BOMBAY REDUX: an interview with Suketu Mehta

By Adam Dunn

A good introduction is worth its weight in gold. No student can truly appreciate the strategic importance of setting up a reader who is about to grapple with a vast, unknown body of work in such a way that its very essence is revealed in brief. To do so forcefully is a reflex; to do so with subtlety is an art. Suketu Mehta is such an artist. One is well lost in his lavish phantasmagorical cityscapes before realizing who has brought them there. In the introduction to MAXIMUM CITY: BOMBAY LOST AND FOUND, Mehta makes an aside to the reader so small as to pass unnoticed—that he is an exile, a wanderer never truly at home in one place, or country. (He repeatedly rented spaces away from home to research and write this book, though his family’s safety was a factor as well, given the scope of Mehta’s interview subjects.) In his introduction, he describes himself as a “citizen of the country of longing” , adding that he met his wife, Sunita, on a plane: “We talked about exile—and I knew at once.”

That carefully placed admission works its way into the reader’s subconscious, and springs like Athena through his frontal lobes during certain passages:

It is hot, baking hot, and the meat lies in the open streets. After the carcasses are

cut, they are left on the street and in the gutters where they have fallen. Then they

are dragged over the surface of the road on their way to people’s homes or to the Gulf countries, where a lot of the meat is exported. I don’t see a freezer anywhere.

By midmorning, a lot of this will be in people’s stomachs, the one animal going

into the other. In the workshop I see a man wring out a long tube from a goat’s inside; a shower of hard black droplets of dung falls out into a bucket. Then he chops up the edible parts of the goat and throws them into the same bucket, where they mix again with the dung.

It is Mehta’s status as exile that facilitates his extraordinary camera lucida, his ability to dispassionately describe people and places while letting their intrinsic wonder emanate from within. “Ultimately, it’s not really a work of investigative journalism,” Mehta says. “It’s a story about the great city of Bombay told through these very human, very morally complex stories about some of the people who live in it. It’s not intended to muckrake or level the finger of blame at this person or that one. I’m more interested in processes, rather than judgments about good and evil.” MAXIMUM CITY had its roots in a 1996 article Mehta wrote for GRANTA on the ’92-’93 riots which tore Bombay apart, and with his involvement in writing the screenplay for the film MISSION: KASHMIR with Vinod Chopra, but it grew into something much greater.

* * *

One wonders just where the hell Mehta gets his equanimity.

Over the seven-year course of assembling MAXIMUM CITY, he must have learned how incredibly cheap human life is in Bombay. This is not Western prudishness; the police chief who supervises the “interrogation” of prisoners while Mehta and some friends observed (“The men are not being electrocuted in their genitals, not yet, not in this room, because there is a woman present” ) is the same one who explains that a contract murder costs 1500 rupees or U.S. $35. “In India, people are not so shocked,” Mehta says. “My book in that sense is not saying anything new. In India, people know that if there’s a burglar in your house, the first thing the cops will do is come to your house, round up the servants, take them to the station, and beat them up. It is accepted practice, there is a societal consent for violence.”

It’s not merely the violence of Bombay’s denizens that fixates Mehta, although the book brims with genocidal psychopaths—taporis, bhais, cops, Bal Thackeray. It is a tangible sense of wonder behind the lens, an atavistic pleasure derived from the limitless idiosyncrasies of his countrymen, whom he collectively dubs “individually multiple”. Water mafias prowl the chawls; Thackeray is a Michael Jackson fan. “One of the stories that was left out of the final edit is something that’s been getting printed all over the place, including two separate German magazines last year," Mehta recalls. “It’s called ‘Runaway’, a chronicle of metropolitan transients…it’s the story of a taxi driver that I met, who began his life as a runaway from [his village]. He became an assistant to a beggar, and became a driver, and his life peaked when he was cook for a dog. His entire life is a continuous migration back and forth from the village to the city.”

Perhaps Mehta’s keen eye for the ways Bombay’s people make the most of what they have is best summed up in his description of a tryst between a bar dancer and her chaava, an underworld shooter, once she finally gives him the green light. They buy juice from the heroin dealer at Haji Ali and rent a cage of tiny songbirds and commandeer a taxi, telling its driver to take a walk:

…and the girl rolls up all the windows of the taxi and opens the door of the cage and all the birds fly out and fill the small dark taxi with their energy and their music. She laughs with delight and asks her man to play a game with her: Catch the birds. They reach out with their hands to grab the birds, who are small and quick, and they have to wave their arms wildly about even to touch them. As the girl and her ardent suitor reach out to catch a bird, they sometimes, accidentally, can’t help touching each other…

Half an hour or an hour later, the door of the taxi opens and half a dozen or a dozen dead birds are thrown out on the road. If there are any remaining alive, they fly out over the great dark sea, free at last.

* * *

Following the completion of his book, with its revelations of some of the less wholesome segments of Bombay society, it was time for the exile to leave once again. “I had to get the hell out of Bombay,” Mehta recalls. “When I went for my book launch, I made sure to enter Bombay the day before it was published, and leave about three days later, before anyone really had a chance to read it.” Perhaps it wasn’t the fights over water or parking spaces or the amebic dysentery suffered by his children; when you traverse a society as high and low the way Mehta has with this book, and when you unflinchingly describe the horrors human beings visit upon each other, and maybe even drop a few names along the way, your personal living space in that society may well become uncomfortable.

But Mehta the exile did his job. He returned to his homeland 21 years later to paint it in all its myriad glories, and judging by the world’s reaction to the book. A bestseller in the Indian English-language edition, the book has been sold in the U.K., U.S., Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. “I have enough left over for a second book, actually, which Penguin India wants me to do as a companion volume to MAXIMUM CITY.” His publishers will certainly trade on the staggering amount of press the book has garnered, not to mention a raft of literary awards and accolades (among them being shortlisted for the 2004 Pulitzer).

Perhaps above all, MAXIMUM CITY earned Mehta the credit of a Great Line, one which will surely live on, reverberating through time: “Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.”