Maxmium City

Maxmium City is a book about Bombay. Mumbai. It’s written by Suketu Mehta who was born and grew up in the city, moved away for New York, and then was drawn back 21 years later. He writes, “Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.” This is anything but a glossy tourist guide promoting moonlit strolls in front of the Taj Mahal, listing where to find the best Bhel Puri or offering helpful tips on where to change money. Rather, it is startling and at times ferocious look into the city’s sprawling underbelly.

This is a city where the mob buys the police, where the poor control politics, where movie stars are assassinated for taking the wrong role (or bribing the wrong person) and where police routinely attach electrodes to the testicles of suspects in order to gain the tiniest tidbit of information. It is a city simmering with religious tension: between the Hindi majority and Muslim minority, political tension: between the rich and poor, the middle class and the slum dwellers, and social tension: where getting the simplest of things done often means ignoring your principles and going directly to the mob. Maximum City seems a worthy moniker.

Mehta writes with amazing clarity and the vibrant (and often insane) characters he meets are all the more impressive for being real. The tough cop who is unique because he won’t take bribes but doesn’t blink as his officers beat the shit out of anyone who won’t tell them what they want to know. The underworld bosses who run the Mumbai underground from Dubai but are terrified of coming back into the fold. The nationalistic Shiv Sena party leader, Bal Thackeray who Mehta claims is “the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in.” These are fascinating people with equally fascinating stories to tell.

It’s a captivating look inside a world you just do not hear about. For me, India has always been one of those mysteries you feel you half understand through an (overblown) sense of cultural immersion. I’ve seen a bunch of Bollywood films, know my way around both southern and northern Indian food and have read a few travel guides to the country in lazy preparation for someday visiting there. However, after finishing this and Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, it’s become quite clear that the India the West perceives and the India that actually exists are vastly different.

In the end though, this just makes me even more keen to go see it for myself.

Posted in Textism on Thursday November 10, 2005.