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REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from The Sydney Morning Herald, February 12, 2005
This portrait of modern Bombay shows it in all its tragic brilliance, writes Sonya Voumard.
Like a mind-blowing, real-life trip through the streets of Bombay, many thousands of images of beggars, slums, palaces, film stars, murderers, cops and lovers rush forward from the pages of this book, as if competing for a high rupee-yielding prize.
From its almost 500 pages, there are many memorable moments. Some involve blood, some the smell and ever-present issue of shit and where to put it. One is a wild, welcoming, routine explosion of mob generosity in a city that's bursting at the seams: the population is projected to reach 23 million by 2015.
Bombay was once seven hilly, malarial islands that were levelled, the land between them reclaimed from the sea. As well as being the economic powerhouse of India, it is an environmental basket-case, a polluted, disease-filled metropolis riddled with corruption, violence and ethnic/religious - particularly Hindu and Muslim - tensions. It is also a city of hope, romance, passion, faith and beauty.
In the mid-1990s, the city was renamed its Gujarati or Marathi name of Mumbai. As an aficionado of the old Bombay, author Suketu Mehta, an Indian-born former Bombay resident who now lives in New York, returned with his family to discover the new Bombay.
He describes what he found in three unsanitised chapters: Power, Pleasure and Passages.
The first zooms in on the so-called black-collar workers, including murderers and other players that exist in a parallel, criminal economy that keeps the country running.
In Pleasure we meet the bar girls, including Monalisa, whose beauty and sexual energy turn heads everywhere, but are not enough to get her a better life despite Mehta's attempts to help her. Monalisa is the only woman we get to know in depth and I was left curious about the details of women with more conventional lives.
Passages focuses on the spiritual quests made by several inhabitants.
Observed with the empathy of a native combined with an exile's bi-cultural perspective, Maximum City is an insightful and comprehensive portrait of Bombay in all its tragedy, comedy, cruelty and brilliance.
There are a mini-skirted Bombay bar-girl and her suitor having sex for the first time in a taxi as they bat away six fluttering love birds they have bought and then kill for titillation in the course of getting it on. They hurl the carcasses out of the cab at the end.
Half of Bombay's population don't have a toilet, so many defecate in the sea, causing a huge stench to rise up when the tide goes out. Only men are seen doing this during the day. The women do it in privacy in the early hours.
A wealthy Bombay diamond merchant and his family have "renounced life", given away their money and become travelling Jain monks who walk barefoot across India. Mehta later catches up with the father, whose scalp is bleeding after his hair has been pulled out "tuft by tuft, over a period of several hours by his superior". This is done to make him strong and understand others' suffering.
This book maps post-colonial Bombay in all its horror and beauty. But the reader is inevitably drawn to speculate about the wider ramifications of poverty and crime.
It takes a small leap to imagine how a boy from Bombay who has seen his mother burned alive, and has himself gone on to rape and kill, could then be easily recruited into terrorism.
It would be naive and inaccurate to suggest that an earlier Bombay was free of the plagues affecting it today. But one thing seems certain: globalisation and the continual decline of the traditional Indian village has worsened conditions for the majority in Bombay.
Yet there is hope. There are those running for the packed morning train in Bombay who reach the station just as it is pulling out, run up and find many hands stretching out to pull them on board.
"And at that moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable ... All they know is that you're trying to get to the city of gold and that's enough. 'Come on board,' they say. 'We'll adjust."'
As Suketu Mehta points out, the people of Bombay live close to their seductive extremities. These are shouted lives.
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