February 27, 2005

SUNIL is a cable television operator. He’s also a soldier in the Army of Shiva, the Shiv Sena. In the latter capacity, his supreme boss is Bal Thackeray, described as a cross between Pat Buchanan and Saddam Hussein. Thakre would be more accurate, but Bal’s dad chose to adopt the sound-alike name of the Victorian author of Vanity Fair.

The second-generation Thackeray is vain enough, but that’s by no means his most egregious flaw. He happens to be a fan of Adolf Hitler. If Indian Muslims are guilty of behaving the way European Jews did in the 1930s, he once told an American news magazine, then they surely deserve a customized Final Solution.

That is why, when the occasion arises, Sunil organizes pogroms. He has no regrets, nor any qualms about describing in gruesome detail what happens when you pour fuel on a man and set him on fire. Not because of anything he has done, but simply because he adheres to a particular faith. Sunil also risks his life to save a Muslim friend who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If there’s any contradiction there, he’s blissfully unaware of it.

Ajay Lal represents an endangered species in the subcontinent: he is an honest cop, immune to intimidation and bribes. He can also be a ruthless investigator in a milieu where the torture of suspects is not just routine but almost mandatory. It sometimes involves techniques that would make incarceration at Abu Ghraib seem like a vacation in comparison.

Mohsin, Satish and Mickey are on the other side of the law: they are “shooters” in what Bombayites refer to as the “gangwar”, gunmen who take their orders from underworld bosses based in Dubai, Karachi or Bangkok. The dons, most of whom started their careers as small-time-smugglers, reward loyalty generously — which helps to explain the attraction of the gangs as a career opportunity. “Treachery”, on the other hand, incurs their unforgiving wrath.

Remarkably, the underworld remains more secular than the society it operates in more than a decade after the most notorious of the dons, Dawood Ibrahim engineered a series of bomb blasts in response to a series of riots that had terrorized Bombay’s vast Muslim community. The riots had been engineered by Thackeray, and some of the worst excesses were perpetrated with police connivance.

In more ways than one, Thackeray the political leader and Ibrahim the outlaw supremo represent two sides of the same coin. And although the two of them may personify India’s worst nightmares, they both exert an amazing influence over its dream factory. This strange nexus is perhaps best represented by Sanjay Dutt, a leading Bollywood actor who spent two years behind bars for hoarding weapons on behalf of the underworld, yet whose first stop upon being bailed out was the Thackeray residence.

Celluloid, however, isn’t the only stuff that dreams are made of. There are also the beer bars where lascivious patrons lavish their cash on — and project their fantasies on to — shapely dancers, such as 20-year-old Monalisa. The dancers, too, have their dreams: some of them long to be models or actors; others would be more than satisfied with a family life in which they are loved for something more than their physical attributes. In many cases, the razor marks on their wrists bear testimony to dashed hopes.

Suketu Mehta left Bombay against his will at the age of 14, when his family relocated to New York. In the 1990s he returned to it as an award-winning writer, determined to understand, and explain, the metamorphosis that had turned his beloved birthplace into rowdy, overcrowded, violent Mumbai.

Resettling in a city he hardly recognizes any more proves harder than he imagined; amenities taken for granted in the West entail an extraordinary degree of exertion in the world’s largest metropolis (by 2015, Bombay is projected to be more populous than Australia). Yet he persists, crossing paths with — and sometimes befriending — killers and cops, aspiring actors and successful directors, dancers and dons. In the process, he gets under the city’s skin, forensically examining its arteries and veins, its underbelly and its entrails.

Armed throughout with a laptop, he weaves the occasionally tense encounters and disparate images into a compelling narrative. He strives to be non-judgmental, and broadly succeeds. There are, however, a few — almost involuntary — lapses. After an encounter with Satish and Mickey, for instance, he muses: “If the police or another gangster shoot them dead — when the police or another gangster shot them dead — I will feel no regret. I will not feel that the earth is a poorer place for their passing.”

It’s difficult to disagree with him there, but on another occasion he expresses what could be construed as an ideological, rather than a moral, judgment: reflecting on the obscene economic disparities in Bombay, he claims “it is also [the] rich who create wealth, who create the conditions that will allow the mother on the streets to find a home for her children. They must be allowed their penthouses, their brandy, so the poor may be allowed their simple clean room, their rice and dal.”

That comes across as a gratuitous bit of neo-liberalism, but such intrusions are rare and barely detract from Mehta’s descriptive skills. Maximum City has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, but Mehta’s epic account is, by and large, refreshingly unprejudiced and steers clear of the overweening subjectivity and occasional dishonesty that diminished the value of Naipaul’s opus.

Bombay often tends to be viewed as a microcosm of India. Mehta shows us that it is also an organic whole, with a mind — and a heart — of its own. Most of the city’s internal conflicts boil down to a competition for limited resources. Mehta doesn’t jump to that admittedly mundane conclusion, but it’s implicit in the vignettes that make up the big picture. That’s a big part of this volume’s appeal: that it’s long on evidence and short on verdicts. It’s a comprehensive collage that coalesces into a striking portrait. And anyone hoping for a more revealing depiction of this unique yet quintessentially Indian city could be in for a long wait.

 

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

By Suketu Mehta

Review

ISBN 0747221596240pp. £20

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