MAXIMUM CITY: BOMBAY LOST AND FOUND
By Suketu Mehta
Review, £20; 240pp
ISBN 0 747 22159 6 Buy the book
As the departing British troops paraded past the Gateway of India landmark, cheers and music ringing in their ears, to board the steamer at Bombay’s quayside, they left behind a poor, partitioned India, exhilarated but apprehensive, and an imperial city shaped by the generations of white administrators taking their first astonished look at the teeming subcontinent.
Half a century later, India is no longer poor or apprehensive. A booming, competitive, fissiparous universe of more than a billion people, India today is a nuclear power, a world leader in information technology, a booming industrial economy and birthplace of a growing number of highly skilled and intensely ambitious Indians living in the diaspora.
Sometimes these exiles return, to their home cities to bask in family applause or to manicured campuses in Bangalore or Hyderabad, where they take up lucrative jobs managing teams of programmers designing software for multinationals. Suketu Mehta is one such exile, wrenched as a boy of 14 from a community of diamond merchants by a father determined to seek a better life in New York. He grew up absorbing the education, values and individual ruggedness of America, but homesick for the smells, food and childhood memories of Bombay. When he went back as an adult, he did so partly to discover what made his own identity and partly to uncover the extraordinary secrets of one of the world’s largest, most vibrant and most ungovernable cities.
Maximum City is, in all senses, a revelation. What he found is truly shocking. Bombay is a city of such tensions, violence, corruption, fanaticism, fatalism, humanity and beauty that it is almost impossible to imagine why it does not implode in chaos. The extremes are as jarring as they are incongruous. Millionaires, film stars and mobsters lavish luxury on themselves with a ruthless selfishness unmatched in any medieval court. Only streets away, millions of destitute immigrants struggle to exist in shacks pitched on pavements, beside railway tracks or over putrid rivers of sewage, battling against bureaucrats, criminals, degradation and the raw unfairness of daily life in pursuit of dreams and imagined riches. Hatreds, religious and ethnic, define unseen boundaries between caste and creed, between haves and have-nots. Riots, murders and the daily maiming of rivals make existence more precarious and unpredictable than anything known in India’s dreary, benighted villages. Politicians lie to win votes and incite to keep office. Despairing officials and principled judges exhaust themselves in the attempt to impose order. Overworked police torture and cheat. And families, despite everything, try — and often manage — to create havens of love, harmony and honour. This is Bombay, city of 19 million people, paying 38 per cent of the country’s taxes, the apotheosis of modern and ancient India.
At huge personal risk, Mehta sets out to explore and record. He sits in on police interrogations, listening to the beatings and screams, he lurks in the shadows of the nightclubs where balding men frustrated by debts, routine and family bonds shower money and unrequited affection on the girls teasing and gyrating nightly on stage. He consorts with murderers and hit-men, hired to eliminate or intimidate political rivals, who shrug off guilt or personal responsibility. He befriends runaways, prostitutes and children dreaming of becoming poets or film stars. He inveigles his way into the sanctums of the sinister and powerful, men such as Bal Thackeray — “a tired ageing fascist” — and his mafia underlings who ensure that every attempt to make life more just and more tolerable is thwarted. And all the time he remains, or tries to, detached, observant, open-minded, tapping on his computer the stories of those who suffer, exult and die in Bombay.
The stories are gripping. Mehta begins with the riots of 1992-93 when Hindu and Muslim neighbours who grew up together were inflamed to attack, shoot and burn alive men, old women and children denounced by unscrupulous demagogues as the enemy. Some of the tales are chilling, some moving. He then looks at how power operates in this feral city, explaining how powertoni (power of attorney) translates as licence to corrupt a legal system bequeathed by the British but now so paralysed that everyone, including even judges, resorts to bribery and parallel law enforcement by mobsters. He finds one of the few honest police chiefs, savvy, shrewd and cynical, who condones the beatings and “encounters” — staged police shoot-outs in which top criminals are executed in cold blood — as the only way to break the gangs but draws the line at the extremes, such as dripping a bottle of acid into a suspect’s anus, which also occur.
He listens, he questions and he explains, dropping in statistics that tell it all: 20,000 buildings are classified as dilapidated but only 1,000 repaired each year and 400,000 homes are kept empty because of absurd tenure laws; an employee can earn more in bribes on a single building than in his entire career in the municipal corporation; five million people have no lavatory, so 2.5 million kilos of shit are dumped outside each day; the courts are so clogged with cases that it would take 350 years to clear the backlog.
But amid the squalor, there is wild, wild fun. Mehta goes to parties of the billionaires, joins in weddings and witnesses the tragi-comic celebrations when a Jain diamond patriarch decides to cast away, literally, all his wealth and take to the road as a wandering monk, forcing his wife and children, whom he will never meet again, to do likewise. He befriends, and admits to a close (though chaste) attachment to Monalisa, a dancing girl who tries to slit her wrists to escape the demi-monde but whom he finds entrancing when she performs. He also meets an exquisite transvestite dancer, neither gay nor a eunuch, who has to fend off men’s gropings and goes home to a wife and children, but whose fading allure becomes desperate after he is kicked out of a nightclub. And he ventures into Bollywood, helping on a filmscript, trying to beat the censors, enduring the tantrums of the megastars and the frustrated rage of directors demoralised at having daily to compromise their talents to satisfy popular clichés and rapacious distributors.
In everything, the frenzied heat of the city is, like the weather, stifling. Sex, blood, shit and money are all mixed in a terrible, stinking vortex. But Mehta’s tales, pounding along in the present tense, read like a modern Arabian Nights, only crueller, more poignant, more real. And when he seems on the point of despair, something shining rescues him and the reader: the setting sun, the runaway he helped to reunite with a desperate father, the selfless student who keeps his pride and his virginity in the slums to help his family up a rung or two. Bombayites learn to “adjust” — to bend the rules, to help those worse off, to make room in a crowded carriage for one more. Each year about 4,000 people are killed on the heaving railways, decapitated by poles too close to the line, run over or electrocuted. But even on the most crowded trains, dozens of hands will reach out and catch the panting latecomer to pull him aboard so that he will not be late for work and leave his family hungry without his pay. Part memoir, part journalism, part travelogue, Maximum City is a tour de force. Bombay is truly here lost — and found.
