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Rahul Bose on MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found October 2, 2004
Bitter SweetBombay is my home. but my relationship with the city is a conflicted one, says Rahul Bose
Suketu Mehta's first book, a non-fiction dissection of Bombay, Maximum City Bombay Lost and Found, has been creating a buzz both in New York and Bombay. And deservedly so. It is, as Amitav Ghosh writes in a blurb on the cover of the book, '...part nightmare and part millennial hallucination...a love affair with the city...' Salman Rushdie believes it is the finest book written about the city. Suketu has been a Bombay boy since childhood. I fell in love with the title of the book where he calls the city 'Bombay' as opposed to the legally correct, 'Mumbai.' As Suketu rightly observes, Bombay has always been called Mumbai in Marathi so he doesn't see the necessity for the name change. He moved to New York only as late as the last decade, and has spent seven years of that time writing this book. His feelings for the city run deep and wide, the gamut from fierce protectiveness to tender despair. Reading this book set me thinking about my feelings for this metropolis. Thirty-two years later it is the only place I will ever be able to call home. Yet I'm unsure, in what way does it call out to me? Does it call out at all?
There is no simple answer. My feelings for this city are heavily conflicted. At the root of this conflict is the two questions I ask people when talk shifts to the nature of the place. What Bombay do you live in? What parts of Bombay do you consciously keep out? I shall attempt to answer these for myself. There is no point talking about my childhood years in the city. One's infancy is pretty much about school, games in school, games out of it and vacations away from the city. It was in my teenage years through to the early twenties that I found myself picking and choosing little bits of the city that I put together to make my Bombay. Music from Rhythm House, plays at the Experimental, books (then videos, now dvds) from Shemaroo, films at Akashvani, sport at the Bombay Gymkhana Club. I was determined to surround my life with excellence and this was my way of doing it. Insular behaviour, as it indisputably was, I know I made the right decision. At the time it was important for me to create a bedrock of the best the city had to offer culturally because even then I could intuit that in those pursuits was where my life was going to lie and all of this was fodder for my future. As I grew more comfortable in my skin I found myself exploring more of the city's skin. Now Bombay expanded to show me the line of art deco buildings at the Oval, Lion's Gate on a Sunday afternoon, a walk down Chimbai village on Christmas eve, kababs at Do Tanki at four in the morning, baida roti at Minara Masjid, an afternoon show in Ganga Jamuna, fish coming off the boats at dawn in Mazgaon.
Then the movies happened. With that I was sucked into a new Bombay. A Bombay that goes so against my dna that I never live in it unless I am acting in a movie. Just like any major film city in the world (Los Angeles, for example), the shamelessness, the desperation, the acute disrespect for anybody lower down the food chain and the monstrous egos make the air unbreathable. As do so many other sides of Bombay. The cowardice and the psychosis of fear that this city guiltily lives with after the riots of 1992. The selling off of onešs convictions to invite a chief minister who has blood on his hands to a business convention. The silent, mass rape of children, girls and women in every slum of Bombay every night.
Today, years spent intermittently abroad have only given me a hazy objectivity of distance to evaluate my feelings for the city. No, I don't love Bombay. No, I don't miss Bombay when I am away from it. No, I don't think it's the most 'happening' place today. But yes, I miss certain parts of Bombay because my life was created bit by bit in those parts. Yes, when I am playing rugby on the greenest grass in the world at the Bombay Gymkhana I wish I could die and go straight to heaven with this as my last memory. Yes, when I hear the muezzin's familiar call at the edge of Haji Ali. Yes, when I put that first sev puri into my mouth at the bhelpuri stall outside the Prithvi theatre in Juhu. But that is my Bombay. Is it Bombay enough to make me miss it? Damned if I know.
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