A Hindu fundamentalist speaks to him nonchalantly of burning Muslims during the religious riots that shook Bombay in the early 1990's. He befriends underworld terrorists and visits (stretching the limits of intimacy) with beautiful dancing girls. In character sketches that extend over pages and months, Mehta, a brave and persistent reporter, sheds light on the darkest (and most bizarre) corners of the city. Part history, part travelogue, part memoir, his book illuminates this supercharged world through its people, presenting a meticulous documentary of living - and struggling - on a teeming island that always seems about to slip into the ocean. Take some 19th-century European urban blight, throw in a little tropical sea breeze, sex and Islamic terrorism and you have Mehta's Bombay - a city in heat," as he memorably calls it.
"Every day is an assault on the individual's senses, from the time you get up, to the transport you take to go to work, to the offices you work in, to the forms of entertainment you are subjected to." The literary landscape this description brings to mind is Dickens's London. "Why do people still live in Bombay?" Mehta asks in frustration. Mumbai is overpowering, exhausting, violent and chaotic - an unrelenting megalopolis that embodies John Kenneth Galbraith's famous (and patronizing) description of India as a "functioning anarchy." Giving depth and shading to such a complex subject, "Maximum City" is narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years - at least since the start of the miniboom in Indian writing for export, which has been notable mostly for its fiction. The gentle - and genteel - world of Mehta's remembered childhood no longer exists. "A city this densely packed affords no privacy." "The greatest luxury of all is solitude," he writes. In "Maximum City," the journalist and fiction writer Suketu Mehta, newly returned from New York and searching for a way to understand the place he left as a youth, is similarly overwhelmed. Naipaul, overwhelmed by the masses, worried he "might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd." Soon Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) will have more people than all of Australia. Over 18 million inhabitants are crammed into its 169 square miles, and in parts of the city the population density exceeds a million per square mile. $27.95.īOMBAY is a claustrophobe's nightmare.
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