Book Review

Maximum City

Bombay Lost and Found

Suketu Mehta

Published by Penguin Books in 2004

This work of non-fiction had won huge praise from writers, novelists, critics and book reviewers. Maximum City also won the 2005 Kriyama Prize for Non-fiction, was short-listed for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Book Prize for Non-fiction in 2005 and chosen as Book of the Year for 2004 by The Economist. Suketu Mehta was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer.

The author is from a family of Jeweller-merchants; he calls them, “mercantile wanderers”. His grandfather left rural Gujarat to set up business in Calcutta and his father, an educated man, moved from Calcutta to Bombay to sell diamonds. As his father and uncle got established in diamond business, their families gained roots in the city. Like other sensitive writers, Mehta’s descriptions of his childhood moments spent in the city, are some of the most poignant and impressive pieces of writing in the entire book.

Suketu left Bombay for New York at a very young age and quite unlike the popular assumptions of an all-welcoming “melting pot”, America wasn’t all that inviting. The teachers and students at Queens were openly racial. As he says, “I existed in New York but lived in India.” One way of repelling the New York society (and it’s winter) was by roaring “Bhenchod, Bheyyyyan chod” when he walked his mile-long way to School, “sucking in the freezing winds as the good Irish, Italian and Polish senior citizens heard this word on very cold days mouthed by a brown boy dressed inappropriately for the weather.”

The personal geography of Mehta merges with that of the city in which he was born as he takes a look at the history of Bombay. We learn that it was called Hetanesia – the city of seven islands – by Ptolemy, Bom Babia and Boa Vida – island of good life - by the Portuguese, Manbeu, Mambai, Mambe, Mumbadevi and Bambai by the Hindus. Bombay from the beginning had its unique culture, which is of transaction – dhanda – appropriate for a city conceived as a trading city. When Mehta returns to the city of his birth, his experiences are less than enchanting; be it getting a rented house or a cooking gas cylinder. These are everyday problems for Indians, but the hearing the same being said by an Indian-born American is quite upsetting.

The civil disorder that has set in Bombay can be found in this description of a Jogeshwari slum: “Much of the slum is a garbage dump. The sewers, which are open, run right between the houses and children play and occasionally fall into them. They are full of a blue-black iridescent sledge. When the government sweepers come to clean the drains, they scoop it out and leave piles of it outside the latrines. I couldn’t use the public toilets. I tried, once. There were two rows of toilets. Each one of them had masses of shit, overflowing out of the toilets and spread liberally all around the cubicle. For the next few hours that image and that stench stayed with me. When I ate, when I drank. It is not merely an aesthetic discomfort; typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral-faecal contact. Pools of stagnant water, which are everywhere, breed malaria. Many children also have jaundice. Animal carcasses are spread out on the counters of butchers’ shops, sprinkled with flies like a moving spice. The whole slum is pervaded by a stench that I stopped noticing after a while.” This should shock no one as more than two million people in the city do not have access to latrines!

Alongside, Mehta also chronicles the struggle of illiterate, slum women to set things right by getting together and agitating. Despite all the filth and dirt, these people have made it their home; they won’t move from the slums. Mehta’s explanation for their rootedness is simple, “Out of inhospitable surroundings, they form a community and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves.” His advice to urban planners is, “Any urban redevelopment plan has to take into account the curious desire of slum dwellers to live closely together”

The other phenomenon of slums, which has been romanticised in so many films, is crime. There is a lively description of the opportunities offered by the social geography of a city like Bombay to the social movement of criminals. Sunil, the Shiv Sena thug, who had burnt alive two Muslims in the riots of 1993, gets appointed as “Special Executive Officer” when the Sena forms a Government in Maharashtra. Even though the post does not give him a legitimate office, still makes him a person on whom public trust is reposed. Suketu Mehta believes that the fact of murderer like Sunil could become successful in Bombay through engagement in local politics is both a triumph and failure of democracy. A triumph because it indicates availability of an open space for social advancement and a failure because it is the worst – with passionate intensity, as W.B. Yeats had described men of this kind – who successfully traverse through this space.

Mehta visits the slum houses, eats, drinks and moves with the rioters, contract killers and gang lords and describes in great detail the psyche of these men and the political economy of crime. Similarly, he meets people on the other end of the spectrum, the ‘encounter specialists’, police officers and the politicians and again comes out with knowledge of the economy involved in fighting criminals. We have often been sympathetic to the criminals, given their social setting and the cruelty of the lives they lead. So it is shocking when we hear Ajay Lal, the Police Officer tell this story: “The franchise to make big chalk pictures of Jesus Christ on the footpath, on which passers-by throw coins, is sold for seventy five thousand rupees for six months by the toughs who control that section.” Mehta comes across a Rajan gang member, who shoots out three persons for 3500 rupees! As this incident is discussed while he was with Ajay, Mehta asks him what is the lowest price he heard about for a life in Bombay? Ajay tells him about a rag-picker, who helps a woman and her paramour to finish off her husband. The rag-picker, chips off the dead man’s limbs into pieces and distributes them in Deonar dump. The price paid to the rag picker for the job done was, hold your heart, just 50 rupees! The rag picker needed a gunny sack to put on the roof of his shack to prevent his house getting flooded and, therefore, took on the assignment! No better example could be cited for the savagery of life in Bombay.

Mehta places some of the blame afflicting urban living in a city like Bombay on popular democracy itself. One example is the notorious Rent Control Act, which prevents vacation of a flat rented out to a tenant and also enhancement of rent. As he puts it, the Rent Act is a case of institutionalised expropriation of private property! It is democracy which allows such laws to remain on Statute Books. As he correctly diagnoses, “Democracies have a weakness. If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books”

No book on Bombay could be complete without a portrayal of life in its sprawling slums. The following is one description of a street scene - no doubt, Mehta’s Jain upbringing repulses the images before him – on the occasion of Muharram, when animals are sacrificed: “Grinning children run barefoot through the blood-deep streets holding the freshly cut heads, all the eyes open. There are groups of municipal garbage collectors who take away the waste entrails, the dung-filled stomach sacs. Huge dumps are filled with these carcasses. A man stands inside a municipal garbage container, cutting a big animal’s insides, disposing of the remains right inside the container around his feet. Cats and dogs are having a feast on the leftovers.................... The narrow streets are slippery with blood and shit; the filthiest time of the year in the filthiest part of the city. On the road leading to the factory I notice a dead squashed rat covered with flies. An open manhole reveals huge red cockroaches ringing the tunnel. The animal hides are stacked and put in front of mosques for charity. Men walk about with reddened shirts; they look as if they’ve been playing Holi.”

At times, the description turns poetic, as this one: “As the fur and the skin and the flesh are cut away on layers, the animals’ bodies reveal treasures in multiple vivid colours: the brownish-red of the liver; the elegant white and red stripes of the inside of the rib cage; the brown, white and black of the fur; the crystal of the eyes; the pure cream of the intestines, unfurled. I see the marvellous arrangement of the bull’s body within and without, the complex cornucopia of its insides, the fine differentiation of the organs, each admirably suited to its purpose. All these had been working in tandem a minute before, and now each part is freed from the yoke of the mind and acts independently; twitching, pissing, growing, hardening. Now they will go their separate ways. After one bull is slaughtered, the children pull at the white fat inside its body; it stretches like a elastic sheet. A man pokes the open eye of the dead animal; its mouth suddenly opens in reflex, showing a line of teeth; The man repeats his gesture; the mouth opens again.”

“What are the killers and sharp-shooters fighting for?” is a question which comes to Mehta’s mind often. On the move with members of the D-Company, he finds that they speak of their criminal association with pride, the pride of an oppressed minority that fights back and ‘dares’ to venture in the ‘outline’ trades. There are also the embers of a global jihad being wages against infidels, when Mohsin advises Mehta to go to Palestine to see the real Mujahideen where even three year old boys carry AK-47s. This is matched by the sentiments of the ‘Sena boys’ who see themselves as protectors of the Hindu nation. To quote Mehta again, “Both sides see what is happening in Bombay today as only the latest in a long series of historical battles. Bombay is where worlds collide; it is their Tours, their Kosovo, their Panipet. Here the line will be drawn, in this Hindu nation ringed by Islamic countries.”

More dangerous than this assumption of being frontline soldiers of the global “War of Civilizations” is the completely unstructured lives that these ‘boys’ lead. “Under the looming shadow of death, they spend their days and, more important, their nights wandering, free-floating through the charms of the city, from the kebab joints and carom clubs of Madanpura, to the charas dens and brothels of Kamathipura where their anger can be stripped off. At any point in the day or night, there are these boys clustered around central Bombay, ever on the lookout for profitable strife. They watch the streets the way stockbrokers watch their computer screens or grain merchants watch the onset of the monsoon, looking for the slightest change in the market, the slightest sign of excitement.”

There is also a telling comment on the way the police functions in the Metropolitan city. A few months later Mohsin is arrested by the police. He is beaten to pulp for three days. The police try to convert him into a Police-informer. Mohsin refuses to be one. What do we expect the police to do? Produce the criminal before a court or kill him in a fake ‘encounter’. No, nothing of these sorts. The Police phone in Shakeel, the Pakistan-based D-Company Commander and demand money for the life of Mohsin! Shakeel pays three lakh and Mohsin is let off! With such a police force, it wasn’t entirely surprising that 26 / 11 happened a few years later!

Another question which Mehta tries to answer is, “Why is that the killers are so remorseless?”. He gives a near psychoanalytical answer to this question when he says, “When a man touches his killer’s feet and begs for his life, saying ‘Please don’t kill me. I have young children’, it is the worst argument he can offer. Thinking the killer will let you off because you have kids assumes that you can locate a hidden source of sympathy in your killer based on something shared, something in common. But very few killers are fathers. Very few of them have had good experiences with their own fathers. So that bond between father and son, which for you and me is the most convincing argument against your death – don’t kill me because it will break that sacred bond – means nothing to them. It is a bond, in fact, that the hit men have consciously been trying to break all their lives. As far as they’re concerned, ridding your children of a father is the greatest favour they can do them”(emphasis added).

Just as you begin to assume that Bombay is all about a city inhabited by gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, politicians, film-stars alone, Mehta introduces a charming story of Girish and his family, who live in a slum but somehow move away to a flat at the outskirts of the city. The family pools its little earnings and resources and buys the flat. And, there is another enchanting story about the renunciation of worldly life by a Jain family, of parents and their two young children.

So, where does redemption lie for the city that never sleeps? Mehta doesn’t offer one, Having lain bare the violence and corruption in their gory detail, he could not do so. But, he does indicate a few. It lies in the illiterate slum-women, who fight for basic needs such as water, sewage clearance, who try to maintain communal harmony by forming Peace Committees; in those train commuters, already drenching with sweat in crowded compartments, reaching out to that late-comer running frantically to get in and families such as those of Girish, which saves whatever little its members could earn and try to climb the social ladder.

Curiously enough, Mehta is fascinated by Seventibhai’s leap into monkhood. In his opinion, “Seventibhai has decisively rejected every value held dear by the middle classes; Western education, consumerism, nationalism and, most important, family.” Seventibhai has even triumphed over death, that in a city where death comes cheap. Remember, it costs only fifty rupees to kill and dump a person in dump-yard. “He has divested himself of everything – family, possessions, pleasure – that is death’s due. All that remains is his body, to which he has renounced title in advance and treats as a borrowed, soiled shirt. Seventibhai has beaten death to the end.”

We their fellow-countrymen only wish that Mumbaikers would choose the less enchanting example of Girish and his family rather than that of Seventibhai and his family!