Maximum City - Suketu Mehta

Having lived with my parents for 24 years… Let me rephrase that. Having lived with EXTREMELY PROTECTIVE parents for 24 years of life, I thought that I would enjoy the independence in Bangalore, where I had to move to for work, as a member of the ever expanding IT brigade. And I do enjoy that… during the time I am not getting nostalgic about Mumbai. Oh yeah… Mumbai… with its streets over-flowing with humans, with its acne infected roads, chugging and choking traffic… and a zillion other negatives… is a city I miss SO much… that I am surprised myself.

And I happened to land on the book “Maximum City”. I expected it to take me to the Mumbai I had lived in, where I inhaled its polluted air, where I ate “Vada-Pav” right next to the open drain… but instead, it was a completely different journey. The book takes me to the Mumbai which thousands of us never see in our endless trips to and fro home and office (or college). It is the Mumbai which is so melodramatically, or perhaps not, portrayed in the films. Suketu Mehta takes you in the lives of diverse characters: a movie director, a politician, a cable-wallah, an assassin, a cop, a poet, a girl dancing in bars, a cross dresser, a family which sacrifices all worldly possessions to become hermits and of course in his own life. Such a concoction of people can only be found in Mumbai. In this book, Suketu Mehta plays a journalist, a novelist, a script writer, a friend to the people he investigates, and a Mumbaikar. It is a truthful portrayal of the innermost feelings of the author which, as a fellow Mumbaikar, I can totally relate to. He presents the opinion of a person who has seen Mumbai in the flourishing, I suppose, 70s and then in the turbulent 90s. Of course it has to be kept in mind that author had left “Bombay” as a teenager, and had come back to “Mumbai” as a writer.

The author goes through his own motions as he researches and describes about the life of various “character types” in Mumbai. He writes, and brilliantly so, about his own life in the old Bombay vis-à-vis the new and modern Mumbai. Every one of the people he describes, touch his life in more ways than one. The gangster who promises him any “favour” he wants, the feared cop who becomes a steadfast friend, the hot-n-sexy bar-dancer whose company people would die to have, a director who urges him to be a part of movies instead of writing books that only a handful of self-proclaimed intellectuals would read… all confide in the author. Everyone appreciates a person who lends his ear. And Suketu Mehta was an empathic listener. Through the book he narrates the conversations he has with the people he meets. And it’s apparent that the conversations have been translated, literally so, from Hindi to English. This might leave an “English” reader with a sense of reading a very dry narration, but as a Mumbaikar, I can hear the dialogue ringing in my ears as it must have been said, in Bambaiyaa Hindi.
Mumbai has seen some dramatic changes since this book has been published. Like the mushrooming of malls across the length and breadth of the city; the relentless rains that have wreak havoc during monsoons every year, the exponentially increasing crowds in the train (oh yeah, the trains are a lot more crowded since the time when the book was written)… but then there is only so much that you can capture about Mumbai in a single book. Every Mumbaikar’s life is a story worth telling. Suketu Mehta has done fabulously well in his 584 pages. You might watch movies which depict the sleazy Mumbai bars, or gang wars… but they lack the honesty that pours from Maximum City. In this book you truly get a glimpse of the living, dilapidated, yet thriving Mumbai. A book that you would end with a note of, “Bhenchod (an expletive, the nuances of which are better explained in the Maximum City), great book!!!”