Return to the promise of Bombay
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta
Knopf, 542 pp., $27.95
There are some cities in the world that are more than geographical places. They are metaphors, mythical concepts, held aloft in space by our collective fantasies and desires -- Hemingway's Paris, the swinging London of the 1960s, San Francisco in the summer of love, New York in the age of jazz.
For Indians of a certain age and sensibility, Bombay, India's most cosmopolitan and prosperous city, stands at that same intersection of myth and promise.
In their imaginations, Bombay is transformed into something more than its drab, shabby reality of dark slums, overcrowded streets, and crumbling infrastructure. Rather, it becomes a valiant, heroic city, full of chaos, yes, full of contradictions, yes (Bombay's classic logo? A slum nestled next to a skyscraper), but also bursting at the seams with energy and potential. Bombay is India's America -- the promised land, the city where rags-to-riches stories are written daily.
This is the unspoken premise behind Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City," an ambitious, detailed look at the city that, Mehta tells us, will be the world's most populous metropolis by 2015.
Mehta was abruptly pulled out of Bombay when he was 14, the victim of his diamond merchant father's impulsive decision to move to America to make more money. But Mehta left his heart behind in his lost city and the memory of that loss haunted him into adulthood. As he writes, he existed in New York but lived in India. Many years later, he and his wife, who grew up in London, decided to move back to Bombay with their two young children.
"Maximum City" is the story of two years when a young Indian couple, whose strongest identity is that of exiles, return to their homeland. In it, Mehta is trying to answer that age-old question that haunts all immigrants -- whether it is possible to go home again, whether it is possible for him to erase old childhood wounds, to reconcile his two selves, by immersing himself in the chaotic flow of the city that truly never sleeps.
If only Mehta had spent more time grappling with these questions, the result may have been a more emotionally resonant book. As it is, it turns out that the personal story only masks the book's true intentions -- to draw a detailed portrait of a city that is teetering on the edge of self-destruction, a city that has lost its way and its soul since the cataclysmic, history-changing Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992.
This is not to take any credit away from the Herculean effort Mehta has made to paint as meticulous a portrait of Bombay as any in recent history. The author has a journalist's knack for getting the most unlikely sources to talk to him and a Zelig-like ability to place himself in the middle of the action.
Most important, Mehta's clear-eyed compassion and sympathy for what it takes to survive in this maddening city gives his book a strong moral center. His empathy with the city's destitute and the struggling middle class, his admiration of the innovative ways of the Bombayite (ever heard of "masala Coke?" That's regular Coke with lemon, rock salt, pepper, and cumin added to it), and his uneasy relationship with his own social class, make "Maximum City" a more nuanced and complex book.
Mehta's personal odyssey takes him into the subterranean world of underworld bosses (one of whom generously offers him a free hit on an enemy of his choosing), the shadowy world of right-wing Hindu fundamentalists ("What does a man look like when he's on fire?" he asks a Hindu fanatic who boasts about setting his Muslim baker on fire during the riots), and the fantasy world of Bollywood, Bombay's prolific movie industry, where he somehow finds himself drawn into working on a movie script.
Along the way he befriends a teenaged runaway from the impoverished state of Bihar who dreams of becoming a poet, a young bar dancer named Monalisa, and a computer programmer who is struggling to move his family out of the one-room hovel in which seven people sleep.
The book is littered with surreal, improbable, only-in-Bombay anecdotes, such as the one about the Mob-related shooting of Rakesh Roshan, the father of current Bollywood heartthrob Hrithik Roshan. The father was shot as a way of "persuading" the hot young actor to star in a movie that was financed by the underworld.
But for all its fascinating details, it is hard to imagine the appeal of this book to an American reader who is unfamiliar with Bombay. Much of it has an inside-baseball feel to it. Early on, Mehta makes clear that he is only perfunctorily interested in examining his evolving feelings toward the city that has haunted his imagination for so long. He is not keen on examining the connections between reality and mythology, between experience and memory.
Rather, he loses himself in the minutiae of daily life in a paradoxical, contradictory city.
"Maximum City" may have been a more interesting book if Mehta had been more of a character in it. Still, the writer should be lauded for his generous, loving portrait of a passive-aggressive city that exasperates and entices, that pulls and pushes, that seduces and spits out.
Thrity Umrigar is the author of the novel "Bombay Time," and the memoir "First Darling of the Morning." 