Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

The uses of anger and power

If you look at Bombay from the air . . . you get a sense of its possibilities. On the ground it's different." Those early lines in Suketu Mehta's dizzyingly ambitious Maximum City go right to the heart of something that even the most transitory of visitors to Bombay can't help but notice -- the juxtapositions of that city's capacity to fuel the imagination with the sheer misery of the living conditions it imposes on almost all of its 14 million inhabitants. A chronicler less intimate with the city, or less skilled in the art of narrative non fiction, might use that juxtaposition as a way of guiding his readers through the city: here are the poor and there are the rich; here the glamour and there the squalor. Fortunately, Mehta chooses the more complex and far more rewarding strategy of showing us how the seemingly divergent facets of the city are interlinked: dreams and misery, violence and incorruptibility, the filth of the underworld and the glitz of Bollywood.

Maximum City does not immediately divulge the grandness of its scope. It starts as a personal journey -- Mehta, a Bombay boy who left his home town for New York as a teenager, returns twenty-one years later to see if he can make a life for himself and his family in the city he still thinks of as "the place I'm from". But Bombay has, in those twenty-one years, changed almost as much as he has and so the "return home" becomes a process of learning how to live in "the Country of No". One of the first things he learns is the uses of anger: "It is the only way to get things done; people respond to anger, are afraid of it. In the absence of money or connections, anger will do". The anger Mehta experiences on a personal level he also sees reflected -- and magnified -- all around him. Bombay is a city enmeshed in communal violence, gang activity and police brutality. One of the more remarkable features of Maximum City is Mehta's ability to gain access to people deeply involved in all these overlapping centres of anger and power. Members of extremist political parties, gang members, police officers -- Mehta doesn't merely interview them, he virtually becomes part of their lives for months on end, developing relationships with them that extend beyond that of interviewer and subject. The section "Power", which details Mehta's interactions with those different groups, is nothing short of spellbinding. Although his writing is utterly located in Bombay, he is also embarking on a profound, abstract look at the nature of violence, and how it intersects with power and powerlessness. "How does it feel to kill a man?", he asks, over and over, of people on both sides of the law. This could easily become voyeurism -- and he is intelligent enough not to deny that he is drawn into these lives, fascinated by them in a way that is hardly distanced -- but it never does. His purpose is something far deeper than titillation: "There is a gulf between the human heart and murder, and I was intent on seeing the bridges men build for themselves over that gulf", he explains. (His ability to find complexity makes it even more disappointing to encounter the moments where he fails to do so; I couldn't help being jarred by the way Pakistan - the place I call home - is reduced to a cardboard cutout of the evil neighbour.) The most fascinating of the men who deal in violence is the policeman, Ajay Lal. In a city reeking of corruption, he is the incorruptible man, dogged in his pursuit of the murderers and gang members who rule Bombay. He is also a torturer; because, how else is he to get the information he needs from criminals who have judges in their pockets and witnesses intimidated or shot into silence? And yes, he, too, has killed, but when a policeman turns executioner there is no outcry from the public: "When you live in a world of fear, you give unlimited power to the state". It is depressing to realize how relevant Mehta's book is to parts of the world far from Bombay.

But beyond the abstract questions of power and violence, there is a deeply personal story continuing to play itself out in the pages of Maximum City -- that of Mehta's relationship to the people he writes about. His is generally the presence in the shadows, typing away at his laptop while stories of excess are retold and, in some cases, unfold -- but occasionally he steps forward to dispel the impression that he is a mere chronicler. One such moment comes when he reads a former prisoner's account of torture either conducted by Ajay Lal or in his presence. He allows one word -- "horrified" -- to stand in for what he's feeling, and later he asks, "What do I do with Ajay? He is a brutal interrogator . . . but had become a friend of sorts". The lines between writer and subject become even more blurred in the next section of the book, the one entitled "Pleasure". Here Mehta writes about the "dance bars" where "fully clothed young girls dance . . . to recorded Hindi film music, and men come to watch, shower money over their heads and fall in love". Mehta's primary focus in this section is on a "bar-line" dancer who chooses "Monalisa" as the name by which she wants to be known in his book. The relationship between the two of them is close but its parameters remain unclear, in a manner strangely suited to a section about desire and yearning.

There is no mistaking the tenderness and compassion with which Mehta writes about Monalisa and the other bar-line girls (as well as Manoj, aka Honey, the one who is really a man), which contrasts sharply with his cruel dismissal of unmarried Bombay women "in short skirts" who have reached their thirties. He describes the type: "successful at her career because she is single, desperately lonely also because of it, she is fair game for the married, the lesbian and the fat -- anybody to hold her through the endless night". One could make a game of counting the number of objectionable assumptions in that sentence.

But Maximum City is not really interested in Bombay as experienced by women. Yes, there are the bar-line girls -- though they are a component of men's pleasure and occasional references to women here and there. When Mehta leaves the world of gangs, bars and Bollywood to write about the ordinary-yet-extraordinary people who try to live out their dreams in Bombay, he writes almost exclusively of men. Perhaps he is trying to say that this is another component of the city -- its male-centredness. And yet one of the more interesting features of the metropolises of the subcontinent is the opportunities they give women to inhabit roles that are less possible in rural areas. So it is a shame that in this long and impressive book we should see so little of the women of Bombay. But this is an introduction to Bombay, not in any way a definitive account of it. That is not to disparage Suketu Mehta's accomplishment; merely to say that a city as teeming with stories and cross-currents as Bombay cannot be contained within a single book, whether that book is Midnight's Children, A Fine Balance or Maximum City. But it can be both the setting and the subject of books as varied and captivating as these.

Kamila Shamsie's most recent novel is Broken Verses, published last year.

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