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BOOK
REVIEW
The soul of a
city
Maximum City: Bombay
Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Capturing the essence of a metropolis of
the mythic proportions of Bombay (renamed Mumbai
in 1995) is no easy task. Journalist Suketu
Mehta's debut offering stalks the soul of India's
soulless mahanagar (great city) through the
medium of the lives of its  heterogeneous
residents. The Bombay that emerges from Mehta's
personality portraits is greater than the sum of
its components, a celebration.
Home to 14
million people, Bombay has a "tight claim" on
Mehta's heart. When he moved to New York as a
teenager, "I missed Bombay like an organ of my
body". (p 8) He "re-approximated Bombay" in
Jackson Heights, "taking little memory trains" of
Hindi films and music. He returned to Bombay on
skittish trips to fall in love and marry, but
nursed the itch to live in the city of his
childhood again. This book is the end product of a
nostalgic journey to revisit roots.
Impossible city
Bombay culture
is characterized by dhandha (transaction).
The ethic of Bombay is quick enrichment. A
well-executed scam is considered "a thing of
beauty". Mehta's ancestors changed caste centuries
ago from Brahmin to Vaisya to adapt to "a
naturally capitalistic city - one that understands
the moods and movements of money". (p 21)
Caste-consciousness pervades the city, with a
hierarchy even among upper-middle-class-flat
servants. "It is as difficult to move down the
caste ladder as it is to move up." (p 37)
In Bombay, Mehta has to relearn how to
stand in line to vote, buy a house, find a job,
leave the country, make a train reservation or
phone call or answer nature's call. In the absence
of money or connections, the only way to get
anything done here is anger. Bombay air has 10
times the maximum permissible levels of lead in
the atmosphere, the equivalent of smoking
two-and-a-half packs of cigarettes a day. London
and Paris are re-created in miniature among the
charmed set of Bombay. "The First World lives
smack in the center of the Third." Billionaires
and repulsive deprivation abide in the city where
violence and muscle power can strike without
warning.
Hindu, Muslim
Mehta
meets a deputy leader of the Hindu-nationalist
Shiv Sena party who took his sick daughter to a
Muslim exorcist for cure, a healer of the same
community that he massacred and burned during the
1993 communal riots. "For Bombayites, business
comes first. They are individually multiple." (p
46) The Shiv Sena goon confesses, "Sometimes I
couldn't sleep, thinking that just as I have
burned someone, somebody could burn me." (p 48)
The riots provided a recruitment bonanza
for the Muslim underworld and set off serial bomb
blasts. Most Muslim boys from shanty localities
joined the Dawood Ibrahim gang. Mehta interviews
Muslim women whose men were shot and stabbed by
the police or the Sena. They protest love for
their city and country, come what may. "If there
is hope for Bombay, it is in this group of slum
women." (p 59)
The Sena wrested political
power for a Marathi underclass. "The monster came
out of the slums." (p 61) The new inheritors were
uneducated, unscrupulous and lacking of Bombay's
cosmopolitan sensibility. They took the keys to
the city from the erstwhile elites - Parsis,
Gujaratis, Punjabis and Marwaris - who were left
ruing the loss of the "gracious city". Mehta has
an audience with Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, a man
who is obsessed with Muslims, and who loves big
business and Bollywood. He is the remote control
that orders young angry men to go out and lay
waste whole communities or to render an illegal
slum permanent and legal.
Thackeray
constantly channels the violent energy of his boys
to attack painters, Ghazal singers, filmmakers,
cricket infrastructure and Valentine's Day
revelers. For the Sena minions, "all the
accumulated insults, rebukes and disappointments
of life come out in a cathartic release of anger".
(p 95) Thackeray opines that Bombay can be saved
only through migration control. "Retaliation is
our birthright," he thunders. The Sena is
primarily a party of exclusion, alleging that this
or that group does not belong to Bombay.
Thackeray boasts to Mehta that if he is
ever arrested, "India could burn. This is a call
for religious riots and everybody should prepare
for the consequences." (p 118)
Realty
horror
Bombay is choking because of the
1948 Rent Act and the all-powerful tenants lobby.
Those who arrive newly have no room to rent
because the middle class and rich have a lock on
all the best properties. New construction is
avoided by builders because of fears of
expropriation of property. The annual deficit of
45,000 houses adds to the ranks of the slums. "The
city is full of people claiming what's not
theirs." (p 128) Reorientation plans to building
easterly meet stiff resistance. Bombay's direction
is typically westward.
Half the population
lacks toilets. The sanitation crisis is compounded
by the "national defect in the Indian character -
absence of a civic sense." (p 138) Traffic snarls
notwithstanding, the roads committee spends its
time on a renaming frenzy to pander to political
whims.
Mafia kingdom
The Bombay
underworld is an "overworld". Gangsters refer to
bases in Karachi, Dubai and Malaysia as
upar (above) and Bombay as neeche
(below). Dons and hit-men engage in international
ping-pong games of murder. "The culture of gang
war is intrinsic to the culture of the city." (p
156) Bombay is the bull's-eye of cross-border
economic aggression, pumped by Islamabad-printed
counterfeit Indian-currency notes. "If India has
to be hit financially, crippling Bombay is a
must." (p 170)
Only 60% of the city's
police have housing, making it impossible for a
constable to evict a slumlord. Police are given
the worst lawyers to prosecute crime syndicates,
while gangs have the best. Police torture is a
"necessary spur in the absence of a functioning
judiciary". (p 198). One daring cop tells Mehta,
"The judicial system is so tilted in favor of the
accused that he is not at all afraid." Gangs
thrive in Bombay to make up for judicial
inadequacies. Police chiefs are themselves
beholden to the dons. They call up gangsters and
ask ransom for releasing arrested sharpshooters.
In 1999, a senior Bombay judge himself approached
the underworld to recover dues from a debtor.
A hit-man of the "D Company" gang
appraises the benefits of his work. "If someone
shoots me, at least one lakh [Rp100,000,
about US$2,300 at the current exchange rate] will
come to my home. I only have to open my mouth to
get money. If I want a car for a while, it is
arranged." In jail, the company sends Rp7,000 a
month for personal expenses and Rp10,000 for his
family. A budding don hiding in Dubai says that
the bhai (gang lord) cares for his family
in Bombay through thick or thin.
Underworld figures are god-fearing. "God
is the biggest bhai." (p 226) One shooter
maintains, "God is like smelling money that you've
earned." The bullet business is God's game. In
Mehta's talk with Chotta Shakeel, the D Company
lodestar, the latter displays a heavy sense of
involvement in wrong. "What is wrong is wrong. A
sin is a sin." (p 267) Hit-men, like the Sena
boys, feel more powerful by killing. They imbibe
their victims' power. Their "character is defined
above all by narcissism, that complex mix of
egotism and self-hatred". (p 247)
Epicure's city
Bombay is the
vadapav (local fast food) eaters' city. It
is the lunch of chawl dwellers, cart
pullers, street urchins, clerks, cops and
gangsters. The bar-line world of nightclubs is
unique to Bombay. In this most commercial of
cities, the beer bar is the definitive place where
the color of money talks. Customers sustain an
illusion of individuality by starring in their own
custom-made Hindi chartbuster in which dancers
pretend to be in love with them. Inferiority
complexes and false-man egos are satiated in the
bars, where money is liberally debased. Dancers
feel guilty for this profession, since they
"exploit men's human need for comfort". (p 317).
They are caught between two worlds, one they
aspire to and one they wish to leave but cannot.
The city hums and throbs with sexual
energy and the frenzy of a closed society. No one
need be lonely or frustrated here. "Bombay has a
service for every need." (p 490) Mehta observes a
"tremendous current of homosexual desire in the
metropolis that lies to itself about its origins".
(p 362)
Reel world
Bollywood is
fundamentally a "mass dream of the audience, and
Bombay is a mass dream of the peoples of India".
(p 457). Through the movies, Indians have been
living in Bombay lifelong without having to set
foot into the mahanagar. Millions of
Indians dream of a future in Bombay celluloid.
Audiences take their films seriously and can
ransack theaters. Directors cannot afford subtlety
lest it go over the heads of the irascible
viewers. India now deals with threats to its
integrity through Bollywood's outlandish scenes of
bombings and terrorists in league with cap-toting
politicians. War onscreen is not all that serious.
"There will always be a break in the fighting for
love and song." (p 449) Sensitive films on
communal tensions get hobbled by Censor Board "A"
(adult) certificates.
Bollywood music
today relies on electronic instruments, African
rhythms and voices. "Like Hinduism, all who come
to invade it are absorbed, digested and
regurgitated." (p 403) The secular film industry
is dominated by Punjabi and Sindhi entrepreneurs
and financed by movie-besotted bhais.
Without the underworld, Bollywood would be
"nowhere near as extravagant, as violent, as
passionate." (p 454)
The city's
pulse
As a child, Mehta recalls the
monsoon's onset as the only event in Bombay
weather. Clouds carried "dispatches from someone
unknown to us to somebody whom we could never talk
to". (p 468) On a visit to his school to come to
terms with "nine years of my ghost time", he is
afraid that a boy might bump into him in the
corridor and "see himself". Starving waifs on the
roads evoke a desperate sadness in the author. "In
Bombay, every day is an assault on the
individual's senses." (p 508)
The
sidewalks and slums of Bombay are strewn with
little lives that share sparse room for living,
sleeping, cooking and dining. Invisibility is
bestowed upon them, though privacy is unthinkable.
Battles over the footpath are battles over rights
of pedestrians, hawkers, vehicle owners and the
homeless. The poor speak of the very poor with
vehemence and the ascending classes feel those
below them have "too much power". One professor
remarks that in Bombay, "you are always comparing
yourself with others". (p 527)
Bombay may
be hectic and breakneck in nature, but not
competitive. In apartments or commuter trains,
Bombayites have no option but to habituate and
adjust. They shrink personal space to expand
collective space and retain empathy for fellow
inmates. The sense of community that binds the
city is rural. "Bombay is a collection of people
from villages who seek to recreate the village."
(p 549). It is not a dying city, but one filled
with incandescent life force. It allows people to
live close to their "seductive extremities" and
still merge into a singular consciousness.
Suketu Mehta's travelogue through the
mahanagar is as sweet and tangy as the city
itself. Flavored for readers of every taste just
like the crispy vadapav, Maximum City is a
magnificent achievement.
Maximum City:
Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. Penguin
Books India, New Delhi, September 2004. ISBN:
0-67-004921-2. Price US$13.25; 585 pages.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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