Book: Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found

Author: Suketu Mehta
Publisher: Penguin Viking

Cartographer of Bombay`s Id



Bombay is the bitch goddess of all immigrants to the city of gold, the rich and poor, healthy and disabled, diseased and those cursed with good health. It is the city where at one time or the other, rapists, armed gangsters, paedophiles, exquisite whores, would-be superstars, famous musicians and celebrity video jockeys have streamed out as particles of that great exhumation of humanity at Churchgate or VT station.

While so much of the city is folklore, there is no definite autobiography of India`s premier metropolis. Or there was not, till Suketu Mehta finished his seven-year labour of love as part of his three-book commission from Alfred A. Knopf of New York. Mehta, a writer on the wings of fame for some time and an alumnus of Iowa Writers` Workshop, has taken flight. And how!

Maximum City is simply the best non-fiction book on Mumbai. Written with the acute puppy love for the city he left when he was still 14, and an adult appreciation of its various transmogrifications, Mehta takes the reader into the gullies and alleyways that are draped in the shadows thrown by the strobelights that catch the city`s famed skyline. His writer`s eye for detail, and his involved detachment, helps fill colour, life, and features into the special denizens of this city that all newspapers write about, but without fleshing them out.

Salman Rushdie`s seminal novel Midnight`s Children was the first portrait of post-Independence Bombay. Brilliant as it was nostalgic, Rushdie`s later attempt to recreate the city of his birth in the Moor`s Last Sigh rather painfully underlined how the writer`s geographical distance from the city had taken its toll, and how memory ill served the erotically grotesque reality of twentieth century Bombay.

Mehta`s book should be a worthy successor to the Midnight`s Children.
It also corrects the tilt; Rushdie`s Bombay was the South Bombay of the rich, Mehta`s Bombay is the suburban Bombay of the rest. Though Mehta misses out on some historically significant events, like the effect of the textile mill workers` strike and its crippling of the city`s economy swelling the numbers that make up the desperadoes of the city, the book brings another dimension in being a non-fiction work.

It is eminently robust, earthy, visceral and at times plain putrid. It updates Rushdie`s post-Independence Bombay and arrives at the millennial Mumbai of 2003. As in when the Shiv Sena rioter Sunil explains to Mehta over cognac how a man looks like when he is on fire.

'I`ll tell you. I was there. A man on fire gets up, falls, runs for his life, falls, gets up, runs.' He continues, '…oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, it shows specially on the nose' -he rubbed his nose with two fingers as if scraping off skin-'oil drips from him, water drips from him, white, white all over.'

The Shiv Sainik is describing how he set fire to the Muslim man who regularly supplied bread to his household. And then, the rioter is also a devout pilgrim visiting the dargah in Ajmer every year.

Or this sociological gem from underworld hit man Satish, who has defected from the Rajan gang, to join the D-company. The author notes 'members of Satish`s gang are intensely religious. But they all belong to different religions; they could be an advertisement for communal harmony. There is Satish himself; there is Mickey, who is Sikh, and Zameer who is Muslim. `He had Catholics too. But they get diverted too easily by girlfriends; they don`t have much hunger for money,` says Satish.'

Or Sanjay Dutt`s traumatic life and the lesions it left on his psyche are rather amusing, when not sad. Reminiscing about his daughter from his marriage to Richa Sharma who is studying in a public school in Bayside. 'Education is fun for them. Here you are studying some shit:
When did Aurangzeb invade India? Who the fuck cares?'

Mehta cavorts with gangsters, bar girls, underworld accountants, and
skillfully persuades or cajoles their stories from them, and
weaves them into a narrative that is by turns heartbreaking, heartwarming, heartless and hearty. He seamlessly weaves the stories of bar girls who calibrate their failed romances with razor blades on their wrists, a man who impersonates a woman and becomes the top dancer at the city`s premier dance bar, mantra spouting gangsters, with those of movie makers, cable operators, and film stars. With his unerring eye, and a prose that crackles and pops without being racy and operatic, Mehta is the new cartographer of Bombay`s Id. A sensational debut, and simply mandatory reading for those who salaam Bombay.