New Delhi, Aug. 9 -- Can a city be a genre unto itself? A great many urban landscapes have been conjured as iconic and idiosyncratic ecosystems. The Atlanta of Tayari Jones. The Lagos of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk (or, very briefly, James Baldwin). And, closer home, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City. Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi are some of the common fares in India's literary imagination. Does a new city await its induction in the ways it is read as a character and its archetypes become canonical?

Towards the end of Omair Ahmad's novella, Homecoming, Hassan, a dentist and transplant from Hyderabad, reflects on his adoptive city: "Lucknow was not a city of conquest, but courtesy, however hypocritical it might be." It is an...