Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found - Suketu Mehta

Barely 45 percent of voters in India’s financial and entertainment capital, Mumbai exercised their right to vote in this year’s General Elections – a number lower than that in most parts of rural and urban India. The people of the city were heavily criticized for their “don’t give a damn” attitude - What happened to all the fervent protests that the denizens of Mumbai carried out following the Mumbai attacks?

Go on, call the Mumbaikers callous about the democratic process, or plain silly for creating a futile hullabaloo – The fact is, Mumbaikars were never the kind of enthusiastic voters who’d go out in herds to vote. Fact is, Mumbai is far too stubborn, crowded, self-reliant, busy, and self-indulgent a city to care about the county’s unreliable democratic system - and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City the “mother of all Mumbai books”, is a testimony to that.

Mehta wrote Maximum City as a rediscovery of the Bombay of his childhood, a city that he returned to after twenty one years. The book has the writer, a young and courageous reporter, befriend Mumbai’s chief regulators - the awe-inspiring world of Bollywood, the sensational underworld, the gritty Shiv Sena, The Mumbai Police, the undersized Hindu/Muslim assassins, the alluring dancers in the beer bars, and finally, a Jain family that renounces the spirited, drunk, intoxicated “city of sin”.

Mehta’s brave and jarring non-fiction work is filled with passages that bare the entrancing, ruined soul of Mumbai to give us hard core reality. Without much ado, Mehta makes his initial discoveries stark and clear: Bombay is a deluge of impenetrable problems; a city groaning under the pressure of one million people per square mile. People who somehow muscle their way (bribe, kill, sweat, adjust) to survive. And yet, the enthralling promise of prosperity gets thousands of people from the outside barge into the city to try their luck.

“Bombay is a bird of gold” - a Muslim slum dweller, without water, without toilets, tells Mehta. A bird that you have to tease, fight and work hard to catch. It involves battles of good and evil, love and desolation, survival and death. So everyday, a million youngsters with dreams in their eyes take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath - a place where the distinction between luxuries and basic needs has long been blurred.  In the shanty ghettos of Bombay all the customary luxuries are easily accessible - every slum in Jogeshwari has a TV, a motorcycle, and even cars. The real luxury in the jam-packed city, as Mehta points out is clean air, clean bathrooms, running water, transport, and housing – comforts that are far-flung even to the well-off.

Maximum city continues to entrance with its mesmeric stories, with Mehta who is enthusiastic and determined to get all the intimate details. His extensive research begins with a group of men from the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena Party – the alleged perpetrators of the 1992-1993 riots in Bombay, who give him a tour of the riot-scene. “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” Mehta asks in startling curiosity. “I’ll tell you. I was there. A man gets up, falls, runs for his life, falls, gets up, runs”.

The carefully designed riots had consequences their planners couldn’t have foreseen: The Bombay underworld was glutted with a line up of ready employees from the victimized Muslim community. The business of the underworld, Mehta finds, is distributed neatly: property, killing and kidnapping. The power of the underworld makes Bombay a city of magnificent sins. Muggings, rape and petty thefts are virtually unknown to the city. The crime scene is bigger and more organized than that - Bombay has a growing gangster problem. Here, shooters like Satish, Zameer and Kamaal, threaten, thump and kill to save their lives. It is disconcerting for Mehta to talk to the gangsters, but the gangsters are at ease with him. They offer him their stories, and Mehta brings them out in a mixed cocktail of infatuation, alarm and disgust. By the end of his research Mehta knows the gangsters through their skin – their real names, what they like to eat, their faith, and their inner most beliefs.

The most enchanting of Mehta’s stories come from his encounters with what he refers to as “the lower humanity”, in the beer bars of Bombay – an inebriating space full with liquor, intoxication, bright lights, and beautiful dancers. A paradise for meager mechanics, rash tapories, rich traders and affluent merchants alike,. These dance bars are a space that realize the “Bollywoodised idealization of love” for its countless guests. Mehta develops an honest and heart rending friendship with Monalisa, the most dazzling bar dancer at Bombay’s famous dance bar Sapphire, and Honey – the man dressed as a woman in order to earn his bread. The stories that they reveal to him confirm the struggle for life and dignity in the modest lives that embellish the filthy core of the city. These damsels, much like Bombay’s hitmen, disclose it all to him, and in large chunks – Mehta possesses the most intimate details of their lives; he knows when they are sad, suicidal, vicious or exuberant. “Every man wants me”, Monalisa tells Mehta – The world may endlessly desire these beautiful nautch girls but it is Mehta who spins and twirls them under the confetti of his words, making them more real, and more alluring than the people they are in flesh and blood.

Mehta’s pages go further to sketch out the big, multifaceted world of Bombay filmdom – what is typically known to the world as Bollywood. In a close friendship with Indian filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Suketu co-writes the script for Mission Kashmir and reveals details of the entire filmmaking process in niceties that are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, and sometimes buoyant. The author steals a look at the private lives of mega celebrities such as Sanjay Dutt, Amitabh Bachchan, Hritik Roshan and Mahesh Bhatt. After the release of the book, the ostensibly unedited, honest representation of private lives got the writer into trouble with Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who felt he had been defamed with the account of his three wives. “I have specifically written he has one current wife, and two ex-wives. But when you write non-fiction you cannot hold yourself back over who you think you're going to affect (with your writing). I thought I had painted Vinod in completely human terms.” was Suketu’s response to the filmmaker’s agitated reaction to the book.

Towards the end of the book the writer comes to show the extremes of spirit in the Maximum city. He delivers a vivid account of a Jain family that lies in the other extreme from henchmen like Satish and his ilk. While one side of Bombay’s intoxicated continuum has men who sleep tranquilly after taking human life, the other end of the insatiable city accommodates Sevantibhai’s family that thinks it is sinful to end the life of even minute water organisms, by stepping into a puddle of water. Sevantibhai’s family, as Mehta informs us, has decided to dramatically reject the city of movie stars, murderers, cops, painted women, and businessmen, by denying themselves of everything - family, possessions and pleasure. The family is determined to take on the utter final simplicity of life – no violence, no untruth, no stealing, no sex, no attachments. “We will live in a life completely without sin. We leave in happiness,” Rakshaben, Sevantibhai’s wife tells the writer. It is somewhere around this point that Mehta’s affair with the robust, unapologetic city comes to an end. Mehta ends his realist thriller by giving us startling digits to prove that Bombay itself is reaching its farthest point: twenty three million people by 2015. The city’s population that should halve, actually doubles. But Bombay, the city of dreams continues to thrive on the dreams of every individual.

“In order for the dream life of a city to stay vital, each individual dream has to stay vital… the reason a human being can live in a Bombay slum and not lose his sanity is that his dream life is bigger than his squalid quarters. It occupies a palace,” the writer reflects.

Suketu’s Maximum City is about people we identify with, experiences we’ve heard of, bits and pieces we’ve watched in the movies and read about in the papers – and yet this magnificent book told in 500-odd breathtaking pages makes us see beyond the wreck of the physical city, to the incandescent life force of its inhabitants. It was recently reported that British director Danny Boyle has acquired the rights to make a film on Mehta's extravagant novel. The director has confirmed his return to Bombay next year to make what might just be a summation of Suketu’s gutsy earnestness and Boyle’s extraordinary talent to create yet another international smash hit from the raw and radical arteries that palpate in the heart of Mumbai. Will Boyle surpass and honor the author’s courageous toil? Let’s wait and watch.