Excerpt I - Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found

I’ve been waiting for this book to become available in paperback, and that’s why its only now that I’m reading it. And its a magnificent piece of work - in sheer spectrum, it exceeds Vikram Chandra’s new book in the spread of its canvas. The mind boggles at the kind of research-by-wandering-around that the author has conducted and the time this would have taken. An interview with the tiger of the Shiv Sena, a telephonic interview with Chotta Shakeel where he’s been granted that grandee’s favor, to becoming the best friend of one of the biggest stars of the dance bars, I for one am not able to imagine what more he could do…. and I’ve not even finished the book! Perhaps strike up a friendship with a commercial sex worker, and explore the organized begging rackets!

At once hard-hitting and compassionate, witty and gritty, this is a book full of passion, there’s no punches pulled. Including in the portions that read like waking nightmares - the interviews with the cops and the shooters, the professional killers of the underworld. If reading these portions could be so disturbing, I wonder how it must’ve been to have experienced the hearing and the seeing. And yet, you get sucked in, with the strange and fearful blend of loathing and fascination, the revulsion and excitement - with which people crowd around a street-fight, without attempting to separate the fighters, watching as blood gets spilt and bodies get pulped, and…. for that’s human nature isn’t it?

And here’s my contribution to whetting your appetite - some excerpts from the book! :o)

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Sunil will inherit Bombay, I now see. The consequences of his burning the bread seller alive: two years later, he got appointed a special executive officer; he became, officially, a person in whom public trust is reposed. He has energy; he gets to work by 10 a.m,. roams far and wide over Bombay, from Jogeshwari to Dahisar, and beyond to Goa and Raigad, and still gets home late at night to be with his daughter. He is not afraid of getting his feet dirty in politics; in fact, he participates with zest and puts his wife up for elections as well. He is idealistic about the nation and utterly pragmatic about the opportunities for personal enrichment that politics offers. Sunil, in fact, can be held up as an exemplar of the capitalist success story.

The new inheritors of the country - and of the city - are very different from the ones who took over from the British, who had studied at Cambridge and the Inner Temple and come back. They are badly educated, unscrupulous, lacking a metropolitan sensibility - buffoons and small-time thugs, often - but, above all, representative. The fact that a murderer like Sunil could become successful in Bombay through engagement in local politics is both a triumph and a failure of democracy. Not all politicians are as compromised as he is, but the one’s who aren’t have to rely on people like Sunil to get elected. Most of Bombay’s politicians need to mobilize huge sums of money for campaign expenditures. The salaries they get, the money their party officially sanctions for campaign funds, is a pittance, so they have to look elsewhere.

This shift is happening all around me. The Bombay I have grown up in is suffering a profound sadness: the sadness of lost ownership, the transfer of the keys to the city. No longer is the political life of the city controlled by the Parsis, the Gujaratis, the Punjabis, the Marwaris. This passage was marked by the candidacy of Naval Tata in 1971. The powerful industrialist ran as an independent from the Mumbai South constituency, the richest and smallest in the country, and still he lost. In India, unlike in America, fabulous wealth by itself can’t buy you an election. Just about the only way the upper class will get into politics now is by being nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

Among the former owners, there is a sense that the barbarians have been let into the city gates and are sleeping on the footpaths outside their palaces. There is resentment that Bombay has to deal with the country’s detritus. The only consolation is that the huddled masses are also the talent pool for South Bombay’s maids, drivers, peons. That is part of the attraction of living here: You can find a maid and pay her a monthly salary smaller than the cost of breakfast at the Taj. Politics, too, has become yet another of those menial tasks that is assigned to servants or subordinates, something you drop as soon as you acquire the financial means to do so, like cleaning the toilets, doing the accounts, answering the phone, or standing in line at a government office. ‘Send your man,’ I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. ‘I have no man,’ I respond. ‘I’m my own man.’ They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person. They send their man.

But it is also these rich who create wealth, who create the conditions that will allow the mother on the streets to find a home for her children. They must be allowed their penthouses, their brandy, so the poor may be allowed their simple clean room, their dal-chawal. In the post-Marxist age, we can no longer believe that redistribution solves anything, that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer. It is the death not just of ideology but of ideas. Nothing in the national debate has any strong conviction. On the right, a vague belief in foreign investment; on the left, a vaguely articulated fear of it. The left is apologetic of being left. Who can defend the work habits of the employees of nationalized banks? After fifty years of experiments in socialism, who can argue with a straight face that central planning is the answer to poverty? One slogan that has been conspicuously absent from the electioneering has been ‘Garibi Hatao’. It is as if there is a tacit acknowledgment on all sides that the poverty is insurmountable, so we’ll move on and tackle something else - corruption or multinationals or whether we should have a temple or mosque in Ayodhya.

The cities of India are going through a transition similar to what American cities went through at the turn of the last century, when the political machines of the Democratic Party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way. Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck. In Bombay, this has not yet happened. ‘The dregs at the bottom has become the scum at the top,’ Gerson da Cunha, a civil activist and figurehead of the old guard, tells me. When people in south Bombay mourn the loss of the ‘gracious city’, what they are really mourning is the loss of their own consequence in the city’s affairs. It was never a gracious city for those who had to live in the shadow of the rich man’s mansions; it was actively pestilential. It will take them a few generations, the new owners, to learn how to run their house and keep it clean and safe. But how can we begrudge them that when we, who had been the owners for such a long time and had still botched it, handed it over in such terrible disrepair?

From Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found, by Suketu Mehta. Reproduced without permission.