 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from India Today, September 2004
Bombay Infinite: The passions and secrets of the throbbing megalopolis come alive as Suketu Mehta steps into its back alleys and dance bars, its fantasy factories and drawing rooms. The biography of a city that never sleeps.Bombay of the memory has a richer life in literature. It is becoming the most favoured destination in the rite of homecoming. Twenty-one years after Suketu Mehta left the city for New York with his parents, he wants to regain home. It had to be more than the land he conjured up in the dark cinema hall of Jackson Heights, watching Bollywood movies. Mehta, journalist and fiction writer, returns with his wife and children, packing Sicilian olive oil and NRI nostalgia. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Viking; 600pp; Rs. 595), Mehta's first book, is Bombay unspooling before him like a reel from a Hindi movie, or rather multiple reels from a plethora of films pasted together. A cop movie, an underworld tale, even an item number.
The mafia don, the bar girl, the police commissioner; the film star, the crossdresser and the sanyasi - from the milling swarm of 14 million people, each one comes out with an intimate story of surviving in a city which has a place for every dreamer. Even Chhota Shakeel talks about his love for India. Like the informants who come to the police officer, they let him on about the Bombays that Mehta did not know. The city, Mehta says, has multiple aliases, like the gangsters. Maximum City is the mind's Bombay.
Every city has its chronicler. For long Bombay was the novelist's monopoly, the city immortalised by Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children. Now another Bombay chhokra tells its story in one of the best non-fiction on India.There are no landscapes here, no historical spots or heritage walks. It is the contemporary history of Bombay as it is lived by Mohsin and Monalisa, the hit man and the dance girl. The culture police of the land must be a joke as Mehta scoops out different cultures, spawned in bars, back alleys and drawing rooms. It is not the city of innocence Mehta left behind, the paint of his old home is peeling. It is the city where, Mehta reminds us, there is al alternative economy of black money and hawala and even an alternative judiciary where the bhai settles the scores, helping the landlord get rid of the tenant or the don bump off his rival. As Mehta writes, "Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet, God help us."
And now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject.
 |
| >> BUY THE BOOK |