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REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from Harper's, February 2005
Underworld: Capturing India's impossible cityBy Adam Hochschild
Cities, like countries and families, have an official currency of power and a real one. In most cities, the official currency is votes and laws: citizens elect mayors and city council members; politicians pass laws; police enforce them. But the real currency of power, of course, is always different. In the Bombay of Suketu Mehta's dazzling and absorbing Maximum City, that currency is a combustible mix of threats, violence, bribes, sex, and glory. If someone owes you money and won't pay, you hire a gang to kidnap one of his children. If the cops capture a particularly valued gunman, they call up the gang leader and ask how much he'll pay to get his man released. In one district, plumbers bribe local officials to turn off the water to public taps so that people have to hire them to install private pipes. In another, drivers of water-tanker trucks pay off the government so that it installs no pipes at all. A group of traders calls a public meeting to complain that extortion costs are soaring; they threaten to stop paying sales taxes unless police death squads kill more extortionists. (The Bombay High Court has ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a business expense.) The city's huge film industry, heavily financed by all this crime, completes the circuit. When some local gangsters are hired to do crowd control at an outdoor shoot, they are thrilled to see the glamorous stars up close. One actress, in turn, is fascinated to meet real gangsters. She asks Mehta, "Can you point out someone who's killed?" Mehta, who is happy to point out to readers more than a few people who have killed, seems to have known for a long time that his real subject was the city where he grew up, and he has been working on this book, his first, for many years. (A much-quoted excerpt appeared in Granta eight years ago.) He was born in Calcutta and lived mostly in Bombay until coming to the United States at age fourteen, in 1977. As an adult, he has returned to India ever more frequently to write about it, finally moving his wife and American-born children to Bombay for several years. Being an outsider all his life--variously a Gujarati in a city dominated by Maharashtrians, an Indian in the United States, an American citizen in India, a secularist in a country brimming with the world's major religions, all the while a freelance magazine and short-story writer in an extended family of diamond merchants--has made him a voraciously curious observer.
Because of his zest to put every byway of the Bombay underworld on the page, his high-energy evoking of characters high and low, and the way his gaze settles on the newcomers trying to make it in the great city, Mehta's eye on Bombay reminds me of no one's so much as Balzac's on Paris. Such insatiable curiosity about people's lives carries a greater burden for journalists, whose subjects are real and vulnerable, than it does for novelists, and Mehta seems oblivious to this. Nonetheless, he makes virtually any other reporting on India--such as the overrated travel books of V. S. Naipaul--look pallid by comparison, the work of outsiders looking in.
The first few of the dozen or so extended portraits in Mehta's gallery bring us inside the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena movement, which for two decades has controlled Bombay politics. (The old British-educated business elite of Gujaratis, Parsis, and others who once ran the city are as horrified by these lower-class Maharashtrians as Boston Brahmins were by the Irish who elected the machine boss James Curley.) The movement's demagogic leader, Bal Thackeray--his father liked the novelist--has long professed an admiration for Hitler. In 1993, Shiv Sena mobs rampaged through the Muslim parts of town, burning, raping, and murdering. The police stood by and before long, transcripts of radio traffic reveal, enthusiastically joined in. Over nine days, some 600 people were killed and 2,000 injured. Only a handful of the Hindu rioters were ever prosecuted, and ten policemen charged with murder were actually promoted. Some 215,000 Muslims, many of their homes and businesses in blackened ruins, fled the city on special trains.
Sometimes, in savoring a book's unexpected power, I imagine how a lesser writer would have handled the material. In sketching the shadow this communal violence has left on Bombay, for instance, most writers would have spoken only to the victims or their families. Mehta, by contrast, goes straight for the killers. He gets a Shiv Sena man to walk him through the city, showing him the spots where the man set fire to a mosque, looted shops, and burned Muslims to death. "it was like a movie," the man tells him: "silent, empty, someone burning somewhere and us hiding ..." Mehta asks another Shiv Sena activist, whom he calls Sunil, "What does a man look like when he's on fire?" Sunil tells him, and describes how he and four other men killed a Muslim bread vendor. "We poured petrol on him and set him on fire. All I thought was, This is a Muslim.... That day we showed them what Hindu dharma is."
Why does someone get caught up in such killing? As with so many people drawn to fascist movements, Sunil remembers a childhood of humiliation. When both his parents were in the hospital, he would try to bring them hot food. But, after racing home from school, if he didn't make it to the hospital by 2:00 P.M., when visiting hours were cut off, he would have to wait several hours until they resumed, vainly pleading. Those who had money to bribe the guard got let in. "I didn't have ten or twenty rupees, so I sat there thinking.... If one has to live, one should live in a proper way." All is now different. "Now I can cross the door of any hospital.... I can talk to Balasaheb Thackeray, and he will phone the hospital, and they will fear him." Sunil's daughter goes to a top school, her admission arranged by a Shiv Sena minister in the state government. In return, Sunil is always ready to turn out his men for the minister when, he says, "they are needed to burn a train or break a car."
Sunil has risen in the movement and prospered from a cable TV franchise it arranged for him. But his very success may be loosening his ties to the Shiv Sena. When the government at one point barred Indian cable systems from broadcasting the programming of India's archenemy, Pakistan, Sunil opposed the decision, saying, "'The thing that someone pays for, you should give them.'" "His business instincts are winning over his distaste for Muslims," Mehta writes. "Bombay is seducing him away from hate, through the even more powerful attraction of greed."
Hate, however, is still the key tool for Shiv Sena leader Thackeray, who himself opens up to Mehta with amazing candor about how he gets mobs to do his bidding: "Young blood, young men, youngsters without jobs are like dry gunpowder. It will explode any day." Part of the art of manipulating them, of course, is to convince them that their joblessness or any other problem of life in this overpowering city, where sewage leaks into freshwater lines and some 2 million people are without access to private or public toilets, is all the fault of Muslims.
Thackeray would like to have visas required for anyone coming to Bombay to live. He admires the strict border controls of the United States.
Mehta's quest to plumb every depth in Bombay leads to an equally disturbing portrait of someone ostensibly upholding the law, a senior police officer whom he calls Ajay Lal. Lal is startlingly frank about his means of interrogation: bullets fired past an ear, electrodes to the genitals, a trip to a creek where cops tie a heavy stone to a prisoner and repeatedly bring him close to drowning. For Muslim militants, Lal says, other methods are necessary, because "those who have no fear of death also have no fear of physical pain. For them we threaten their family.... That usually works."
Hearing this, a lesser writer might have thought: I've got the incriminating quote; that's all I need. Mehta, however, asks Lal if he can sit in on a few interrogation sessions. Surprisingly, Lal lets him do so. In one, Lal and his assistants question two men just arrested with a stash of counterfeit money. "Both speak English, and are well dressed. They are uncomfortably familiar. A little more money, a little more education, and they would be People Like Us." Lal's constables go at them with fists and "a thick leather strap, about six inches wide, attached to a wooden handle. One of the cops takes it and brings it savagely down across the fat man's face. The sound of leather hitting bare human flesh is impossible to describe."
Yet in the midst of watching this beating, Mehta still manages to notice that, just as the Hindu and Muslim gangsters he has interviewed don't let go of their religion, neither do these counterfeiters let go of India's deep consciousness of rank. "As they are being beaten, they address their tormentors as 'sir.' Thus we addressed our teachers in school.... Not once do they fly out; not once do they scream an obscenity." One man finally yields the name of a mistress, a dancer; she is quickly arrested and leads Lal to the rest of the counterfeiters' ring. (Such questioning is routine; when Mehta visits another police station, he hears agonized screaming coming from behind a closed door.)
One feels a guilty, voyeuristic horror at even reading such a scene on the page. But then that horror becomes slowly, uncomfortably tempered as we learn more about Lal and see that Mehta's aim is far more complicated than showing us a brutal man at work. Lal takes no bribes. He plans arrests in secret, to prevent corrupt superiors from tipping off gangsters in advance. He knows exactly which senior police official has received what--women, money, a free apartment--from which gang chief. He suspects that one junior officer working for him is a gang mole. If he doesn't threaten or beat information out of a suspect as soon as he's been arrested, a gang boss will bribe someone to get him out of jail, or stand by and let him take the fall for those higher up. In court, appeals can take twenty years or more; each judge has more than 3,000 cases pending, and thanks to payoffs the conviction rate for criminal offenses is a mere 4 percent.
Lal has devoted his life to the vain struggle to break the power of the gangs, too often getting home after his children have gone to sleep. Gang leaders have threatened to kill him, to kill his wife, to blow up his sons' school. He needs a score of bodyguards even to come to Mehta's apartment for dinner. His boys need them to go to school. He can relax only when he travels abroad. He is fearless about raiding the houses of Shiv Sena officials, including Bal Thackeray's son--and his career has suffered as a result. He has turned down offers of jobs outside the police department at far higher pay. Despite everything, this torturer is one of the few honest high officials in the book.
It is exhilarating to plunge so deeply with Mehta into the lives of his characters, but at times you have the uneasy feeling that his lust to know everything about them is so intense as to be reckless. The currency of power he wields is the writer's coin: the knowledge of secrets. Only once does he openly flaunt this wealth. It happens when he talks about a bar dancer/prostitute who shares with him stories of her childhood, her hopes, her struggles with her family, her attempts to end her life, her clients and how she lures them. "I know what color and type of underwear she wears. I know how she likes to make love. I know when she is sad, when she is suicidal, when she is exuberant." Mehta's relationship with the dancer is only platonic, but, he exults, "What is sex after such vast intimate knowledge?"
True enough, but just for that reason I wonder how this woman, and the other people who so readily confide their stories to him, may feel when these are read by family and friends. For Mehta is disturbingly foggy about when he has changed names and identifying details and when he has not. And even the changes he does make seem to be minor: for example, the brutal, incorruptible, and supposedly pseudonymous Ajay Lal is transparently recognizable to any reader of Indian newspapers as longtime Bombay police official Rakesh Maria. A senior cop is surely experienced in the dangers and rewards of talking to journalists, including those careless about protecting sources, but most of the others who so opened their souls to Mehta probably have no sense of what it means to speak to a writer. Arc their identities any better hidden? I hope so.
Part of Mehta's ambitiousness--and here is where his characters remind me of Balzac's provincial immigrants to Paris--is that he knows that today every great city in the world's South is simultaneously destination, way station, and jumping-off point. Indians in the village crave a foothold in the vast metropolis. Those living on the sidewalk want a shack. Shack dwellers dream of a proper apartment. The upper classes want to emigrate. Maximum City, abounds with long, vivid sketches from this entire array: a teenage runaway who sleeps on planks in the open air; the bar dancer who fled a violent mother and whose great dream is to win the Miss India contest; a slum family who finally scrape together enough money to buy their first apartment; a group of well-to-do professionals planning to move to Vancouver together. The entire city is packed with people trying to claw their way up. Mehta glues himself to them, never content to just interview and go away. He rushes to the scene when the runaway's father comes to find his son; he follows the bar dancer back to a reunion with her family; he's there when the slum family move into their first apartment building where a shady contractor has put in an elevator shaft but no elevator.
Mehta's extraordinary skill at getting people to talk to him makes use of this social and economic ambition. Some open up because he's from America, the land of dreams; even just speaking to him raises their status. Sunil, the Shiv Sena thug, talks more readily when Mehta brings him to a friend's high-rise flat, a great luxury for someone who grew up in a slum; he notices Sunil's "sense of well-being whenever I take him to a high floor." And some of the gangsters tell him their stories because they know he writes movie scripts, and they imagine making the greatest migration of all: having their lives on the screen for all to see.
It is all the more striking, then, that Mehta's final portrait from this city of people on the make is the story of a family--and here I can recall no equivalent in Balzac--that renounces every form of its currency of power. A wealthy diamond merchant, his wife, and their three children decide to follow the most honored custom in the Jain religion by giving away all their money to become wandering barefoot monks, begging for their food, allowed to eat only once a day, with no possessions but the simple clothes on their backs. The husband and two sons, the wife and daughter, must wander the roads of India separately, for the man and woman must renounce not just all their worldly goods but each other.
Fellow Jains praise the family for taking this holiest of steps. But for others, this act is deeply upsetting, a challenge to the whole basis of the city's modern life. A critical onlooker believes the family only did it because "the Dawood gang must have been after them." Someone else mutters that things are not as they seem, that there is a trust fund in case the family changes its mind. Mehta's Westernized, cosmopolitan friends "shudder even more when hearing about them than when I talk about the hit men." Mehta is there when the family gives away its wealth, throwing endless handfuls of bills and gold and silver coins into a vast crowd from carts drawn by elephants--a gesture that reminds him of a scene he has already shown us, of patrons showering rupees on his bar dancer.
Not content to let the story rest with such a scene, Mehta, indefatigable, months later tracks down the former merchant to see how he is doing in his life of pilgrimage. The soles of the man's bare feet are "cracked, calloused, split, and blackened" from walking through the villages of India; his heart, he says, is at peace.
It is certainly hard to feel one's heart at peace in visiting this overwhelming city. I recently lived half a year in south India, but the few days I came north to Bombay stand out with unforgettable vividness. I remember an afternoon sky dark with pollution, like a premature dusk; streets, parks, buses, and sidewalks jammed with people--holy men, beggars, cripples, cricket players, hawkers of every conceivable item of food or clothing; shantytown huts packed together in unimaginable denseness; the smells of human waste, rotting fruit, diesel exhaust, sweat, perfume; the layer of oily dust that rapidly covered every object, even indoors. It was numbing, paralyzing, impossible to take in. Late in the day, coming back to the university guesthouse where I was staying, I was peering out through a car window, which, like everything else, was covered with grime. We passed a flatbed cart, pulled and pushed by a dozen or so men in white knee-length kurtas, leaning far forward with the strain. Suddenly I realized it was a funeral procession. A dead body lay on the cart, wreathed with garland upon garland of white flowers. The moment seemed transcendent, the sorrow of the procession softened by the flowers, a touch of beauty in the midst of dirt and gloom. Maximum City--gritty and unsentimental, but by its breathtaking boldness and scope a paean to this impossible city--is Mehta's garland for Bombay.
Adam Hochschild is the author of King Leopold's Ghost. His latest book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, was published in January.
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