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REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from The Toronto Star, December 26, 2004
City of DreamsWhether Bombay or Mumbai, it's where all the cool stuff happens An Indian journalist does the place proud, writes Aparita Bhandari
Delhites envy Bombaywallahs. It struck me as an epiphany one lazy winter morning in 1996. It was almost noon and almost all of our group ‹ a ragtag bunch of university students in their late teens ‹ had gathered at the strip of lawn in front of our haunt, The Staircase. We rarely attended classes, except on the first few days of the year to ensure our names were on the class register.
Gaurav Kathuria sauntered in last. He was as thin as the Goldflake cigarettes that were his passion. His gravelly voice didn't quite match the glasses and the floppy hair. He was the quintessential Indian college boy whose two primary loves were booze and what we called hard rock ‹ Def Leppard, Guns 'n' Roses (called GnR), Bruce Springsteen ...
"I'm going to Bombay," Kathuria announced as we soaked in the winter sun and sipped small cups of the canteen's sweet tea.
"I'm going to see Led Zeppelin."
I'm not sure I registered the Led Zeppelin part. But I was definitely envious of Kathuria's upcoming Bombay vacation.
For Indians, Bombay has always been the city of dreams. It's where people ran away to make it big, in Bollywood or in business. It was the stopover to a vacation in Goa. For university kids, Bombay was the city where all the cool stuff happened, where life really began at dusk and you could actually club hop all night. (In Delhi there were only a handful of discotheques in five-star hotels.) Bombay was the pop-culture epicenter for us, the MTV generation.
Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found brings the reader just that bindaas flava-flava of the city formerly known as Bombay. Loosely translated as cavalier or edgy, bindaas is a word as Bombay as the Chowpatty beach.
Maximum City was born out of the harangues of author Suketu Mehta's friend David Davidar, the new publisher of Penguin Canada, to write a book about Mumbai ‹ the official name of Bombay. Mehta refuses to call the city just Mumbai. He points out the city has had many names, and perhaps the British, who transformed the port city into the Gateway of India and called it Bombay, have the right to christen it.
As a journalist, Mehta had ferried in and out of the city and written short features for various publications. His Granta article on the 1993 Bombay riots that polarized the city into Hindus and Muslims caught the eye of Knopf editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta, who offered his namesake a two-book contract. What was supposed to be a one-year stay for Mehta in Mumbai turned into a seven-year odyssey.
The book is definitely not a Lonely Planet guide. It's a paean to the city that Mehta lost and found again. (Mehta was born in Calcutta, but grew up in Bombay until his father transported his family to New York when he was 14.)
My first solo trip to Bombay was in 1997, a long detour to my American born-and-raised cousin's wedding in our family house in Dehradun. My aunt lived in Bombay, where I was going to crash while chasing down fashion celebrities for freelance articles.
On the way from my aunt's Chembur flat to the glamorous confines of models and pop singers who lived in Bandra and Nepean Sea Road, there was the train ride on which you got all Bombay's sights ‹ from slum dwellers crapping on the tracks to women hanging laundry on their high-rise balconies ‹ and smells, from fish to jasmine.
But you eventually must find your own rhythm in a city pulsating with 19 million heartbeats. Mehta found his, and the resulting Bildungsroman-esque aspect of Maximum City, in which Mehta pitches himself as a very involved narrator, is what makes his book such a special read.
For some characters and places, Mehta makes up names. He delivers an extended game of cops and robbers as he consorts with Bombay's gangsters as much as Bombay's finest. He meets dancing girls (they're not quite strippers) and Bollywood directors. And by telling these characters' stories, Mehta tells deep secrets of the city you won't get from a one-week Bombay vacation.
I think I recognize some of the places Mehta masquerades. When I was in Bombay earlier this year, I checked out what I was told was the city's finest beer bar, Topaz. I went with my friend Anjali and her boyfriend Rahul. Anjali's cousins, who were regulars, joined us to explain the concept.
It was a most surreal experience to watch young women, mostly in their late teens, decked out as prettily as any Bollywood starlet, dancing to the blaring Bollywood hits and being showered with money by men young, old and middle-aged.
"So, is Sapphire actually Topaz?" I asked a touring Mehta.
"I can't tell you that," he replied.
Aparita Bhandari is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
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