Bawdy Language in Bombay : EVENINGS AT MONGINI’S And Other Stories, <i> By Russell Lucas (Summit Books: $17.95; 264 pp.)</i>

Bombay in the ‘40s and ‘50s (the decades preceding and following India’s independence in 1947) was much the same as it is today, to judge from “Evenings at Mongini’s.” Then as now, the bustling port was a catch-all for the flotsam and jetsam of the world. It is a polyglot megalopolis of fabulous wealth and appalling poverty, of violence and vibrancy, of wholesale dealers in flesh, ecstasy, dreams and nightmares.

Russell Lucas, author of this collection of stories, was born in Bombay, and his childhood and adolescence in the city spanned those years when the Second World War was raging (though it was little more than a distant rumor in India) and when independence was first a dream, then a bloody exercise in partition, then a fait accompli whose only noticeable impact seemed to be the grubby cluster of European “stayers-on.”

Lucas left for England in the early 1960s and has lived there ever since, but he re-creates a gallery of vividly wacky characters (and, indeed, of vividly energetic whackers) from the ‘40s and ‘50s: diplomats, memsahibs, pukka British colonels, street whores, film stars, war profiteers, maharajas, pimps, child prostitutes. There are Indians of every region, caste and faith. There are also Germans, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish adventurers, Russian sailors, Irish soldiers, waifs with tangled lineages composed of all of the above, lost souls, strays, riffraff.

They are almost all cartoon characters, two-dimensional cutouts. Perhaps it’s the heat, perhaps it’s the sheer proximity of bodies in the teeming city, but no one seems capable of non-sexual thoughts for more than minutes at a time.

Archetypal literary forms survive and resurface in the most unexpected of places. In Lucas’ stories, the form of the medieval French fabliau is alive--though not, alas, very well. Jongleurs entertained at court and castle with their fabliaux , which were both bawdy and hilarious. The sole narrative aims were raucous amusement and satire, the tales turned on a single sexual joke, success depended on brevity and surprise.

As a satirist of fake respectability, and as sardonic commentator on the murkier interrelationships of race, power and sex, Lucas does quite well. As a teller of sexual jokes, alas, he exhibits all the finesse of an interminable after-dinner bore whose stories run deep in predictable grooves, and whose tales get taller and flabbier with each brandy.

Couplings of all sorts (lesbian, cross-racial, with practiced professionals, with children) are a specialty, but on the joker’s art of brevity, Lucas scores zero. The tales meander tediously on, and the reader empathizes deeply with the wife of an Irish soldier in “The Massage Parlour”: “She could not understand his endless joking. She began to believe that all his patter was part of one awesome joke that went on for years and years. She strained her mind waiting for the laugh-line that never came.” Precisely.

The book reads like an early draft submitted to a writing workshop. Yes, there is the occasional good punch line that works even though one has heard it before. And there are some good nuggets of social satire. A wife reads in a newspaper of her husband’s scandalous war profiteering. Frightened, she murmurs: “I only hope he doesn’t go to jail.” “He’s making far too much money for that,” her companion responds.

Passages of good erotica can be found, especially in “The Pathan’s Girl” (a steamy affair between a memsahib and a servant), but there is far more that is embarrassingly trite: “curved breasts firm as moulded bronze,” so many melon-like or papaya-shaped bosoms that it’s hard to tell if lovers are into sex or fruit salad, much parting of thighs and “hardness of risen flesh” and other formulaic swellings and couplings.

These stories do show real promise. “The Pathan’s Girl” and “Moving Targets,” while stylistically uneven, are taut studies of the deadly mix of race, sex and violence. “Bismarck” has poignancy and power, but flounders into a sentimental ending.

Unfortunately, the book comes loaded with the kind of hype that will probably sink it: “Written with such originality and assurance,” gushes the publicity kit, “that it is astonishing that Lucas should be making his debut when already in his fifties.” Not really.

No one should be sentenced to reading the book in long stretches. But if you keep it on your bedside tables and just dip into fragments, you’ll get a few laughs--and possibly some spiced-up sex--before you sleep.