Maximum City (4 page)

The Gateway of India, a domed arch of yellow basalt surrounded by four turrets, was built in Bombay in 1927 to commemorate the arrival, sixteen years earlier, of the British king, George V; instead, it marked his permanent exit. In 1947, the British left their Empire under this same arch, the last of their troops marching mournfully onto the last of their ships. Bombay, for my family too, was the threshold city; it was where we paused, for a decade, on our journey from Calcutta to America. We sat and rested under the arch for some time, till our ship came in. Cities are gateways: to money, to position, to dreams and devils. A migrant from Bihar might one day get to America; but first he needs a spell in the boot camp of the West: Bombay, the acclimation station.

Greater Bombay’s population, currently 19 million, is bigger than that of 173 countries in the world. If it were a country by itself in 2004, it would rank at number 54. Cities should be examined like countries. Each has a city culture, as countries possess a national culture. There is something peculiarly Bombayite about Bombayites and likewise about Delhiites or New Yorkers or Parisians—the way the women walk, what their young people like to do in the evenings, what their definitions of fun and horror are. The growth of the megacity is an Asian phenomenon: Asia has eleven of the world’s fifteen biggest. Why do Asians like to live in cities? Maybe we like people more.

India is not an overpopulated country. Its population density is lower than that of many other countries not thought of as overpopulated. In 1999, Belgium had a population density of 130 people per square mile; the Netherlands, 150; India, under 120. It is the cities of India that are over-populated. Singapore has a density of 2,535 people per square mile; Berlin, the most crowded European city, has 1,130 people per square mile. The island city of Bombay in 1990 had a density of 17,550 people per square mile. Some parts of central Bombay have a population density of 1 million people per square mile. This is the highest number of individuals massed together at any spot in the world. They are not equally dispersed across the island. Two-thirds of the city’s residents are crowded into just 5 percent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolize the remaining 95 percent.

Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see where the action was in India, you went to the villages. They contributed 71 percent of net domestic product in 1950. Today, you go to the cities, which now account for 60 percent of net domestic product. Bombay alone pays 38 percent of the nation’s taxes. What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the cities.

“Bombay is a bird of gold.” A man living in a slum, without water, without toilets, was telling me why he came here, why people continue to come here. In the Bayview Bar of the Oberoi Hotel you can order a bottle of Dom Perignon for one and a half times the average annual income; this in a city where 40 percent of the houses lack safe drinking water. Another man put it differently: “Nobody starves to death in Mumbai.” He was being very literal. People are still starving to death in other parts of India. In Bombay, there are several hundred slimming clinics. According to a dietician who operates one of them, fashionable models are on the verge of anorexia. This is how Bombayites know they’ve parted company with the rest of India. “In any class of society in Bombay,” explains the dietician, “there are more people wanting to lose weight than put on weight.”

Bombay is the biggest, fastest, richest city in India. It is Bombay that Krishna could have been describing in the Tenth Canto of the Bhagavad Gita, when the god manifests himself in all his fullness:

It is a maximum city.

“Can I get a gas connection?”

“No.”

“Can I get a phone?”

“No.”

“Can I get a school for my child?”

“I’m afraid it is not possible.”

“Have my parcels arrived from America?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“No.”

“Can I get a railway reservation?”

“No.”

India is the Country of the No. That “no” is your test. You have to get past it. It is India’s Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders. Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge. In the guru—shishya tradition, the novice is always rebuffed multiple times when he first approaches the guru. Then the guru stops saying no but doesn’t say yes either; he suffers the presence of the student. When he starts acknowledging him, he assigns a series of menial tasks, meant to drive him away. Only if the disciple sticks it out through all these stages of rejection and ill treatment is he considered worthy of the sublime knowledge. India is not a tourist-friendly country. It will reveal itself to you only if you stay on, against all odds. The “no” might never become a “yes.” But you will stop asking questions.

“Can I rent a flat at a price I can afford?”

“No.”

Coming from New York, I am a pauper in Bombay. The going rate for a nice two-bedroom apartment in the part of South Bombay where I grew up is $3,000 a month, plus $200,000 as a deposit, interest-free and returnable in rupees. This is after the real estate prices have fallen by 40 percent. I hear a broker argue on the phone with another broker representing a flat I am to see. “But the party is
American
, holds an American passport and American visa; everything, he has. His wife is British visa. . . . What? Yes, he is originally Indian.” Then he speaks apologetically to me. “It is for foreigners only.” As another broker explains it, “Indians won’t rent to Indians. It would be different if you were one hundred percent white-skinned.” At least this is one sign that my passport changes nothing. I am one of the great brown thieving horde, no matter how far I go. In Varanasi I was refused admittance to the backpackers’ inns on similar grounds: I am Indian. I might rape the white women.

The earth is round and you go all over it, but ultimately you come back
to the same spot in the circle. “Look everywhere but, I guarantee you, you will be living in Dariya Mahal,” my uncle predicted. It is not a flat I wanted, after the first immediate rush. The second time I came back to see it I didn’t like it. But I feel as though I could never live anywhere else in Bombay. The universe is teleological. I grew up in the third building around the palace. My grandfather lived in the first. Now I have come back to live in the second, completing the trilogy. The ghost time and the present have no boundaries. Here is where I got beat up by the bully, here is where I saw my true love on Holi, here is where the men made the pyramid to get at the pot of treasure, here is where the mysterious caravan Nefertiti always parked. I am afraid that one of these days I’ll meet myself, the stranger within, coming or going. The body, safely interred in the grave, will rise and, crouching, loping, come up to me from behind.

The clerk in my uncle’s office, who grew up as our neighbor in Dariya Mahal 3, tells me that Dariya Mahal 2 is “cosmopolitan.” This is how the real estate brokers of Nepean Sea Road describe a building that is not Gujarati-dominated. For a Gujarati, this is not a term of approval. “Cosmopolitan” means the whole world except Gujaratis and Marwaris. It includes Sindhis, Punjabis, Bengalis, Catholics, and God knows who else. Nonvegetarians. Divorcees. Growing up, I was always fascinated by the “cosmopolitan” families. I thought cosmopolitan girls more beautiful, beyond my reach. The Gujaratis I grew up among conformed to Nehru’s stereotype of a “small-boned, mercantile” people. A Gujarati family’s peace rests on the lack of sexual tension within it; it is an oasis from the lusts of the world. It is the most vegetarian, the least martial, of the Indian communities. But it is easygoing. “How are you?” one Gujarati asks another. “In good humor” is the standard reply, through earthquakes and bankruptcy.

We have a meeting with the owner of the flat, a Gujarati diamond merchant, to negotiate the contract. The landlord is a Palanpuri Jain and a strict vegetarian. He asks my uncle if we are too. “Arre, his wife is a Brahmin! Even more than us!” my uncle replies. And this is where we get our vegetarian discount: 20 percent off the asking rent. But in my uncle’s words is evident the subtle contempt with which the Vaisyas—the merchant castes—regard the Brahmins. The Brahmins are the pantujis, the professors, the straight people. Not good in business. Eager to come home at funerals for food. Whatever the reasons for my ancestors’ change of caste centuries ago—from Nagar Brahmin to Vaisya—it has served us
well. Change of caste is a mechanism for evolutionary survival. Brahmins in a god-fearing age; Vaisyas in one where money is god. And we are in a naturally capitalistic city—a vaisya-nagra—one that understands the moods and movements of money.

My father has one rule for selecting a flat to live in: You should be able to change your clothes without having to draw the curtains. This simple rule, if followed, ensures two things: privacy and a sufficient flow of air and light. I forgot this dictum when putting down my deposit for the second-floor flat in Dariya Mahal. It is hemmed in by large buildings all around. People walking below or standing on their balconies in the buildings opposite can peep into every corner of my flat, watching us as we go about cooking, eating, working, sleeping. There are twenty floors in the building and ten flats on each floor. Each flat will have an average of six residents and three servants; their allocation of incidental support staff (watchmen, construction workers, sweepers) will be one per flat. That makes two thousand people in this building. Two thousand people live in the building adjoining this, and another two thousand in the one immediately behind. The school in the middle has two thousand pupils, teachers, and staff. That makes eight thousand human beings living on a few acres of land. It is the population of a small town.

The flat we have moved into was designed by a sadist, a prankster, or an idiot. The kitchen window ventilates only the refrigerator—or, rather, heats it—since there is no provision for curtains and the sun beats down on it. When I turn on the fan in the dark recesses of the kitchen, it blows out the gas flame, since the space for the range is directly underneath the fan. The only way we can get air in the living room is to open the study window, to let the sea air in. But this also brings in a sand dune’s worth of thick, black, grainy dirt from outside, along with a spectacular array of filth. (We found a plastic ice-cream cone inside the bedroom once, with a film of syrup and cream still inside it.) We also receive used polyethylene milk bags, the betel-stained plastic cover of a pan, and, once, a shit-stained diaper. The air outside is a rain of thin plastic bags, which has replaced the parrots I grew up with. By five o’clock the living room is dark, since we’re on such a low floor. We need the air conditioner and the lights on all the time; so our electricity bills run into monstrous figures, the necessary price of keeping the environment out.

The flat is furnished in diamond merchant luxe. Diamond merchants
have a certain vision of the good life. It is not exactly vulgar, because these diamond merchants are mostly Jains: reticent, sober, vegetarian, teetotaling, and monogamous in their personal lives. They will be seen at a party, if they go to parties at all, holding glasses of Coke and wearing white shirts and dark trousers. They do not have mistresses, they stay married to their wives all their lives, and they are good to their children. But a certain extravagance might manifest itself in the furniture they choose. So the furniture in my flat erupts upon the eyes like a weather phenomenon. An enormous porcelain lamp dominates the living room, engraved with three semi-nude Greek nymphs frolicking, each one with a hand cupping one breast of the nymph immediately proximate to her, their heads shaded by a shower of illuminated crystal leaves. The glass dining table, which is interleaved with real gold ornamentation, is flanked by two more lamps, one a giant yellow pear and the other a giant pink strawberry, which, when a switch is flicked on, shine from within with fructous life. A chandelier with pink leaves looms over our heads when we sit on sofas upholstered in bright red, with golden tasseled ropes hanging from them, which my children promptly yank off. The master bedroom continues in this arboreal vein, with a pair of golden branches on the ceiling whose giant leaves shield 100-watt bulbs; vines run up and down the closet doors, painted in a vivid shade of green. Throw open a closet door and your vision will be flooded by a cascading waterfall painted on the inside. Across the giant mirror, a sun with one eye open casts its tendrils across the glass. The mirror in the other bedroom explodes in a galaxy of blue stars; glass stained with blue, red, and green waves covers the small windows. The furniture makes a terrifying din, all day and all night.

The house takes shape, slowly. The owners have not removed all their belongings. The flat’s closets yield many gods, Jain and Hindu. We put them away in the drawers. We put our own up on one shelf of the study. We remove, over the objections of our landlord, the pink chandelier and the Greek lamp. He is wounded when we tell him about the lamp. “When you took down the chandelier I didn’t say anything, but when you removed the statue, that I didn’t like.” I hasten to assure him that it is not his taste I am questioning; rather, I am protecting the masterpiece from the evil designs of my young children.

Every day the flat gets cleaned and scrubbed. We learn the caste system of the servants: the live-in maid won’t clean the floors; that is for the “free
servant” to do; neither of them will do the bathrooms, which are the exclusive domain of a bhangi, who does nothing else. The driver won’t wash the car; that is the monopoly of the building watchman. The flat ends up swarming with servants. We wake up at six every morning to garbage, when the garbage lady comes to collect the previous day’s refuse. From then on, the doorbell rings continuously all through the day: milkman, paperboy, knife sharpener, waste-paper-and-bottle buyer, massagewali, cable man. All the services of the world, brought to my door, too early in the morning.