Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  After the nuclear tests, the international financial carpetbaggers start leaving Bombay, not in a group but in twos and threes. For a while, India is no longer a profit center. A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving. So it is that the Bombayite might dream of the West, not just for the riches that lie there but also for the excitement of moving somewhere again.

  Every summer, waves of Indians living overseas come back. They also send back little pictures: of their son in front of the new fifty-two-inch TV; their daughter sitting on the hood of the new minivan; the wife in the open-plan kitchen, one hand on the microwave; the whole family laughing together in the small backyard pool, their “bungalow” in the background. These pictures plant little time bombs in the minds of the siblings left behind. They hold the pictures and look around their two-room flat in Mahim and suddenly the new sofa and the two-in-one Akai stereo they have invested in with such pride look cheap and shabby in comparison. It used to be that they could reassure themselves: At least my children are growing up with Indian values. But when the children of the exiles come back, it is noticed that there isn’t such a vast gulf between the Bombay kids and their cousins abroad; both wear the same football jerseys and speak in the same peculiar argot of the music video channels, an internationalized American. Often, the kids from the cold countries are interested in going to a temple; they have come back brimming with facts on Hinduism that have been taught to them in the fine schools they attend. The local kids want to take them club-hopping. When we decide to put Gautama in a Gujarati-language school, our decision is met with amazement and sometimes anger. “How could you do that to your son?” demands the lady down the hall. “You’ll ruin his life.” But then she reflects. “It’s all right for you, you’re getting out of here sooner or later. If you were living here permanently you’d put him in Cathedral.”

  A whole network of recently met strangers gather themselves to help us find a school for Gautama. Everyone knows a teacher or a principal or an owner at one of the few schools that has a kindergarten, and they energetically make calls on our behalf, even go personally to wheedle and convince. They paint us as innocents abroad, foreigners unsophisticated in the ways of school admissions. The fact that we need a place only for two years counts in our favor; it means that when Gautama leaves, another place will be created, to be bestowed upon someone else in exchange for a favor or a donation. Each vacant place signifies money and power. There are only seven schools in South Bombay that are considered worth sending a child to.

  One of them is the Bombay International School, which has eight families living in the school building. They are long-term tenants, protected by the Rent Act. The door next to the library is someone’s flat. The school is in desperate need of space for classrooms but cannot force the residents out. It inherited the tenants years ago, when it bought the building. There is no land on which to build schools; no new ones have appeared in my area since I was a child. But the population of children has exploded. There is no place for all these new learners. They have to be registered at birth. “Is it difficult, getting a place for a child in a school in Bombay?” I ask the principal.

  “It’s like climbing Mount Everest.”

  I want my son to go to a Gujarati-language school, and the only one that’s any good in Bombay is New Era, a school founded by Gandhians. A trustee writes a letter for us, and after a round of begging and pleading it is done. Going to pick him up after his first day, my heart swells with gladness: I can’t recognize my son. I can’t pick him out from the whole crowd of brown-skinned kids in white uniforms. For the first time in his life, he’s just like all the others.

  But not long afterward, I become conscious of a way in which my son is not like the others. In the school bus with him coming back from New Era, little Komal tells me, in Gujarati, that her grandmother is coming to visit. She has stick-on tattoos she wants me to put on the back of her hand. Out of her schoolbag come wonderful treasures: a potato with lots of matches stuck in it, like a porcupine; outlines of drawings to be colored in; a piece of paper cut into strips and held together loosely at the top so you can fold it and something interesting will happen. She instructs me to tell Gautama’s mother where to buy shoes. My son tries to talk to her, to the others on the bus, but nobody can understand his English. “But can’t you speak Gujarati?” I ask him.

  “I speak only a little Gujarati,” he explains reasonably. “Pappa, please put me in an English-language school.”

  “You broke your father’s heart,” my uncle later tells Gautama.

  MY SON COMES BACK from Head Start, his new English-language school, and for the first time in this country he can describe his day in detail. He painted on a piece of paper using a capsicum as a brush; then he made a house and a sun; then he played puzzles; and he ate a “square idli,” which is later explained to him as a dhokla, a Gujarati snack. I listen happily. He never talked about what he did in the Gujarati school, because he never understood.

  The first evening, a woman calls for Sunita. There is a birthday party for one of the students in the school that Saturday; can she and Gautama come? On the second day, Sunita meets another mother—the family has lately returned from Lagos—and makes plans to go swimming at the Breach Candy club, which used to be reserved for whites and is now open to anyone with a foreign passport. Immediately, this world takes us in. Komal’s mother never fulfilled her promises to meet us; not one of the New Era mothers included us or our son in their birthday parties or sent their children over to play. We were too foreign, too “cosmopolitan.” You belong to the club that takes you in, and this is ours: rich people, English-speaking people, foreign-returned people. Head Start is filled with the sons and daughters of industrialists, royal families. My son is not going to get the education I got; he is going to get, in India at least, an elite education. If we stayed here, he would go on to the “convent” schools, to Cathedral or Scottish Mission, to join the ranks of boys who looked down on my younger self. It is as difficult to move down the caste ladder as it is to move up.

  At Head Start, iron-willed mothers meticulously plan their children’s birthday parties. My son goes to one, in a large apartment in Cuffe Parade. The party favors are imported from Dubai. There is a professional entertainer, with a dog that has been trained to play basketball. Gautama comes home with three sets of imported crayons and coloring pens—“felt pens,” as we used to call those items we craved. There might have been a hundred kids there; the hosts would have spent not less than 100,000 rupees—about $4,000—on that party. But it is a good investment in this world, in Bombay High. It is training for their children in a lifetime of parties. The question that never leaves the minds of the charmed set in Bombay, however old they are, is: Who will invite me to their party? Who will come to mine?

  There is something especially frenetic about partying in a poor country. Every night there is a party, and the invitations outdo each other in inventiveness: one comes in a woolen glove, another in a shot glass, a third in a box with pasta, dried mushrooms, and Italian herbs. These are grownup birthday parties, and the same people get invited or not invited who were invited or not invited in school. They are stocked with Bombabes: good-looking women in short skirts. I see something new this time in India: single people in their thirties, even forties, unmarried by choice. One of the rakes uses the old line to explain why he won’t get married: “If you can get milk every day, why buy the cow?” The cow is a Bombabe in her thirties, a year or three away from her sell-by date. Successful at her career because she is single, desperately lonely also because of it, she is fair game for the married, the lesbian, and the fat—anybody to hold her through the endless night.
But none of this vulnerability will creep into her public self. The world will never know. Married women will envy her.

  Bombay is built on envy: the married envy the single, the single long to be married, the middle class envy the truly rich, the rich envy those without tax problems. The advertising billboards promote it. OWNER’S PRIDE, NEIGHBOR’S ENVY goes the slogan of a long-running TV ad, showing a green horned demon with his talons around a TV set. The third page of the Bombay Times and the back pages of the Indian Express and the columns of the Sunday edition of Mid-Day and the metro sections of the newsmagazines are the envy pages, all designed to make the reader feel poorer, uglier, smaller, and most of all, socially outcast. So the housewife in Dadar looks up from page three at her husband sitting there in his lungi, having his hair oiled, and demands to know why he isn’t being invited to any of these parties, doesn’t know any of these names. Thus does a metropolis create what advertising people call “aspirational” consumers.

  There is a simple truth about the society set: They hate living here but they couldn’t exist anywhere else in India. “Maybe Bangalore,” they say hopefully, but few of them ever move there. If they move, they go to New York or London. Better still, they bring New York and London to them, in restaurants such as Indigo, whose success is due to displacement. You walk in off the seedy Bombay street, and you’re in Soho. No effort is spared to make it foreign, in the waitstaff, the food, the decor. The first world lives smack in the center of the third. I meet people in Bombay High who can tell me where to get the best chocolates in Paris but have no idea where to find good bhelpuri—the city’s equivalent of New York’s pizza slice—in Bombay. You would think that to go from South Bombay to the rest of the city—the area demarcated by the Mahim flyover, from the taxi zone to the auto-rickshaw zone—you would need a visa. But these people are not any less a part of the city for their determined exclusion of most of it from their lives. Bombay has always been a city of internal exiles: Parisian socialites in Colaba, London bankers in Cuffe Parade. If they ever actually made the move to the cities of their dreams, they would be adrift, valueless. Other worlds can be replicated right here, in miniature.

  ONE AFTERNOON, before Sunita and the children have joined me in Bombay, I am walking on the road leading to the Strand bookstore when I see a little family: a mother with wild and ragged hair, walking with a baby boy, maybe a year old, fast asleep on her shoulder and leading by the hand another boy, maybe four or five, who is rubbing his eyes with the fist of his free hand. He is walking the way children walk when they have been walking a long time, his legs jerking outward, his head nodding in a circle, to beat the monotony, the tiredness. They are all barefoot. The mother says something gentle to the older boy, still clutching her hand. I walk past them, but then I have to stop. I stand and watch. They come up to a stall on the sidewalk, and, as I expect her to, the mother holds out her hand. The stall owner doesn’t acknowledge them. Automatically I find myself opening my wallet. I look for a ten, then take out a fifty instead, and walk up to them very fast, my mind raging. I thrust the fifty into her hand—“Yes, take this”—and walk on very fast without looking back, till I get to the air-conditioned bookstore, and then I stand in a corner and shut my eyes.

  The identification with my own family is so strong—a mother with two young boys—that I start constructing a past and a future for them. Probably they would have walked like that all day long, barefoot in the heat. A hundred times a day the boys would have seen their mother hold out her hand to beg. A hundred people would be watched by those clear young eyes as these strangers curse their mother, tell her to move on, or throw some change at her. And still she would carry them on her shoulder when they were tired. Sometimes she might put them down in the dirt, and then they would eat a little rice or sleep where they were from tiredness.

  All day long I feel ashamed of spending money. Everything I spend that day becomes multiples of that 50-rupee note. Within twenty minutes of my giving money to the mother I have spent six times as much on books. The pizza I order in the evening is two of those fifties. The rent I will be paying per month on my flat will be two thousand times that fifty. And so on. What had my giving them 50 rupees changed? For me, it meant nothing: pocket change, less than a New York subway token. I haven’t yet learnt to take the brightly colored money seriously. But it would probably be a whole day’s earnings for the mother (I can’t think of her as “the beggar”). Perhaps she will take her boys and her sudden good fortune and buy them a toy from the arcades under the Fort’s arches. Perhaps she will buy the medicine she hasn’t been able to afford for the younger child’s cough. Perhaps she will take the money and give it to her man, who will buy six more bottles of country liquor. And that is the obscenity here: Our lives have two entirely separate systems of currency.

  I am new in the country still. It has not hit me till now, and I feel physically exhausted. I call Sunita in London and ask her if our two children are well. I feel an intense need to hug them tight. I am still reacting to the city as a foreigner. I remember what a French friend had told me about her mother, a social worker in Paris. The first time she came to India, she stepped outside the airport with her bags to have a horde of street children come up to her, little babies being carried by only slightly older ones. Overcome by their destitution, their youth, their beauty, she opened up both her bags on the sidewalk and started handing out gifts. Within minutes her bags were picked clean. Thus unburdened, she stood up and walked forth into India.

  The previous evening I had come home from the Library Bar after a small party of billionaires, people richer than any I’d ever met in New York. In the daytime I had been walking around the Bihari slums of Madanpura, scenes of fantastic deprivation. As I wake up now in this flat overlooking the sea, the children of Madanpura have long since been up in their shanties. Maybe they are working at construction sites, holding on their heads baskets of bricks weighing half again as much as themselves. Maybe they are running, fetching tea, washing vessels, servicing the desires of men. This, too, is a kind of childhood.

  SLOWLY, A SYSTEM EVOLVES in the Dariya Mahal flat: a maid, a driver, and a cleaner are found and tested; bathrooms are brought to working order; communications with the outside world—newspapers, e-mail, telephones—are established. We begin to get to know the patterns of light and air, we know what time of day to draw the curtains, when to leave the windows open, and in what sequence. We still don’t have many friends, but we are beginning to rely on one or two people that we will see at least once every couple of weeks. The surrounding Gujaratis make tentative attempts to reach out to me but they are unsure of how to do so, since I have left the family business and married a Madrasi.

  Indian friends such as Ashish from America call me. “Can we return there too? We have been thinking for a while, but what kind of job will my wife get . . .?” To what India do you want to return? For us, who left at the beginning of our teenage years, just after our voices broke and before we had a conception of making love or money, we kept returning to our childhoods. Then, after enough trips of enough duration, we returned to the India of our previous visits. I have another purpose for this stay: to update my India, so that my work should not be just an endless evocation of childhood, of loss, of a remembered India. I want to deal with the India of the present.

  But the terrain is littered with memory mines. I step on a particular square of cement on a particular lane and look up and see a tree springing up as I saw it a quarter of a century ago. A memory explosion, an instant bridge between that precise moment and this one. As I walk around the city now, I step on little pockets of memory treasure that burst open and waft out their scents.

  So I wander the streets with my laptop in a green backpack, taking rickshaws and taxis and trains whenever possible, looking for all the things that made me curious as a child. As people talk to me, my fingers dance with Miss Qwerty. But I have to pay. My currency is stories. Stories told for stories revealed—so have I heard. Stories fr
om other worlds, carried over the waters in caravans and ships, to be exchanged for this year’s harvest of stories. A hit man’s story to a movie director in exchange for the movie director’s story to the hit man. The film world and the underworld, the police and the press, the swamis and the sex workers, all live off stories; here in Bombay, I do too. And the city I lost is retold into existence, through the telling of its story.

  Powertoni

  “WHAT DOES A MAN LOOK LIKE when he’s on fire?” I asked Sunil.

  It was December 1996, and I was sitting in a high-rise apartment in Andheri with a group of men from the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party. They were telling me about the riots of 1992—93, that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

  The two other Shiv Sena men with Sunil looked at each other. Either they didn’t trust me yet or they were not drunk enough on my cognac. “I wasn’t there. The Sena didn’t have anything to do with the rioting,” one man said.

  Sunil would have none of this. He put down his glass and said, “I’ll tell you. I was there. A man on fire gets up, falls, runs for his life, falls, gets up, runs.”

  He addressed me.

  “You couldn’t bear to see it. It is horror. Oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white, you touch his arm like this”—he flicked his arm—“the white shows. It shows especially on the nose”—he rubbed his nose with two fingers as if scraping off the skin—“oil drips from him, water drips from him, white, white all over.