Bombay, City of Extremes
By Ayesha K.

Bombay "is the city that has a tight claim on my heart, a beautiful city by the sea, an island-state of hope in a very old country. I went back to look for that city with a simple question: Can you go home again?" professes Suketu Mehta in his sprawling, critically celebrated, over-500 page opus, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Writing part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-investigative journalism, Mehta went to Bombay following his own heart in an attempt to find his roots, and with a promise to take Bombay for no more than the beauties and sorrows that it offered. Maximum City is the result of his 2 ½ year adventure of finding Bombay, focusing on the stories that were offered to him by his interviewees: gang members, hit men, cops, dancers, Jain monks, and hapless beggars.

Mehta, born in Calcutta, and raised in Bombay and New York, is a distinguished journalist who has published in New York Times Magazine, Granta, Time, and The Village Voice. Mehta also cowrote the script for the popular Bollywood film, Mission Kashmir. Currently, he finishing his second book, a novel, and working on a screenplay for Merchant-Ivory starring Tina Turner.

What were your motivations while writing Maximum City? Why did you choose to write about Bombay?
I wanted to see if I could go home. I grew up in Bombay, but came to New York when I was 14. I spent 21 years wandering around New York, London and Paris. Increasingly, I missed Bombay. I think all of us who leave South Asia, maybe more than other immigrants, have this need to see if we can go home again. And especially those of us who left in the middle of our adolescence, we want to see what the life not lived would have been like.

I went back in ’96 to write about the Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992-93. I got offered a book contract to turn this into a longer book, but I didn’t want to write just about the riots, I wanted to write about the city. When I left Bombay, I missed it like an organ of my body. I wanted to see what had happened to the city that I’d left and loved.

	Suketu Mehta's Website

I just wandered around and talked to whoever would talk to me and they would lead me to somebody else and somebody else. And that’s how I spent two and a half years. Just wandering around the Bombay listening to stories.

You actually moved there for two and a half years, with your family.
We moved there for two and half years…yeah.

So why did you choose to name your book, Maximum City?
The most obvious reason is that Bombay is the biggest city in the world in terms of population. But, beyond that, Bombay is a city without limits. All life and death are on evidence in the broad Bombay street. The extreme or the maximum of violence, the max of non-violence – from the Jains to the hitmen -- the maximum of sex, the maximum of commerce. The one thing we often forget is that as human beings we are an urban species, like rats or cockroaches. There are more people living in cities than in villages for the first time in the world’s history. Gandhi said “India is a nation of villages,” but that’s not true anymore. India is now increasingly a nation of city people. So, I wanted to look at the urban experience through Bombay, and Bombay is representative of a whole group of these major cities around the world, such as Rio, Sao Palo, Lagos, Jakarta, Shanghai- these huge sprawling megalopolises. You know the streets are paved with gold. There was a man in the worst slums of Dugeshwari, he had no running water, no toilets, no job, and he said to me “Bombay to sone ki chiriya hai.” Bombay is a bird of gold. That was amazing.

One of the most powerful lines in your book is when you quote Victor Hugo, “All big cities are schizophrenic,” and then you say “Bombay has multiple personality disorder.” Can you expand on this a little?
This is true of all cities, that there is this schizophrenia between rich and poor, between the powerful and who are not, people with vastly different occupations, the city of the day and the city of the night. But Bombay seems to be all of those things multiplied, maximized, if you will. This came out during the riots, for example, during the riots the printing presses were running overtime. People would carry two sets of visiting cards – one with a Muslim name one with a Hindu name. And if you got stopped by a Hindu mob, then you would give them the name that said “ram” and if you got stopped by a Muslim mob you would give them the one that said “rahim.” So this really perfectly symbolizes schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is a survival tactic.

What were the significance of these riots to the evolution of society in Bombay?
Well, until then Bombay had prided itself on being a tolerant place, and an exception to the rest of India. Growing up in Bombay, we would always read about these bitter riots in the North, in Bihar or UP, wherever. We always thought that Bombay was this exception where Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews would live in glorious harmony. The 1984 riot in Bhivandi killed many but it didn’t really affect the city as much as the outlying city. But the 1992-93 riots were like the world trade center demolition in New York. There were people walking around the richest buildings in Malabar hill, my uncle’s building and so forth, and demanding to know who were Muslim in the building. It wasn’t just that it was a riot where people died, it was that there was this urban explosion and a whole lot of forces, which had been buried or swept under the carpet, exploded. Bombay is a deeply disturbed city in many ways, and there is constant low-level violence. Any little thing could set off so that a whole bunch of little factors come together and then there’s another giant explosion. People throughout the city kept telling me it could happen any day. Bombay has been relatively quiet since the riots in ’92-93, but it’s also been building up. And the things is, when you have that many young people come into the city with expectations, they are going to riot if they don’t get what they want.

You’ve divided Maximum City into three big sections: power, pleasure, and passages. Are these the three pillars under which organized your research?
I wish it could be that systematic, but this book was really built on stories. So, I went out and spoke to anybody who would talk to me – up and down the worlds of Bombay, Bombay high and low. I must say, I found Bombay low more interesting than Bombay high. And then I put down all these stories and it took me much longer than I’d thought. I’ve been working on this book non-stop since the beginning of 1998. So, when I looked at stories, first I put them in different words, I saw they were organically falling into these three broad concerns power, pleasure, and passages; it’s really what drives human beings. There’s a part of us which is concerned with power, with politics, with economics, with the relationship in the social hierarchy. Then there’s another part, which is concerned with pleasure, and Bombay more so than other cities because of Bollywood, with sex and social identity. And then we’re always –especially those of us who’re outside of South Asia – concerned with some sort of passage between this world and that- in our careers, in our relationships, we seem to be this floating nation of transience. I found this very much within Bombay because Bombay, like New York, is a collection of transience, of people who have come from somewhere else and are on their way to somewhere else.

Do you feel a sense of social responsibility to do something to help them, or do you believe that goes beyond the role of a journalist/writer?
The one thing in Bombay which consistently broke my heart was seeing children on the streets. I have two of my own and I kept comparing my kids to these kids running around in the traffic, begging for food. Some children learn to beg before they learn to walk, and I feel that a country as rich as India, and India is actually a rich country, shouldn’t treat its kids this way. So, what I’m doing is donating the entire Indian royalties of my book to a legal defense fund for children in India. There is this marvelous thing called public interest litigation within the Indian legal system where any concerned citizen can sue the government. I’s going to sue, and have contacted the leading public interest lawyer in India, M.C. Mehta who is a genius at moving the supreme court to take up some legal action on behalf of children. It’s the government’s constitutional obligation to take care of children, but the problem is that children don’t vote so no one has to listen to them. So I’m hoping that the government machinery can be moved by the supreme court; this is the only thing that can do it.

Your line, “I‘m sick of meeting murders, I’ve been obsessed about them for years” is very interesting. What role did this kind of obsession play in the book?
This book took fire and blood; I almost died for it. I got so many people mad, and who knows who will be mad after they read it. If I knew what I had to go through, I don’t know if I would could have done it again. It was obsession because for the first two and a half years, I was just researching and meeting people, and going through their lives. The thing about following real peoples is that there is no end; their life continues. I had to remove myself, even though there is always something else, some new development. I moved to Brooklyn and then came the worst part of having to write the book. I was bored out of my mind in Brooklyn. New York was boring to me after what I had just been through in Bombay, but I had to do it. So, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph I built a book. And, I learnt how to write a book and how to create a narrative. It’s really like raising a child, the hardest thing in the world to do well.

What was it like for your family to live through this experience with you?
It was tough. I had to keep them out of all these worlds of Bombay because as my family, they were the first people my interviewees would go after. I kept a separate studio apartment that I would use for business. It was great for my kids in a way because they actually got to know India as a real place; previously, they’d only visited India on holidays. It was very difficult for my wife, not knowing when I would come home, if I would come home alive. I remember she once dropped me off at this hotel for a party of professional shooters who kill people for a living. She’s waiting outside, and after 8 hours, she calls my driver who says “Saahab uder to gaye par waapas bahar nahi aaye.”

Are you planning to live in the US or are you moving back to Bombay?
I would ideally really like to split my time between New York and Bombay, and these two cities are so alike in their spirit that they’re almost suburbs of each other. They’re sister cities, brother cities, uncle cities, twin cities. They represent the same for the people of their countries. I have been so lucky to live in both. Although, I’ve also lived in Paris, which I love, it’s the mistress city. So I know that I’m definitely going to going back and forth all my life.

What is the difference between fiction and journalism? Would you say that the line blurred between them?
Yeah, although every single word that I’ve written, every quote is accurate. I never go inside my characters’ heads as some journalists do. I never presume to write about what they’re thinking. These characters, they weren’t really characters to me, they were my friends, they called me when the father they hadn’t seen for half their lives came back into their lives, they called me to their wedding, they told me how they killed people, they invited me to sit as they tortured people, they told me how they made love- you know I was half-afraid they’d invite me to watch! It was amazing, that was the most beautiful part of it, almost more beautiful than writing the book itself.

Before writing this book, I was looking at how writers wrote about cities. There were two writers who wrote for the glory days of the New Yorker, JJ Leibling and Joseph Mitchell. They had my approach, they went out and collected stories. They taught me how to look at cities in a non-fictional way. But again, I had no model for this book because its part memoir, part travelogue, part investigative journalism, part urban history. V.S. Naipul, although I disagree strongly with many of his political views— taught me how to sprinkle a little fantasy. I mean, he’s a master stylist. I’m not a journalist, I began as a fiction writer. I’m a fiction writer masquerading as a journalist. My background is as a fiction writer and all the fiction I’ve grown up reading is the one thing that’s taught me to write about character. Because ultimately, even journalism isn’t really about facts or figures. It's about people and how people’s lives are shaped by history. I’ve always thought that my mission as a writer is to write about the human being struggling underneath the foot of history.

Photograph by Dominic Sidhu