Maximum City

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Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is a narrative nonfiction book by Suketu Mehta, published in 2004, about the Indian city of Mumbai ("Bombay"). It was published in hardcover by Random House's Alfred A. Knopf imprint. When released in paperback, it was published by Vintage, a subdivision of Random House.

1 Awards
2 Plot summary
3 Reviewers' quotes
4 External links

[edit] Awards

Maximum City was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Kiriyama Prize, [1] an award given to books that foster a greater understanding of the nations and peoples of the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Newsmagazine The Economist named Maximum City one of its books of the year for 2004.

[edit] Plot summary

The book combines elements of memoir, travel writing as well as socio-political analysis of the history and people of Mumbai. Mehta interweaves details about his childhood in the city then known as Bombay with his experience of returning to the city as an adult, as well as a parent and resident. His family left Mumbai for the United States in 1977, settling in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, in New York City.

Mehta's return to Mumbai as an adult details his frustration with everyday day life in a developing nation. He frankly describes the slums and how they can crop up anywhere, even alongside the railroad tracks. In explaining the slums and squatting, Mehta delves into the politics of modern Mumbai: the party divisions along Hindu versus Muslim lines, the criminal Mumbai underworld and the impact of the shocking 1993 Bombay bombings. He meets with murderous gangsters as well as prominent politician Bal Thackeray of the nationalist Shiv Sena party to give the reader the fullest view of a city seemingly too large to have boundaries.

The book culminates in the story of a Jain diamond merchant family who methodically renunciate their material lives and methodically shed their wealth and family ties to spend the rest of their lives as wandering ascetics.

[edit] Reviewers' quotes

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The quotes from reviewers, listed below, help to build a picture of this complex book, written in a narrative style that would be equally well at home in fiction.

“In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta has given us a brilliant book. He writes fearlessly about the horror and wonder that is Bombay. One by one, he reveals its multiple personalities: maleficent Bombay, bountiful Bombay, beckoning temptress of hope, manufacturer of despair–city of dreams and nightmare city. Best of all, reading this book helps one understand why Bombay can be an addiction.” – Rohinton Mistry, author of Family Matters and A Fine Balance

“Quite extraordinary – Mehta writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope. The quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It’s the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read.” – Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh

“Mehta writes with a Victorian novelist’s genius for character, detail, and incident, but his voice is utterly modern. Like its subject, this is a sprawling banquet of a book, one of the most intimate and moving portraits of a place I have read.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies

“Stunning . . . the account–fierce, engaged, coruscating–of a curious outsider who became, for two years, an intimate insider . . . [Mehta] explores the underside of the city with the inquisitiveness of a voyeur, the sensibility of a poet and the zeal of a private investigator. Mehta is none of those things and yet, like the best writers, he is all of them.” – Shashi Tharoor, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Mehta is an urban ethnographer with an acute sensitivity to the peculiarities of his city . . . This fidelity to his interlocutors, and to their detail and circumstance, as much as the intelligence and brightness of Mehta’s own prose, makes Maximum City an extraordinary debut – a debut that will rival Arundhati Roy’s in fiction.” – The Nation

“[Mehta’s] sophisticated voice conveys postmodern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In his new book, Suketu Mehta writes an epic biography of his childhood city, and it’s as luscious as a cold mango lassi on a sweltering day . . . Through his fluid writing, he establishes the culture and modern history of a city torn by Hindu-Muslim strife, but where culture and beauty still flourish . . . A vivid and textured portrait of Bombay.” – New York Post

“The passions and secrets of the throbbing megalopolis come alive as Suketu Mehta steps into its back alleys and dance bars, its fantasy factories and drawing rooms . . . Every city has its chronicler . . . now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject.” – India Today

“Suketu Mehta has done the impossible: he has captured the city of Bombay on the page, and done it in technicolor. Like Zola’s Paris and the London of Dickens, it will be difficult for me to visit Bombay without thinking of Maximum City and the enormous delight I had when I inhabited its pages.” – Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner

“Along with V. S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City is probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India.” –Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father

“Maximum City is the remarkable debut of a major new Indian writer. Humane and moving, sympathetic but outspoken, it’s a shocking and sometimes heartbreaking book, teeming with extraordinary stories. It is unquestionably one of the most memorable non-fiction books to come out of India for many years, and there is little question that it will become the classic study of Bombay.” – William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals and In Xanadu

“Like one of Bombay’s teeming chawls, Maximum City is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination, filled with detail, drama and a richly varied cast of characters. In his quest to plumb both the grimy depths and radiant heights of the continent that is Bombay, Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn’t put it down.” – Amitav Ghosh, author of In an Antique Land and The Glass Palace

“Brave, honest, and addictive: Maximum City is narrative non-fiction at its best. Mehta de-exoticizes as he mesmerizes, finding humanity in killers, actresses, and civil servants, and leading us inexorably to the sight of our our own reflections in the fractured mirror of his great city, Bombay.” – Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke

Bombay’s allure is unmistakable. Millions throng to it every year from all over India to heed its siren song of glamour and economic prosperity. Yet all indicators seem to point out the fact that it is an unlivable city, with a population of 19 million and growing, with ubiquitous traffic congestion and recurring communal violence interspersed with regular underworld activity. Suketu Mehta lived the first fourteen years of his life in Bombay and then moved to New York when his diamond merchant father moved his entire family to the United States. Twenty-one years later, Mehta returned to Bombay for a two-year stint, along with his wife and two infant boys. Ostensibly, Mehta’s reasons were to give his children a sense of their roots and an exposure to Indian culture. But what really brought Mehta back was his curiosity about the city of his birth – to see if it had changed or had remained true to his boyhood memory. Mehta, in essence, acted on every expatriate’s dream of going back home and reconnecting with his past. Mehta realizes that much had changed in Bombay in the two-decade plus interim. In addition to the more obvious demographic factors – an ever increasing population with the highest density of people per square mile anywhere in the world – Mehta sees a culture shift that is not particularly subtle. The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots and the rising tide of communal violence that culminated in the 1992-1993 Hindu-Muslim riots introduced the city to gangsters, contract killings, and protection payments. Mehta comes face-to-face with several hitmen, the functionaries of gang leaders who operate from afar, whose price for a killing is no more than the cost of a mid-priced dinner at a New York restaurant.

Since the city extracts a huge price in terms of the number of hours spent on commuting and on the job, in recent times it has seen a mushrooming growth in bars and the consumption of alcohol. The bars in Bombay are unique in having “bar girls,” girls employed by the bar owner to dance fully clothed to entice customers to buy more alcohol in the promise of something more from the dancers. The story of Mona Lisa, a world-weary twenty-one-year-old dancer, is both sordid and poignant as it details a sure and steady descent into everyday hell.

Mehta encounters several lower middle-class people who desperately search for economic stability and a place to live. Girish, a young computer programmer, lives with his large family in a slum that has communal toilets and intermittent water supply. By making immense sacrifices, the family moves to a newly constructed apartment block in the outskirts of Bombay. While the family sees this as a move up, Mehta perceives it as an act of desperation, for the new apartment block is a crumbling edifice with little by the way of infrastructure and facilities.

Much as V.S. Naipaul did in his books on India, Mehta lets his characters have free reign in their description and assessment of their life in the city. While it leads to a meandering and incohesive account at times, its impact is palpable. It is a searing portrait of a city in the constant throes of chaos, as the eddies of everyday lives intersperse with people’s dreams and hopes – sometimes dashing them, and at other times affirming them emphatically. Mehta has a keen eye for detail and a dry sense of humor as the following passage about why Indian fans like Bollywood movies with their implausible plots, indicates:

The suspension of disbelief in India is prompt and generous, beginning before the audience enters the theatre itself. Disbelief is easy to suspend in a land where belief is so rampant and vigorous. …. The audience is pre-cynical. They still believe in motherhood, patriotism, and true love; Hollywood and the West have moved on. Mehta is an undeniable talent. He approaches the subject with a surfeit of honesty and seeks candid reasons why his city changed its name to “Mumbai” and why people throng to it in multitudes in spite of its decidedly unattractive features. In the end, he realizes that it is not one singular thing that makes the city tick. Rather, it is an aggregation of the quotidian, like people helping each other out, a shared sense of making it, and the hope that the city inspires in people, that makes it what it is. Populated by vibrant, colorful characters like the incorruptible cop, Ajay Lal, the street poet, Babbanji, and the cross-dressing dancer, Manoj, the book is a must-read for those interested in cultural history.