Book Review
"Maximum City": Bombay, exposed

By David Takami
Special to The Seattle Times

AIJAZ RAHI / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Wreckage of a car bomb in Bombay in August 2003. The violent Hindu-Muslim divide is among the many fascinating subjects of “Maximum City.”

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Suketu Mehta has written the ultimate insider's view of Bombay, a roiling and vigorous account that delivers on a seemingly impossible challenge: how to limn the diversity and sprawl of such a place in a single book. Indeed, the 500-plus pages of "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" feel like a thumbnail sketch.

Now officially known as Mumbai, Bombay is a city of 18 million people living cheek by jowl in spectacular chaos. The grinding poverty of the surrounding countryside brings in a steady flow of opportunity seekers, filling the city's vast slums, where the living conditions are appalling. Open sewers run between houses. The air, food and water are severely contaminated. Even in affluent neighborhoods, buildings are crumbling. A street-renaming craze has made it almost impossible to navigate the city by map. Corruption is rampant and bribery the only way to get things done.

Mehta's approach is to mine the extremities of urban life, both as a storytelling strategy — piquing reader interest in unusual topics — and as a serious attempt to uncover the precious metal beneath the surface: the insights that lead to deeper understanding. And so he brings us firsthand accounts of the 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots (in which thousands of people died, mostly minority Muslims); the resulting "gangwar" underworld that developed; the often brutal response by Bombay police to the criminal element, abuses that make prisoner treatment at Iraq's Abu Ghraib seem tame; the "bar dancer" consorts who indulge almost any male fantasy; the "Bollywood" filmmakers whose potential audience is a billion people; and the extreme asceticism of the Jain religious sect.

"Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" by Suketu Mehta Knopf, 538 pp., $27.95

Mehta's gifts as a writer of short fiction, film scripts and magazine articles are many. Part voyeur, part social scientist, he immerses himself in the worlds he describes, giving his narration an omniscient quality, like the fictional dream of a novel. "At night, the monks sleep where they are sitting, but with a caveat," he writes about a sweltering Jain worship hall. "They can't sleep in the path of the fresh breeze coming in, because that will kill the lives in that breeze. It would also mean that they desire the bodily pleasure of the cooling breeze. If a window is closed, they are forbidden to open it for the same reasons. Sevantibhai has to bleach his life of all comfort of pleasure. ... His life has to be so bereft of luxury, so continuously tormenting, that it will be easy to slip into the dark waters of nonexistence."

His preoccupation with rioters and hit men on both sides of the Hindu-Muslim divide is riveting, but not without risk. Promising to put their lives in the movies, Mehta extracts extraordinary confessions from people who murder for a living and trust no one. Their firsthand descriptions of "gangwar" violence are unexpectedly thrilling — we should be horrified as law-abiding people, but, like the author, we can't help listening with fascination.

The book naturally flags after this section. Even the life of a call girl in a city "humid with sex" pales in comparison to the edgy life-and-death world of assassins and gang dons. But "Maximum City" lives up to its title in subsequent chapters, particularly with tales of Bollywood ups and downs. Mehta is a screenwriter for the film "Mission Kashmir," about the Hindu-Muslim clashes in the northern territory of Kashmir, the primary battleground for the conflict between India and Pakistan, and he presents his own and others' experiences in episodic vignettes and character sketches that recall a Robert Altman montage.

In whatever context, Mehta lends a dignity to personal striving, especially among the poor and the masses of Bombay — a city that is well on its way to becoming the most populous on earth. The question he continually returns to answering is: who would want to subject themselves to such dreadful living circumstances? "The reason a human being can live in a Bombay slum and not lose his sanity," he concludes, "is that his dream life is bigger than his squalid quarters. It occupies a palace."

David Takami, a writer living in Kenmore, is the author of "Divided Destiny: a History of Japanese Americans in Seattle."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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