Review: Maximum City

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, by Suketu Mehta.
[rating:5/5]

Back to India, the crazy city of Mumbai. How can you not be drawn in:

If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward form the train like petals. As you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway. The rest is up to you. You will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks. But consider what has happened. Your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts already drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train, and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.

Well written, amazing people, great access, this is the book to read on Mumbai. After the nearly 600 pages you will have had your fill. Hindu vs. Muslim:

My uncle looked past me, out the window at the darkening sky. He had a good Muslim friend in Calcutta, he told me, a friend who was in school with him in the tenth standard; they would than have been about fifteen. He went with this friend to see a movie, and before the main show, a newsreel came on. There was a scene with many Muslims bowing in prayer, doing their namaaz. Without thinking, my uncle said aloud in the darkened theater, perhaps to his friend, perhaps to himself, “One bomb would take care of them.”

Then my uncle realized what he had just said and remembered that the friend who was sitting next to him was also Muslim. But the friend said nothing, pretending he had not heard. “But I know he did,” said my uncle, the pain evident on his face, sitting in this flat in Bombay thirty-five years later. “I was so ashamed. I have been ashamed of that all my life. Then I began to think, How did I have this hatred in me? And I realized I had been taught it since childhood. Maybe it was Partition, maybe it was their food habits- Muslims kill animals- but our parents taught us we couldn’t trust them. Even my son. I tell him, ‘After you’re married you won’t be so close to your Muslim best friend.’ The events of Partition washed away the teachings of Gandhiji. Dadaji- my grandfather- and bapuji- his brother- were staunch Gandhians except when it came to Muslims. I could never bring a Muslim friend to my home and I couldn’t go to theirs.”

Suketu has so many amazing contacts, like this Muslim hit man. Yeah, it’s a real gang-war hit man:

“First I shot him, dhadam! He held up his hand to stop the bullet when the gun came up. The first shot was on his heart- the second on the other side- the third in the neck – the fourth in the stomach. Mohammed Ali held up his head by the hair and emptied his gun into his head. Then we walked away. All the people had run away while we were shooting. This was in Narialwadi, five minutes from here. We walked to Rani Bagh and took the bus to Wadala. Then we came back at night and had a good dinner in Bhendi Bazaar. We ate quail. Then we played carom. We forgot we had done any work.

More from the hit man:

Moshin uses a .38, with anywhere between seven and nine rounds. For those who can’t afford the imported guns, there is the katta, the country-made gun, used to shoot deer. “The hole it makes in the front is very small, but in the back it is huge. The bullet spins as it enters the flesh. After you fire two or three bullets from it, you have to let it cool down. If you fire it more than that, your hand blows off.” When Moshin doesn’t or can’t use a gun, he uses a razor or a chopper. For the half murder in 1991, Moshin used a khanjar, a short dagger. I ask him if needs strength to use a knife to stab through muscle and bone. “Have you ever cut a watermelon?” Moshin asks of me. “It’s the same. A man’s flesh is so delicate.”

Now the book ventures into the culture of bar dancers, whose tragic stories are told in great detail:

The personal history of bar dancers is written on their arms. Honey shows me another mark and tells me the story behind it. There was an Irani man in the bar, a loyal customer who professed to be in love with Honey and would blow as much as 40,000 rupees a night on her. One night, he was also spending on another girl, Sonali. Sonali was trying her best to woo the free-spending Irani away from Honey; she whispered into his ear that Honey loved him only for his money. So he asked Honey if this was true. Honey grabbed a glass, smashed it, and slashed her arm with the jagged edge. She said she would write “I love you” in blood on her arm to prove it. The Irani begged her not to further injure herself and asked what he could do to atone for doubting her love. “Go to Sonali and tell her to tie a rakhi on you,” Honey demanded. The Irani beckoned to Sonali and gave her 5,000 rupees to tear off a piece of her dupatta and tie it around his wrist, in front of the whole bar, forever making her his sister. The bleeding Honey had to listen to Sonali’s abuses, but the Irani has treasured that piece of glass that Honey cut herself with for three years now.

At this point Suketu veers into his experiences in the Indian movie scene, where he helps write a screenplay and sees the movie through to premiere:

What is fascinating to me is not so much the scriptwriting process as hearing Vinod explain what is politically acceptable and what’s not. Infinite care has to be taken, as the papers put it, to avoid “hurting the sentiments of a particular community.” Vinod goes back and forth and back again over what religion the female leads should profess, what might cause offense, what would play well with the audience. Finally, he splits the difference: Mrs. Khan, the cop’s wife, is Hindu, and Sufi, the militant’s girlfriend, is Muslim. The constraints we operate under are peculiar to the country. Vinod can’t have fade-to-black in his movies. He had five of them in one of his early films, after he came out of the Film Institute, and the audience started jeering and whistling. They thought the arc light was going. In the interiors the projectionists cut fade-outs out of the reels to keep the audience from wrecking the theater.

More on movies:

Kareeb is not a good film. The script moves along with the aid of contrivances. The acting, especially by the first-time heroine, is so ad it borders on parody- she wanders through the movie looking stoned. Vinod blames her for his losses on Kareeb, because he had to waste so many takes on an untrained actress. Once, on the set, she was supposed to lift her right hand to her head. She kept flubbing it by raising her left hand. After it happened one too many times, Vinod went over to her, grabbed her right hand, and bit it. “The pain will remind you which hand to use.” He is the Werner Herzog of Indian cinema, a little bit mad.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, by Suketu Mehta.
[rating:5/5]