Bombay dreams
Harsh A. Desai

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
by Suketu Mehta. Penguin/Viking. Pages 585. Rs 595.

Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is not a celebration of Bombay but an attempt to find out what gives Bombay its magnetic pull. What gives it the power to thrill and make you shudder – sometimes at the same time. This enquiry is led by an interesting cast of characters which includes Ajay Lal, an Assistant Commissioner of Police involved with the investigations of the Bombay bomb blasts, Mona Lisa, a ravishingly beautiful bar dancer at Sapphire with a proclivity to slash her wrists in reaction to failure in love and life, Honey, the bar dancer who is a man but that does not prevent him from carrying on with his profession, Babbanji, the runaway poet from Bihar who finds solace on the streets of Bombay, gangsters, hitmen, actors, directors and a host of other delightful characters. The usual suspects in any book on Bombay, Bal Thackeray, Amitabh Bacchan, Hrithik Roshan, Sanjay Dutt also make an appearance.

Part-autobiography, part-biography of the city, the author describes both the sordid and the sublime of Bombay. But going by the author’s account, the sordid far outweighs the sublime. For every sunset over Marine Drive there are numerous murders, beatings and assaults. Violence is a throbbing reality in the city. The author spends a fair amount of time and throws light on the workings of the Bombay Police which resorts to encounters, torture and violence to keep a lid on the violence in the city. He also chronicles turf wars and corruption in police stations.

His investigation into gang wars leads him to a telephonic interview of Chotta Shakeel during which Chotta Shakeel paraphrases John F. Kennedy and tells him that it is important to ask not what the country can do for one but to ask what one can do for the country.

The author, who has been to school in Bombay and has returned after many years spent abroad, finds a city which is difficult to settle into. His attempts to settle down with his wife and young children and learn the way of the country are sometimes amusing, though somewhat dated. For instance, his struggle to get a gas connection in today’s Bombay seems to be particularly outdated. His shifting from a south-Bombay residence to a more comfortable residence Bandra mirrors the shift in the balance of power of the city. Comfortably settled in Bandra, he describes a heart-rending scene of four street children wandering alone at night on the streets of Bombay. Realising his helplessness in being able to do anything substantial for them, he buys them an energy drink each. It is the descriptions of such scenes, which would go completely unnoticed by a true-blue Bombayite, which make the book special. His description of a train journey from the suburbs to the city is also terrific – a daily hardship for many Bombayites who bear it stoically and even try to derive some pleasure from it.

Reading the book gives one a sense of déjà vu at times, feeling that you have seen this or heard that somewhere before and that is and realise that all this features in the supplements of the morning newspapers: incessant gang wars, contract killings, police brutality. The detailing and the personalised accounts in the book carry it to a new level. It is a peek into the forbidden.

But the author again and again comes to the question of why people live in Bombay, and what draws them there. And while the answer for his characters seems to be that each of them needs Bombay in their own peculiar way a more general answer lies in the spirit of the Bombayite, regardless of whether he regards it as a sone ki chidiya or a paap ki bhoomi or maya ki nagri.

The best answer, I think, is given by Babbanji, the runaway poet from Bihar:
What could be sold in this carnival?
What intoxication could there be in this earth?
that the na`EFve and innocent
come to the crossroads of rushing and thieving?
They are in the search of dreams
that will clash with their dreams

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