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REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from The Financial Times, February 25, 2005
Promise Amid the PotholesBy Rahul Jacob
When we speak of the 21st-century metropolis, the cityscapes imprinted on most minds are New York or Hong Kong. Headlines on immigration tell of millions moving from south to north. We're looking in the wrong direction: the big story of this century will be of millions in the developing world moving from the countryside to the city in nations such as India, China, Nigeria and Brazil.
In 1950, only New York had a population of more than 10 million. By 2015, 23 cities around the world will be that size or bigger, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Just four of these will be in the developed world. By 2015, Mumbai, at 26 million, could be the biggest of them all.
Suketu Mehta's biography - and no other word will do - of Mumbai, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, teems with people: bar-girls, slum dwellers, gangsters, movie directors and policemen. It is an obsessive look at Mumbai's dysfunctional side, but many of the stories he tells are also uplifting.
This is perhaps as it should be: the process of urbanisation, whether in Lagos, Chongqing or Mumbai, may not be pretty but it is as full of promise as potholes. Millions, after all, are escaping rural poverty. Call centres and call girls co-exist side by side. Apartments in Mumbai that cost $2m-$3m overlook slums where toilets are scarce and people queue for hours for water.
Yet for many Indians in villages and cities alike, Mumbai remains a city where the streets are lined with opportunity. In the slums of Mumbai, Mehta finds people who have saved up to buy fridges, telephones and phone lines and are energetically remaking their lives.
Mehta follows around a police officer and draws a grittily realistic picture of crime and punishment in Mumbai. The underworld's influence has grown, explains the officer, as people lose faith in the hopelessly backlogged legal system. Mehta is in the room when a police interrogation escalates from slapping the suspects to thrashing them with a thick leather strap.
For the view from the other side of the fence, Mehta also spends time with gangsters, yielding extraordinary insights about their sexual appetites and religious beliefs. For example, after a gangster called Satish has murdered a victim, he eats a strictly vegetarian meal, has a bath and then goes to worship Hanuman, the Hindu monkey-god. Muslim or Hindu, the gangsters are all devoutly religious; being in India, the locus classicus of contradictions, they see no apparent inconsistency.
Mehta lands an interview by telephone with Chotta Shakeel, an Indian Al Capone, who lives overseas (as do most of Mumbai's mafia dons). After the gangster waxes eloquent on his sense of loss living away from Mumbai, the writer is offered the ultimate gangster's IOU: "Any trouble you have in Bombay. One work [murder] free. Bhai [brother] said so."
The American writer Janet Malcolm observed that the relationship between journalist and interviewee almost always ends in betrayal. She had not met Mehta. He does not merely interview people - he becomes part of their family. A local politician haggles over campaign contributions from a diamond merchant with Mehta in the room. A film director not only asks him to write a script for his movie, but insists on having food from his house delivered to Mehta when the author's wife is away. A nightclub dancer who has had a rapprochement with her father a decade after he abandoned his family insists that Mehta be part of the reunion.
This is compulsively readable stuff, the best non-fiction book on India in a couple of decades.
V.S. Naipaul covers some of the same terrain more analytically in India: A Million Mutinies Now, but Mehta's reportage is much richer.
The closest comparison to Maximum City, oddly enough, is Salman Rushdie¹s well-researched fictional portrait of Mumbai, The Moor's Last Sigh, which was also a love song to the city and a clarion call of the doom that could yet befall it.
The trouble is that Maximum City skews too heavily towards the darker side of the city. It ignores the more bourgeois - but hardly boring - advances of Mumbai's stockbrokers and call centres in the commercial capital of one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
It is fitting that among the gangsters and slum dwellers that Mehta writes about with unusual empathy, the most touching portrait is of a poet named Babbanji. He has migrated to the city and lives on its footpaths simply because he believes Mumbai has the best stories of all.
Babbanji encounters people singing on the train and follows them home to their shanty town by a sewer. "The sewer was overflowing with all kinds of plastic - plastic bags, plastic bottles - and Babbanji thought of his school science project," of turning plastic into petrol. "And I thought, this is a treasury," says the poet, whom it is hard not to see as an alter-ego of Mehta. For Mehta's gift is to take the equal parts of wretchedness and redemption that Mumbai offers and make poetry of it.
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