Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  All the people at the meeting in Radhabai Chawl had told me that this kind of communal rioting was unknown in the villages of India. In the villages, people were secure in their faith; they had no need to convince them selves of their devotion by massacring infidels. As one of the hotheaded young men in Radhabai Chawl had explained, “In the village, if there are two Muslim families and there is a patel”—village headman—“the patel will take care of the Muslims. In the city, the politicians and the police harass Muslims.” In the villages, they said, you live very close to your neighbors and everybody knows everybody’s business and their families and predilections. There is very little mobility; you will have to live together all your lives and can’t afford blood feuds with your neighbors.

  Around 5 percent of Bombay’s Muslims voted for the Sena in Maharashtra, in the 1995 elections, reasoning, as one Muslim put it to me, “when you give the thief the keys to the treasury he’ll never steal.” Very few issues affect the urban voter as much as crime. In the anonymous city, in the close quarters of the slum, the overriding interest is law and order, stability. More than water, more than housing, more than jobs, the Bombayite wants personal safety. It was in the Sena’s interest to prevent riots, and Asghar Ali Engineer, who runs an institute that studies communal conflict, said that since the Sena—BJP government came to power, the incidence of communal rioting had gone down sharply. It was not that Muslims felt safe under the Sena government; as Jalat Khan put it, “They have their finger in our ass.” The violence had been driven under the surface, controlled as deliberately as it was deliberately organized during the riots. Periodically, the Sena would show just what it was capable of if displeased—beating up a newspaper editor here, killing a recalcitrant tenant there. But it didn’t order young men like Sunil and Raghav to go out and lay waste to whole communities. It didn’t need this as long as it had the keys to the state’s treasury. It was quiet in the city; but it was a quiet waiting for the storm.

  Elections 1998

  It is the greatest transfer of power in world history: the real devolution of power to the real majority of 1 billion people. A huge transfer had taken place when the British left India and Pakistan, but an even greater shift was to come. In fifty years, independent India has done what five thousand years of history could not do: It gave the people who are in the majority a voice in the running of the country. The Dalits (also known as untouchables), the “scheduled castes and tribes” (those specifically listed in the constitution as historically having been discriminated against), and the “other backward classes” (those not listed in the schedule but considered deserving of affirmative action) form, as a bloc, the numerical majority in the country. For thousands of years the upper castes—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—had kept them out of power. But toward the end of the twentieth century, their time had come. For the first time in history the lower castes came into the political process and had a say in who gets to rule them. In 1997, an untouchable, K. R. Narayanan, became president. Brahmin ministers scrambled to touch his feet and ask for his blessings. A bill has come up in parliament, whose passage is inevitable, sooner or later: It will reserve one-third of the seats in the highest legislative body in the land for women, an experiment unprecedented anywhere in the world.

  In the summer of 2000, the headlines in the country read 50 MILLION AT RISK OF FAMINE. The rains had failed, but there was no famine; the government machinery roused itself and sent trainloads of relief supplies all across the vast country to people who couldn’t grow their own food. As late as the sixties, those headlines would have read THOUSANDS STARVE IN FAMINE. There are very few deaths from starvation in the country now. Anytime someone dies and the cause is suspected to be starvation, the newspapers cover it prominently, and the state government has to answer difficult questions in the assembly; the opposition jumps on such issues. Not least of the country’s accomplishments is the abolition of famine. This view surprises the elites in Bombay, who are almost uniformly pessimistic about the future of the city.

  The new leaders are extravagantly corrupt, unlike the older Oxbridge-educated ones, whose noblesse oblige and feudal wealth kept them from wholesale plunder of the public purse. And it’s not just politics. Through reservations and quotas, the “backwards” are also getting their share of other government institutions such as the Indian Administrative Service. The writer U. R. Ananthamurthy tells me about a Dalit IAS officer who explained to him why he had no option but to be corrupt. He was the first one in the history of his community, he said, to matriculate and go to Delhi, fabled seat of power. Each time he returns to his village, he is expected to come back bearing the goods and spoils of office, not just for his family but for his entire impoverished community. “I am a lump of sugar,” the officer said, “in an anthill.”

  The general election of February 1998, when I return to Bombay to live, is a ghost election. The Election Commission has clamped down on spending, and you would hardly know there was an election unless you turned on the television—at least on Malabar Hill. The only poster I’ve seen in my neighborhood features a Gandhi cap—wearing mustachioed figure, the candidate of the Pajama Party, declaring, “All I want to do is to pass motions.” It is sponsored by MTV and Levi’s jeans. Only they have the money to spend on making fun of elections.

  It is a contest between Sonia Gandhi, the Italian widow of Rajiv Gandhi, and the BJP stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The chattering classes don’t like Sonia. They are patriotic and are offended by the suggestion that we need to import our prime ministers, like two-in-one radios or designer jeans. They do not consider Sonia Indian; she enjoys little support in Malabar Hill and Jor Bagh. Where she is accepted is in rural India. When she gets up on the stage and begins her speeches by saying, “My husband made my life complete,” the people see before them not an Italian immigrant but the mythic paragon of the dutiful wife, Sati Savitri. They do not see the Italian widow of a half-Kashmiri, half-Parsi airline pilot with bad Hindi. When a woman enters the house of her husband’s family, she loses origins. Anybody in the world can come to India and find home. Even those who have been gone for twenty years.

  WHEN I REACH the diamond merchant’s office, Jayawantiben Mehta is already sitting behind the Formica desk. Jayawantiben is a middle-aged housewife and BJP member of parliament from the Mumbai South Constituency; her opponent is Murli Deora of the Congress, who had held this seat for twelve years before Jayawantiben defeated him in 1996. There is a campaign finance auction going on in the office, a tremendous haggling over what the merchants should contribute to her campaign. Figures are being shouted back and forth between the MP and the merchants around her. “You gave three and three-quarter lakhs. That leaves one and a quarter more,” she says. “No, no, we promised only three!” “No, no, nothing less than five!” (One lakh is 100,000 rupees, or $4,000.) The man whose office we are in is an official with the diamond merchants’ association; he and his father and his wife are Hindutva activists. But they are too educated to actually run for office themselves. His wife was offered a ticket by the BJP to contest the legislative elections. She refused: “It’s a dirty business.” The official now takes a white plastic grocery bag out from under his desk and thumps it on the desk in front of Jayawantiben, who does not touch it or peer inside it. “Have someone take it to the car.”

  Her assistant takes out a receipt book. Jayawantiben offers them a receipt. Further negotiations ensue, what percent is to be given by check and what percent cash. Tea arrives, and as we sip it she invites me to go campaigning with her. After she leaves, I am sitting in front of the white plastic shopping bag, which is waiting to be delivered to her car. I take a quick peek. Inside are hundreds of thousands of rupees, wrapped in newspaper bundles. Printed on the front of the bag is a logo:

  HALDIRAM’S SWEETS & NAMKEEN

  Choice of Million

  I take Jayawantiben up on her invitation and link up with her entourage one morning. I don’t have far to go; she is campaigning right behind Dar
iya Mahal, in the hidden villages of Malabar Hill. I walk with the MP on the rocks near the sea, which is home to a large shantytown. Jayawantiben is greeted with indifference, mostly. A man laughs. “There isn’t even water. They come once in five years.” But in one house, a group of women come to the porch to worship the candidate. They bring out a steel plate with a coconut, a lamp, and stick of incense, do a little puja in front of her face, and then bow down to touch her feet. She blesses them. The language of the slogans being shouted by her followers changes, from Marathi to Hindi to English, as the population of the slum warrants.

  The slum dwellers are pretty confident around their MP. Near the Hanging Gardens, a Gujarati lady comes out of her shack and points to a pipe in front. “The reservoir is right there”—the Malabar Hill reservoir, which supplies water to all of South Bombay—“and I have no water. I have left my job of twenty-two years because there is no water. The job begins at seven-thirty in Andheri, and I have to leave at six.” She needs to be home to fill the buckets when the water tanker arrives. Jayawantiben promises to do what she can. Then the woman says, “And will you get my daughter admission?”

  “Come to my office and we shall see. A convent school, a government school, a private school?”

  “Walshingham. Will you get my daughter admission in Walshingham? Just tell me.” This is one of the most elite girls’ schools in Bombay, the one my sisters went to. It is a pretty brazen demand the woman is making.

  “Since the school is private it doesn’t get government grants, but I will do what I can. That is all I can promise. I could lie and tell you I will get her admission but I don’t want to do that. Come to my office and we will try.”

  There are other villages all around the reservoir. One of them is so beautiful it inspires one campaign worker to say to another, “You want to get a place here?” Under towering banyan trees, strewn about with blue and pink plastic bags, is the settlement, made of brick walls and corrugated roofs. Roosters and chickens run about on the grass. In the distance we can see the blue sea. Gleaming steel vessels are visible through the doorways; new ten-speed bicycles are parked out front. The inhabitants are well-dressed. The children look healthy, and there are no open gutters. But there is also a very large dead rat lying on its side on the lane; we step over it. These slums grew up after I left. They are all around me now, in every available nook and cranny, and they are here to stay; they have power and water connections. All day long, Jayawantiben goes through the fourteen slum colonies around Malabar Hill, meets people, listens to their complaints. But not once does she go into any of the posh buildings surrounding the slums.

  “Why?” I ask a campaign worker.

  “The rich don’t come down from their buildings to vote,” he responds. From the wealthy section of Malabar Hill, the legal residents of the district, the turnout is 12 percent; from the squatters in the slum colonies, for whom the issue of who comes into power means the difference between living in four walls or on the street, it’s 88 percent. In the evening, I go to Bandra to meet a journalist friend. He digs out an electoral roll from 1995, when he was a poll officer. There are little red tick marks next to about half the names, grouped by the building they belong to, indicating that they’ve voted. He shows me the listings for the “good” buildings, the rich ones; there are only a few stray marks here and there: 20 percent, 25 percent. Then, next to “Navjivan Chawl,” a slum or a group housing development, there are a whole group of tick marks; every single name in that group has been marked. This is the biggest difference between the world’s two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.

  A MAN WHO HAS MURDERED is not entirely defined by it. After he kills a human being, a large, perhaps the largest, part of him is a murderer, and it marks him off from most of the rest of humanity who are not; but that is not all that he is. He can also be a father, a friend, a patriot, a lover. When we try to understand murder, we mistake the part for the whole; we deal only with the murderer and are inevitably left confused about how he became one, so radically different from you and me. I want to meet the other selves that form Sunil the murderer and see what became of him after the riots. So, on Election Day 1998, I decide to go back again to Jogeshwari. I phone Girish, who, thin and smiling as ever, meets me at Church-gate and takes me to his suburb.

  In the Jogeshwari chowk, I meet Sunil and the boys who came to drink with me. In the year and a half since I last saw him, he’s moved up in the world. Today he is wearing a crisp white shirt and black trousers and sunglasses, dangling the keys to his new motorcycle on a chain. At thirty, he has a son in addition to his daughter. Sunil is friendly as always and immediately starts introducing me around. “He came to write about the war,” Sunil says. I am met with warm smiles from people who recognize me from the last time. Bhikhu Kamath, the shakha pramukh, pulls up in a rickshaw and clasps both my hands in his in greeting.

  Sunil invites me to go canvassing with him for Ram Naik, the BJP—Sena candidate for parliament. “You will have to listen to some bad words.” Sunil laughs. “It is the nature of canvassing.” The polling area is demarcated by white lines on the road extending two hundred yards in all directions, marking the boundary within which cars and campaigning aren’t allowed. Everybody wants to get me in to see the voting; the whole area bristles with men intent on assisting me. I walk back and forth in front of the school where the polling station is located. Finally, I walk up with Girish’s brother Dharmendra, stand at the threshold, and watch him, with no little wistfulness. His number and name are checked off a list, an official tears off a ballot paper against a steel slide rule, and his finger is inked. He takes the seal and goes behind a chest-high cardboard barrier, marks his ballot with the seal, folds it, and finally deposits it in the slot. The city is full of people for whom it isn’t this simple, people who come to the booth and look up their name and address only to find a small red mark on the list; someone has already voted in their name. Someone has stolen their right to make the only meaningful choice available in a democracy. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you can prove to be who you are. You arrived second.

  The campaign workers at the booths outside the polling station, who look up people’s identification numbers for them and give them the registration chits, are paid by the political parties: 50 rupees if they are with the Sena—BJP and 100 rupees if they are with the Congress, plus puris, vegetables, and sheera, a sweet. Right then I know the Sena—BJP will win; you have to be paid more to support a loser. I speak to Bhatia, a Congress worker. He isn’t very committed, even though he’s been a Congress activist since childhood. He offers me a novel reason why people should vote for his party, the incumbents: “The Congress has already eaten. Its stomach is full. The Sena hasn’t eaten. Everybody’s a thief, but the Congress won’t eat any more.”

  I WANT TO KNOW more about Sunil’s life, so I take him and Girish to lunch at a plush restaurant in Lokhandwala. It is lit by candles—“to save electricity,” opines Girish. Girish wants to put across the fact that he’s not impressed and abuses the waiters every chance he gets. “The food took too long.”

  “Girish is a big man now,” I say.

  “He has the power of athanni now,” Sunil agrees. He has powermoni.

  Girish graduated from Ismail Yusuf College with a BA in Economics in ’91. The world was not impressed. “I realized there I should have gone to a better college.” Then he studied computers in private classes and became a sub-broker during the time of the stock market boom in the early nineties. Everybody made money. Girish wallowed in luxury; he could afford to drink fruit juice every day. “Even if we liked banana juice, we would pick the more expensive ones.” After the bomb blasts of 1993, the boom ended. Girish has since worked for a variety of software companies, going back and forth between jobs and his own business ventures.

  “Money is God,” says Sunil. He has been to fancier places than this one. He once went to the Taj Hotel for a meal. He still keeps the bill. It came to 2,400 rupees; he show
s it to skeptics in Jogeshwari. The people I meet who are seeking position or money in Bombay often use this one hotel, this one citadel of Empire, as a mark or measure of their progress upward through the strata of Bombay. The Taj was born out of a slight; because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel. When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshetji Tata was refused entrance into Watson’s Hotel in the nineteenth century because he was a native, he swore revenge and built the massive Taj in 1903, which outshone Watson’s in every department. It is less a hotel than a proving ground for the ego. The Taj lobby and its adjoining toilets are where you test your self-worth; theoretically, anyone can come in out of the heat and sit in the plush lobby, on the ornate sofas, amid the billionaire Arabs and the society ladies, or relieve themselves in the gleaming toilets. But you need that inner confidence to project to the numerous gatekeepers, to the toilet attendants; you need first to convince yourself that you belong there, in order to convince others that you do. And then you realize that the most forbidding gatekeeper is within you.

  Sunil grew up in the slums, very far from the Taj. When he was eight, in the second standard, both his parents were seriously ill. His father worked the night shift in the Premier Automobiles factory and didn’t bring home a lot. He developed an ulcer, then appendicitis, and at the same time his mother had what Sunil calls “a ball in her stomach.” They were in and out of the hospital for three years; his father was declared to be in the “last stage.” At home, there was only Sunil and his slightly older sister; there was no earning member, and the relatives didn’t help out much; if the parents died, his uncle stood to gain some three lakhs. The food at Cooper Hospital was very bad, so most of the patients had their meals brought by relatives from home. Sunil would run out of school when it finished at twelve-thirty, take the 253 bus, and go home. There, his sister would be waiting with the tiffin; she went to school at seven in the morning, then came home and cooked lunch. Sunil would dash to the hospital with the food, for he had to be there before two o’clock, when visiting hours were over. Often, he couldn’t make it in time, and the doorman would tell him he couldn’t go in till four, when visiting hours resumed. He would beg and plead, pointing out that his parents were upstairs, right above them on the second floor, hungry, waiting. The guard was inflexible; Sunil was only a little kid, without money. So the boy would sit by the door for two hours with the rapidly cooling lunch and watch as a procession of people who bribed the guard with a few rupees were let in. “I didn’t have ten or twenty rupees, so I sat there thinking: If I can’t do this, take my father his tiffin, then I can’t live. If one has to live, one should live in a proper way. Then I realized that a man has to make money anyhow in Bombay—through the underworld or anything—and that even murder is all right.”