“Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found”, by Suketu Mehta

 

560 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-0375703409

Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is an insider’s view of this most-Indian of metropolises and has garnered a number of accolades: winner of the 2005 Kiriyama Prize (given to books that foster a greater understanding of the nations and peoples of the Pacific Rim and South Asia), winner of the 2005 Vodafone Crossword Book Award, one of the Economist 2004 Books of the Year, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize. And no wonder, as this book is a very personal work of a native Bombayite who left with his parents for New York at 14 before returning as an adult twenty-one years later to examine all that has changed and, often sadly, all than has remained the same, told mostly through interviews with both power-brokers and ordinary people.

Maximum City is not a book to be read in search of a single theme, but is rather best enjoyed for what it is: a seemingly random collection of tales told by those whom Mehta encounters as if by chance on the streets of Bombay (assuredly not a reality, though; some of these Very Important Personages had to approve interviews – but it seems rather spontaneous all the same). It is sprawling, no doubt, just as Bombay is, but that is to be expected; this enormous patch of humanity of 233 square miles into which over 12½ million people have been crammed could never be described in a linear narrative. Better to do as Mehta did and piece together the lives of but a tiniest fraction of the inhabitants of the Gateway to India into broad divisions and allow them to speak and dream and pontificate on their own.

And just who are these people? Well, there is Sunil, the Hindu nationalist who rises from street thug to the ultranationalist Shiv Sena party leader. There’s also Monalisa, the “beer bar” dancing girl who dares to dream of escaping her sad existence in a seedy bar by winning the Miss India beauty pageant. We have Ajai Lal, who claims to be the only non-corrupted policeman in Bombay. As well as an unemployed young migrant worker from Bihar, one of India’s most backward states, struggling to establish a career as a poet. And why have they all come to Bombay? As Mehta puts it, Bombay still gives them room to dream and still allows them to live “closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known”. The siren call of Bombay is the same as every city the world over, then and now: a new start in a place where nobody knows you.

“Every day is an assault on the individual’s senses, from the time you get up, to the transport you take to go to work, to the offices you work in, to the forms of entertainment you are subjected to”. That is life in everyday Bombay, and yet still people come. One is put in mind of a Dickensian cityscape in which 19^th Century industrial urban blight has been married to a tropical climate with loads of sex, Islamic terrorism and Hindu violence – “A City in Heat” in Mehta’s memorable phrase, an overpowering, exhausting, violent and chaotic patch of planet Earth which is every bit a “functioning anarchy” (to borrow John Kenneth Galbraith’s famously patronizing description of India as a whole). How the place functions is a mystery, but function it does, if imperfectly and unfairly for all of its millions.

Part history, part travelogue, part memoir, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found brings to life this supercharged world through its people, presenting a meticulous documentary of living, thriving and surviving on this teeming island that always seems threaten to slip into the ocean at any moment, taking its struggling population with it.