of the diamond-encrusted rat trap." In O City, City, from 1993, he writes that Bombay like every megalopolis is cruel. But cruelties and tragedies play out differently in life and in the arts. There are moments of hilarity too. In Want to Get Away? Let Others Do It for You (1997), he writes, "I've come to believe that the best way of taking a holiday is to stay put; let others do the getting away for you. It can be wonderfully relaxing." Mostly, though, these articles are about the poet himself, the lapsed architect who reimagines the city one word at a time. The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap is a pleasant read and, as Pinto notes, Jussawalla "does not provide any potted histories; those are for others to write and to believe in. His city is built of chance encounters, of laughing liftmen, of departed friends and other ghosts."...