URBANSCAPE
Kala-khatta for the soul
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`Maximum City is a seething, rumbling, deeply compassionate break-dance of a book.'
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EVER wonder why Bombayites find other cities pedestrian, rustic? Think it's because we have gorgeous gardens, pristine roads, affordable housing, leaders who don't rename things, Bombay itself included? Yeah right, let's go have some vada-pav and ruin your stomach so you'll dump these hilarious notions. "Dump" being the operative — and, in Bombay, the appropriate — word.
The core of the city
We have none of those things, we don't have many more too, and we may just be proud of it. You see, it's what's wrong in Bombay that makes it such a stimulating place, drives life and creativity here.
And even so, it's not clear what "wrong" really means. Who's to say that my life in this city is somehow "right", with my genteel ways, a view of the sea, the woman who comes in to sweep? In fact, what about her? Constantly ill husband, wastrel daughter with kids by four different philanderers, the struggle to find lakhs for the shady dude who has promised her a hovel: is her life, her ordinary Bombay life, "wrong"?
Suketu Mehta's book must speak in many tongues to its readers. To me, it gets to the throbbing, shifting, shifty core of what makes this organism by the bay: this is a fine place to live, and especially for a writer, precisely because it is so simultaneously crummy.
Look at it this way. Take away the overflowing garbage dumps. The corrupt and brutal cop in his continuous encounters with the city underbelly. The phantasmagoric lifestyles of Page three yahoos. The twisting warrens in our seas of slums. The supremo who, in this book, shows he is a small-minded buffoon; the underworld don who shows he is quite the opposite. The world's best kala-khatta, near VT. The dense, rusting, crumbling lanes of Agripada or Kalbadevi. The frighteningly packed, yet smoothly efficient trains.
Take them all away. Would you want to live here then? What's Bombay without all that and more? Nothing. A svelte Singapore clone, maybe, but let's be truthful — that interests nobody.
So Mehta's book is a paean to Bombay, but not by singing the city's praises. Or maybe it does sing the city's praises, who knows? That Bombay conundrum again, and that's the point.
Before I read it, someone at a discussion described this book as "literature". That put me faintly on edge. Bombay and literature are like fish and bicycles. Nothing could, or should, put them together. Look for literature in the Romes and Viennas, sure. In Bombay, give me Navakal, and keep the change, thank you very much. It is Mehta's great achievement, and I mean this as high praise, that this doesn't come across as literature, just literature. Maximum City is a tour-de-force of journalism, of measuring and reporting the rhythms of my city.
The writer and his characters
Of course I wish I had written it. Of course too, I know I couldn't have. Mehta's passion for Bombay drips from every page, every sentence, and I'm not sure I have that passion — whether for this complex city or for sustaining it over 600 pages. But that simply increases my admiration for what Mehta has accomplished. He tells Bombay's tales through the eyes and experiences of a circus tent of characters — "morally compromised", he calls them — that spans all Bombay. The cop, the killers, the dancing girl, the pen-pusher with aspirations, the Jain who renounces: they don't flit in, then out, of the book; nor of Mehta's life. He is a splendid spendthrift with the time, the emotions, he gives these people. He can tell their stories, and thus Bombay's, because he lets his life intertwine so intimately with theirs. In a real sense, Mehta becomes his characters. Maximum City is the better for it.
There are, nevertheless, the minuses. Somewhere around page 400, the book begins to sag. Some passages had me asking why they were here, starting to count the pages left. They are not badly written, by no means. But they are pieces that could have been in a magazine, or in an anthology.
Mehta's long rumination over getting reacquainted with his school is one such. Something is a little too pat here — the ghastly school of memory, still ghastly in the present, the fear of meeting a current student because he might "look up at me and see himself". This section segues into two short essays: a temple visit, a heartbreaking run in with street kids.
The school connection in these essays is tenuous. But more than that, there need not be meaning, and profound meaning, in every single experience. Bombay is like that too. Yet at times like these through this book, Mehta seems he is on a search for such meaning, and it produces that sag.
Bombay is no clone
Quibbles? May be. But may be a book about Bombay without its bits to quibble at is like Bombay without garbage, the svelte Singapore clone.
Maximum City is a seething, rumbling, deeply compassionate break-dance of a book. And for my money, the few lines that make it soar come smack in the middle. At the end of Mehta's finely fleshed portrait of the dancer Monalisa, he writes:
[W]hat I am adoring, what I am obsessed with, is a girl beyond [Monalisa], larger than herself in the mirror beyond her ... it is her that I'm getting to spin and twirl under the confetti of my words. The more I write, the faster my Monalisa dances.
Dance on, Bombay. Always.
DILIP D'SOUZA
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta, Penguin Viking, 2004.
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