Maximum City
Authors: Suketu Mehta
Acclaim for Suketu Mehta’s
MAXIMUM CITY
An
Economist, Seattle Times
, and
San Jose Mercury-News
Best Book of the Year
“Dazzling and absorbing. . . . Because of his zest to put every byway of the Bombay underworld on the page, his high-energy evoking of characters high and low, and the way his gaze settles on the newcomers trying to make it in the great city, Mehta’s eye on Bombay reminds me of no one’s so much as Balzac’s on Paris.”
—
Harper’s
“Sprawling, epic, vibrant—and more than a little scary—
Maximum City
does justice to its monumental subject, the city of Bombay.”
—
People
“Mehta is an urban ethnographer with an acute sensitivity to the peculiarities of his city. . . . This fidelity to his interlocutors, and to their detail and circumstance, as much as the intelligence and brightness of Mehta’s own prose, makes
Maximum City
an extraordinary debut—a debut that will rival Arundhati Roy’s in fiction.”
—
The Nation
“Stunning.”
—
Time
“Quite extraordinary—Mehta writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism, and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope. The quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It’s the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read.”
—Salman Rushdie, author of
Midnight’s Children
and
The Moor’s Last Sigh
“Remarkable. . . .
Maximum City
is at once paean and lament to the megalopolis that is . . . Bombay.”
—
The Village Voice
“Mehta writes with a Victorian novelist’s genius for character, detail, and incident, but his voice is utterly modern. Like its subject, this is a sprawling banquet of a book, one of the most intimate and moving portraits of a place I have read.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri, author of
The Namesake
and
Interpreter of Maladies
“This is compulsively readable stuff, the best non-fiction book on India in a couple of decades. . . . Mehta’s gift is to take the equal parts of wretchedness and redemption that Mumbai offers and make poetry of it.”
—
Financial Times
“Maximum City
is journalism at its best. It is journalism of a kind never seen in India before. . . . Mehta is able to bring away an enormous amount that is startling and entirely fresh from every encounter.”
—
The Week
“A brilliant book. [Mehta] writes fearlessly about the horror and wonder that is Bombay. One by one, he reveals its multiple personalities: maleficent Bombay, bountiful Bombay, beckoning temptress of hope, manufacturer of despair—city of dreams and nightmare city. Best of all, reading this book helps one understand why Bombay can be an addiction.”
—Rohinton Mistry, author of
Family Matters
and
A Fine Balance
“The passions and secrets of the throbbing megalopolis come alive as Suketu Mehta steps into its back alleys and dance bars, its fantasy factories and drawing rooms. . . . Every city has its chronicler . . . now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject.”
—India Today
“Suketu Mehta has done the impossible: he has captured the city of Bombay on the page, and done it in technicolor. Like Zola’s Paris and the London of Dickens, it will be difficult for me to visit Bombay without thinking of
Maximum City
and the enormous delight I had when I inhabited its pages.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of
My Own Country
and
The Tennis Partner
“Along with V.S. Naipaul’s
India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City
is probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India.”
—Akhil Sharma, author of
An Obedient Father
Suketu Mehta
MAXIMUM CITY
Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s other work has been published in
The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harper’s, Time, Condé Nast Traveler
, and
The Village Voice
, and has been featured on National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered.
Mehta also cowrote
Mission Kashmir
, a Bollywood movie.
For my grandparents:
Shantilal Ratanlal Mehta & Sulochanaben Shantilal Mehta
Jayantilal Manilal Parikh & Kantaben Jayantilal Parikh
As for Kabir, I went to him through the Nirgunia singers of Malwa whom I heard while lying ill in Dewas. I learnt about their capacity to create vacuum which is so crucial for a Nirgunia bhajan. They use notes in a distinctly hermit-like manner so that notes are thrown at you but you don’t get hurt. They sing in loneliness. In singing Kabir my attempt is to create this essential loneliness and yet also a persisting sense of community. Kabir says it himself beautifully: I am severally alone. The total identification of the interior and the exterior is Kabir’s most challenging aspect.
—
KUMAR GANDHARYA
We are individually multiple.
—
KABIR MQHANTY
PART I *
POWER
Number Two After Scotland Yard
Ajay Lal: The Blasts and the Gangwar
Chotta Shakeel: The Don in Exile
PART II *
PLEASURE
Vidhu Vinod Chopra:
Mission Kashmir
PART III *
PASSAGES
T
HERE WILL SOON BE
more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia.
URBS PRIMA IN INDIS
reads the plaque outside the Gateway of India. It is also the Urbs Prima in Mundis, at least in one area, the first test of the vitality of a city: the number of people living in it. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.
I left Bombay in 1977 and came back twenty-one years later, when it had grown up to become Mumbai. Twenty-one years: enough time for a human being to be born, get an education, be eligible to drink, get married, drive, vote, go to war, and kill a man. In all that time, I hadn’t lost my accent. I speak like a Bombay boy; it is how I am identified in Kanpur and Kansas. “Where’re you from?” Searching for an answer—in Paris, in London, in Manhattan—I always fall back on “Bombay.” Somewhere, buried beneath the wreck of its current condition—one of urban catastrophe—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? In the looking, I found the cities within me.
I
AM A CITY BOY.
I was born in a city in extremis, Calcutta. Then I moved to Bombay and lived there nine years. Then to New York, eight years in Jackson Heights. A year, on and off, in Paris. Five years in the East
Village. Scattered over time, another year or so in London. The only exceptions were three years in Iowa City, not a city at all, and a couple more in New Brunswick, New Jersey, college towns that prepared me for a return to the city. My two sons were born in a great city, New York. I live in cities by choice, and I’m pretty sure I will die in a city. I don’t know what to do in the country, though I like it well enough on weekends.
I come from a family of mercantile wanderers. My paternal grandfather left rural Gujarat for Calcutta in the salad days of the century, to join his brother in the jewelry business. When my grandfather’s brother first ventured into international territory, to Japan, in the 1930s, he had to come back and bow in apology before the caste elders, turban in his hands. But his nephews—my father and my uncle—kept moving, first to Bombay and then across the black water to Antwerp and New York, to add to what was given to them. My maternal grandfather left Gujarat for Kenya as a young man, and he now lives in London. My mother was born in Nairobi, went to college in Bombay, and now lives in New York. In my family, picking up and going to another country to live was never a matter for intense deliberation. You went where your business took you.