Book Review - Maximum City

This review appeared in The Telegraph

IN THE RECYCLED MESS


Part of the rot
Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found
By Suketu Mehta, Penguin, Rs 595
Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus on Bombay is impossible to put down. The New York-based writer returns to Bombay 21 years after his family migrated to New York, this time to plumb the dark underbelly of the metropolis. Mehta moves from the cages of Kamathipura to the gullies of Madanpura, the slums of Jogeshwari and Dagdi Chawl to the matchboxes of Mira Road with ease. In this reportage of the city, fixers, shooters, rioters, policemen and film directors come alive in vignettes both stark and cinematic.
The stories are powerful and haunting. They shock with their graphic descriptions of violence and of police brutality. Mehta takes a hard look at Mumbai’s police force, socializes with Bandra cop Ajay Lal in a Bandra police station, and discusses police encounters with assistant police inspector, Salaskar. He befriends underworld shooters Mohsin and Satish, who explain their techniques and describe their habits in a matter-of-fact manner.
Mehta spends nights at Sapphire and other beer bars, hangs out with the sexy 20-year-old dancer, Mona Lisa, at trendy cafeterias or at her home, where she tells him her story. She talks about her father, who abandoned the family, her mother, who sent her to the beer bar, and the lover for whom she slashed her wrists.
He meets film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, co-writing his script for Mission Kashmir. Mehta is relentless in his exploration of the urban landscape — both physical as well as mental. “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” he asks Sena activist, Sunil. He analyses the men in the mob responsible for the horrific 1992-93 Hindu Muslim riots in Mumbai. “The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweats and farts …Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob.”
The underlying theme that runs through the book is one of rot that comes through powerfully in the images of filth. In one such image adman Prahlad Kakkar tells Mehta, “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit everyday”. When Mehta’s foreign-born children fall sick with amoebic dysentery he says, “We have been feeding our son shit. It could have come from the mango we gave him; it could have been in the pool we took him swimming in... There is no defense possible. Everything is recycled in this filthy country, which poisons its children, raising them on a diet of its own shit.”
The book is a deeply disturbing, disquieting portrait of a city where, as Sunil the local Sena boss declares, “even murder is all right”. Mehta’s Bombay has none of the magic of Salman Rushdie’s childhood world, or the affectionate idiosyncrasies of Pico Iyer’s travel tales or even the hopeless nostalgia of Rohinton Mistry’s Parsee protagonists. Instead, we are drawn into a world sans basic amenities, where the neighbourhood pav-wallah is set aflame, where the primeval impulse for territory makes men loot and kill with equanimity, where models and bar girls measure their grief in the number of slashes on their wrists. Mehta may be the quintessential artist as outsider, but he leaves behind a vision that is compelling.
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY