Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004)

It’s true that every city has a character of its own and stories that reveal both its glorious and sordid past, as well as hint at the promise of its future. In Sukhetu Mehta’s debut work Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, I found one of the best examples of such a narrative – powerful yet vulnerable, personal yet revealing, and aching but all the while healing.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the Kiriyama Prize for Non Fiction, Maximum City is an absolutely riveting read. This is largely due to Mehta’s style, which is honest and simple. Here’s a book that doesn’t try to trick you with fancy word play, over analyse events so that the thing itself gets lost, or convolute your mind with hyper-emotion. He has my gratitude for that.

The book is in three parts: Power, Pleasure and Passages. For Mehta, the narrator, it’s a journey of rediscovery. He has come back to a city he left some 20 years ago. And things have certainly changed – some for the better and some for the worse and plenty for the passing of time.

Writer Suketu Mehta (© www.suketumehta.com)

Bombay’s greatest strength is its people. In fact, it’s teeming with great numbers of people, flocking to the city from all over India in search of a better life. It’s like India’s own version of a promised land. How they adapt to each other’s differences is where the stories lie.

Mehta is not afraid to get personal. In fact, the entire work is based on his interactions, experiences and impressions of Bombay and its eclectic collection of inhabitants. And what a collection! Neighbours, gangsters, bar line dancers, policemen, filmmakers, diamond merchants, actors, politicians, old teachers, slum dwellers… and the list goes on.

In Bombay politics, religion, race, caste and class all clash with each other. Identity is a mixed bag and which one you choose to adopt for a given day depends on what you want done. The people are truly passionate and when they feel something it seems to overcome them, and this can boil over to become a matter of life and death.

The beauty of the book is not that it doesn’t judge what it reveals, but that you feel a sense of acceptance of its chaos and its energy. You see both sides of the coin and you become aware why something is the way it is or why someone has become who they are.

Some of its hilarious, like the art of film making in Bollywood. The stories about the Hindu-Muslim riots are devastating and they make you question the very notions of justice. Secret meetings with underworld figures are thrilling for their sense of danger. Watching a Jain family renounce their worldly bonds and possession is like a learning curve. Most of this was entirely new to me, and all of it was just mesmerising.

Maximum City is the story of Bombay – how it was, how it is and how it will be. Abraham Verghese compares it to Zola’s Paris and the London of Dickens, and how true. Every great city needs someone to tell its story, and in Mehta, Bombay found hers.