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REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from The South China Morning Post, October 17, 2004
These two books, about two of the best-known cities in India, could hardly be more different. Winchester père et fils - both Britons - have put together a commendable, if predictable, anthology on Calcutta, topping and tailing it with their own impressions and a potted history. Simon includes an anecdote about his experiences at the home of a general who feasts his eyes on Japanese erotica during lulls in the war with Pakistan. Rupert wheels out his backpacking arrival in a city notorious for its deprivation.
The 22 authors chosen to represent Calcutta are mainly foreign - Kipling, Lapierre, Theroux, Twain and Simon's personal literary guru James, later Jan, Morris - and seem rather dated. And this is the problem, for the Winchesters' Calcutta is a lofty museum piece, interesting in its own way but not much more than a historical footnote when compared with the coruscating vitality of Suketu Mehta's Maximum City.
After a 21-year sojourn in the US, Mehta returns to his native city and plunges in head first to get the feel of a megalopolis that has changed not just its name - to Mumbai - but its entire character in his absence. He writes with a natural authority, at once in tune with the 18 million residents and yet able to view them with the detachment of an expatriate. The book glissades like a Hindi movie on fast forward, with its fluent author able to sit in on a violent interrogation by Mumbai's most famous police officer, dally with bar girls and gangsters, roam the slums and the most svelte neighbourhoods and get behind the scenes of a film industry the ignorant dub "Bollywood". Movie-making in Mumbai predates anything anywhere in California, and on an annual basis it churns out many more flicks than the Los Angeles suburbs. Small wonder, then, that Mehta starts off his epic journey through Mumbai by pointing out that its population will soon outstrip Australia's, and hinting that it will become one of the definitive cities on the planet.
Much of what Mehta writes is so shocking it seems to belong to the world of fiction. The slum dweller, who - in despair at being evicted from her pathetic shanty - tries to dash out her baby's brains against a wall. The sludge-like legal system that's a modern embodiment of Dickens' Bleak House. The extrajudicial killings carried out with impunity by the police. The bribery, corruption and sleaze that infest every level of government. The thousands of young men and women who flock to seek a career in films, only to end up ruined. The city planners, who know that if their plans are too efficient it will only make things worse, because yet more people will immigrate from the countryside. The list runs on.
But bemoan Mumbai as he does, Mehta also finds much to praise. Commuting is a nightmare, with railway carriages packed solid with sweating humanity. Yet a passenger frantically running to catch a train will be grabbed and hauled in by strangers, who will squeeze together and "adjust" - an essential Mumbai verb - to make space for one more soul. Terrible race riots are followed by periods of reconciliation, with ordinary Hindus and Muslims striving to make peace. An old man who lives solely on charity is always careful to tip the waiter at his lunchtime restaurant, knowing the value of giving like nobody else. Maximum City has an energy and intensity possessed by few other travel books. Finishing it, you feel you have to go there yourself - and soon.
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