I have seen the future, and it stinks

Suketu Mehta

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Knopf, 2004, 542pp. $27.95 (cloth)

"There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay," Mehta reminds us, "than on the continent of Australia." And, as this stunning account of a two-year reimmersion in the life of his childhood city by a New-York-based Indian expatriate continually shows us, those sky-high numbers (19 million people packed together, in some parts of the center city, at the rate of 1 million per square mile) don't necessarily bode well for anyone. Overcrowded Manhattan, by contrast, squeezes a mere 70,000 people into each square mile. So, multiply the New York rush hour by a factor of fourteen, add a horrible lack of sanitation, clean air and water, housing, medical care, and social services; throw in a teetering infrastructure, cruel religious violence, ubiquitous corruption, street crime, child prostitution, AIDS, and filth of every kind. Any visitor willing to venture far enough outside the lounge of the Taj Mahal Hotel is likely to run into scenes like this one:

     Much of the slum is a garbage dump. The sewers, which are open, run
     right between the houses, and children play and occasionally fall
     into them. They are full of a blue-black iridescent sludge. When
     the government sweepers come to clean the drains, they scoop it out
     and leave piles of it outside the latrines. I couldn't use the
     public toilets. I tried, once. There were two rows of toilets. Each
     one of them had masses of shit, overflowing out of the toilets and
     spread liberally all around the cubicle ... It's not merely an
     esthetic discomfort; typhoid runs rampant through the slum and
     spreads through oral-fecal contact. Pools of stagnant water, which
     are everywhere, breed malaria. Many children also have jaundice.
     Animal carcasses are spread out on the counters of the butcher
     shops, sprinkled with flies like a moving spice. The whole slum is
     pervaded by a stench that I stopped noticing after a while.

A 21st-century version of How the Other Half Lives, perhaps (or is it, How the Other Three-Quarters Lives?) But, for all the muck in Bombay-Mumbai, Mehta isn't mainly there to rake it; instead, he illuminates and celebrates "this fucking city," though, of course, he always has the luxury, which he ultimately falls back on, of retreating to America. (He left, Mehta explains, when his son Gautama told him that, "My family there misses me.") Life in the diaspora trumps returning to roots.

But the journeys he takes and the tours he guides us on are jaw-dropping: into the chaotic world of Shiv Sena thugs and the boss himself, fanatical Hindu nationalist Bal Thackeray, of battle-hardened police inspectors (a.k.a. killers with badges), gorgeous dance-bar queens (female or otherwise), their fans and lovers, a homeless teenage poet, directors, producers, and stars in Bollywood (Mehta ends up cowriting a movie named Mission Kashmir), a family of Jain millionaires who decide to renounce everything and become wandering monks, and so on.

Much of what he sees and shows us, e.g., the massive, three-day-long slaughter of goats and cattle for the Bakri Id festival in Madanpura, the Muslim enclave in Bombay known as "mini-Pakistan," is grim, if not grisly.

But Mehta's love for this crazy, soulful, warm-hearted, wildly religious place conquers all. Well, nearly all: he has to conceal the names, and even the existence, of his wife and children, from the many louche, or worse, characters he consorts with--one false move could result in a kid-napping or assassination. But that love persists. In one typical moment Mehta is out on the town for the night of Nanapati Visarjan, when devotees of the elephant god Ganesha gleefully dump their idols into the waters surrounding the city. The delirious marchers parade through Muslim neighborhoods, in a seemingly deliberate provocation (the city has been ravaged by bloody Hindu-Muslim riots). But nothing happens, and on his way home Mehta notices that his taxi driver has both a tiny shrine to Sai Baba of Shirdi, a popular modern Hindu saint, and a verse of the Koran in Arabic in the cab. Mehta points to the Arabic script, and asks, "And you have Saibaba also?" "Yes." "He has turned around. He is smiling. I am joyous. There is still hope." One wonders.

Maximum City has been widely hailed by the critics, as it deserves to be. Mehta is a racy, sharp-eyed, sympathetic, and often funny writer. His book provides, not just a brilliant travelogue of a great and more-than-slightly-scary city, but a penetrating cultural exploration by someone who is both a polymathic insider and a level-headed outsider (Mehta spent 1977-98 in London, Paris, and Manhattan). Still, what of the inevitable question: where is Bombay (and the vast portions of the world that resemble it far more than they do First World capitals) going to wind up? Is there any way to rescue its future?