Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Seventy-five percent of the country is below the age of twenty-five. Sunil is representative of this group—a generation that expects something better than their parents had. If they don’t get it, they will be angry. And no family, no country, can withstand the anger of its young.

  It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations at your back. You dare not turn around. You know what is expected of you; you have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is getting married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. It’s up to you; you carry a heavy burden of guilt from your childhood for having heedlessly taken the best of everything. So when you go out with your matriculation certificate or your BA and find there are no jobs—the big companies have stopped hiring or are leaving the city altogether, and the small companies will hire only relatives of people already working there, and your family is from Raigad or Bihar and has no influence here—you will look for other ways of making money. You will look for other ways of assuring your family that their investment wasn’t lost. You can take beatings, you can take rejection, but you can’t face your family if you don’t do your duty as the son. Go out in the morning and come back at night; or go out at night and come back in the daytime if you have to, but take care of the family. You owe it to them; it is your dharma.

  In his teenage years, Sunil started hanging around the Maya Dolas gang, doing errands for them, bringing them cold drinks and food, watching and learning how men make money in Bombay. He took the tenth-standard examinations and failed. He tried again and passed. When it came time to take the exams for the twelfth standard, Sunil was wiser. Studying, trying, and trying again till you succeeded was fools’ work. He hired a stand-in to take the exams for him, with a forged hall ticket. He got 67 percent, First Class. After his schooling was over, Sunil joined the Shiv Sena. When he had needed transfusions, the Sena boys gave blood for him. This act touched him deeply—they are, literally, his blood brothers.

  These days, his position has changed; he is no longer a tapori, a street punk. His cable business is expanding, and he has also started a small factory making pens, a mango-trading operation, and, with the purchase of a van, a tourist business. The police use Sunil’s good offices to put an end to minor disputes; when a group of boys was bent on breaking a rickshaw, Sunil offered them free entry to the circus if they behaved themselves. Sunil has a stack of business cards in his front pocket; prominent among them is a card issued by the Government of Maharashtra which confers on him the title Special Executive Officer. “With this card I can do anything in Bombay. I have the power of a judge,” says Sunil proudly, although he is just a glorified notary. When a political party comes to power, one of the ways it rewards its cadres is to issue such cards, making hundreds of people Special Executive Magistrates and Special Executive Officers. It often becomes an embarrassment, because a large percentage of those honored in this way have extensive criminal records. Legally, it confers almost no power on Sunil. But the card gives him status, legitimacy; when he flashes it around, few people think to ask him what it means, since it bears the seal of the government of Maharashtra.

  The treatment he gets at hospitals has also changed. His father had to have another operation recently; his left testicle was removed. Sunil could afford to pay 15,000 rupees for the procedure, at Hinduja Hospital, one of the city’s best, with five-star facilities. And they didn’t make him wait by the door. “Now I can cross the door of any hospital—Hinduja, whatever. I can talk to Balasaheb Thackeray, and he will phone the hospital, and they will fear him.”

  Sunil is very pleased when his daughter calls him on his mobile phone, less because of the sound of his little girl’s voice than because of the opportunity it affords him to show off his pricey gadget. He hands me the phone so I can talk to Guddi. She is in an English-language school, St. Xavier’s. The admission was arranged by the minister who bailed him out during the riots. In return, Sunil arranges to round up the boys for the minister “when they are needed to burn a train or break a car.”

  But Sunil is still trying to understand the ways of St. Xavier’s. One Parents’ Day, Sunil went with Guddi to the elite school. There was a stall with books from Japan; his daughter put one into her bag. The teacher said something in English that Sunil didn’t understand and asked him to sign something. The teacher was smiling, patting Guddi on the head and saying “good parents.” “I also felt good,” Sunil recalls, so he signed. He went home with his daughter clutching the book. The next day a deliveryman knocked at their door and deposited an entire set of encyclopedias in the middle of their shack. Sunil found he had just bought it, for 4,500 rupees—over $1,100.

  Sunil met his wife while playing the contact sport of kabbadi for the school. They knew each other for almost a decade before he decided to marry her. She is of his caste, although from a poorer family, so his parents objected. “My wife is not so good in looks,” he says. But she recently stood as an independent for the city council and came within eighty votes of winning. The BJP and Sena had made an adjustment, put up a joint candidate against her. I ask Sunil if there was pressure on him, as a Sena man, to withdraw his wife’s candidacy. “It’s democracy in the household. It’s my wife’s decision; what can I do?” The Sena, in the next election, will have to give her a ticket or pay large sums to buy her off and make her withdraw. This election was just an “apprenticeship.” Even now, if there is a dispute among the ladies of the area, they come to Sunil’s wife. At twenty-three, she was the youngest candidate in the election, and there is to be another election in three years. Sunil told her, in his English: “Try to again and again, but don’t cry.”

  Sunil knows firsthand about the virtues of political participation. He went shopping with his wife two days ago, for his son’s birthday, and as they were standing with their shopping bags at the rickshaw stand, they saw a pregnant lady arguing with a rickshaw driver. The driver was refusing to take the lady to an unsafe area of Jogeshwari near Radhabai Chawl. Sunil’s wife stopped a police constable, pointing out that there was a pregnant lady trying to get a rickshaw. The constable ignored her. When Sunil’s wife came back to him, he told her to go back to the cop and say, “I stood for the elections and I got eight hundred and seventy votes, and I can shut down this rickshaw stand.” Thus the lady was seated in the rickshaw and the cop was reported to his superior officer. “I made my wife realize what kind of power she has,” Sunil says.

  As he walks me to a rickshaw, he points out a plot of ground where he expects a circus will be coming, from which, since he holds the parking concession, he’ll be making extra income. He makes 50,000 rupees a month from his cable business, and another 25,000 or so from his other activities, legal and illegal.

  “Seventy-five thousand,” I calculate. “That’s more than what some executives make.”

  “That’s why I like myself so much,” he responds.

  SUNIL WILL INHERIT BOMBAY, I now see. The consequences of his burning the bread seller alive: When the Sena government came in two years later, he got appointed a Special Executive Officer; he became, officially, a person in whom public trust is reposed. He has energy; he gets to work by 10 a.m., roams far and wide over Bombay, from Jogeshwari to Dahisar, and beyond to Goa and Raigad, and still gets home late at night to be with his daughter. He is not afraid of getting his feet dirty in politics; in fact, he participates with zest and puts his wife up for elections as well. He is idealistic about the nation and utterly pragmatic about
the opportunities for personal enrichment that politics offers. Sunil, in fact, can be held up as an exemplar of the capitalist success story.

  The new inheritors of the country—and of the city—are very different from the ones who took over from the British, who had studied at Cambridge and the Inner Temple and come back. They are badly educated, unscrupulous, lacking a metropolitan sensibility—buffoons and small-time thugs, often—but, above all, representative. The fact that a murderer like Sunil could become successful in Bombay through engagement in local politics is both a triumph and a failure of democracy. Not all politicians are as compromised as he is, but the ones that aren’t have to rely on people like Sunil to get elected. Most of the Bombay politicians need to mobilize huge sums of money for campaign expenditures. The salaries they get, the money their party officially sanctions for campaign funds, are a pittance, so they have to look elsewhere.

  This shift is happening all around me. The Bombay I have grown up in is suffering from a profound sadness: the sadness of lost ownership, the transfer of the keys to the city. No longer is the political life of the city controlled by the Parsis, the Gujaratis, the Punjabis, the Marwaris. This passage was marked by the candidacy of Naval Tata in 1971. The powerful industrialist ran as an independent from the Mumbai South constituency, the richest and smallest in the country, and still he lost. In India, unlike in America, fabulous wealth by itself can’t buy you an election. Just about the only way the upper class will get into politics now is by being nominated to the upper house of parliament.

  Among the former owners, there is a sense that the barbarians have been let into the city gates and are sleeping on the footpath outside their palaces. There is resentment that Bombay has to deal with the country’s detritus. The only consolation is that the huddled masses are also the talent pool for South Bombay’s maids, drivers, peons. That is part of the attraction of living here: You can find a maid and pay her a monthly salary smaller than the cost of breakfast at the Taj Hotel. Politics, too, has become yet another of those menial tasks that is assigned to servants or subordinates, something you drop as soon as you acquire the financial means to do so, like cleaning the toilet, doing the accounts, answering the phone, or standing in line at a government office. “Send your man,” I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. “I have no man,” I respond. “I’m my own man.” They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person. They send their man.

  But it is also these rich who create wealth, who create the conditions that will allow the mother on the streets to find a home for her children. They must be allowed their penthouses, their brandy, so the poor may be allowed their simple clean room, their rice and dal. In the post-Marxist age, we can no longer believe that redistribution solves anything, that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer. It is the death not just of ideology but of ideas. Nothing in the national debate has any strong conviction. On the right, a vague belief in foreign investment; on the left, a vague and poorly articulated fear of it. The left is apologetic about being left. Who can defend the work habits of the employees of nationalized banks? After fifty years of experiments in socialism, who can argue with a straight face that central planning is the answer to poverty? One slogan that has been conspicuously absent from the electioneering this year has been GARIBI HATAO. “Remove Poverty.” It’s as if there is a tacit acknowledgment on all sides that the poverty is insurmountable, so we’ll move on and tackle something else, corruption or multinationals or whether we should have a temple or mosque in Ayodhya.

  The cities of India are going through a transition similar to what American cities went through at the turn of the twentieth century, when the political machines of the Democratic party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way. Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck. In Bombay, this has not yet happened. “The dregs at the bottom have become the scum at the top,” Gerson da Cunha, a civic activist and figurehead of the old guard, tells me. When people in South Bombay mourn the loss of the “gracious” city, what they are really mourning is the loss of their own consequence in the city’s affairs. It was never a gracious city for those who had to live under the shadow of their mansions; it was actively pestilential. It will take them a few generations, the new owners, to learn how to run their house and keep it clean and safe. But how can we begrudge them that when we, who had been the owners for such a long time and had still botched it, handed it over in such terrible disrepair?

  I ASK SUNIL to take me to his slums. He and two of his Sena friends have set up three rooms on railway property. We walk through a pitch-dark alley till we get to a patch of ground with newly demolished huts set amid concrete housing for low-level railway workers. Just past this is a larger plot of land, meant to be a dumping ground for the railways. I can see the lights of a suburban train go by on the far side. We walk on wooden boards bridging open sewers and stand at the edge of the dumping ground; it is sopping wet from the rain, and my feet, shod in sandals, are covered in mud and God knows what else. “There”—Sunil points—“those three rooms with the oil lamps.” That’s his property. “We have captured the land.”

  Currently, it is occupied by laborers to whom Sunil has given the huts for free, so that tenure may be established over the land. They have been demolished twice by the railways. Each time, they have been reconstructed. They are built against the wall of a factory. Two sticks of bamboo in front support sheets of cardboard, and lots of black tarpaulin is draped over the whole structure. The cost of the material, which Sunil gets from Goregaon: 1,500 rupees. The time it takes to rebuild the shack after a demolition: an hour or two. “If you give it three kicks the whole thing will fall down,” says Sunil. If they are demolished a third time, he is determined to build them again, and this time he says he will erect brick structures.

  Above is a wire stretching between buildings, over poles. “All that is my cable,” says Sunil. He walks me to the other side of the plot. A wall demarcates a construction site where housing for railway officers is to be built. We are now standing on a new road that will link the officers’ housing. This is the reason he might hit the jackpot, Sunil says. If there is a road there will be shops, and shops can be demolished innumerable times, and each time they will be re-erected. There is already a water tap in the back of the factory. Electricity is more of a problem, since if Sunil’s laborers tap into the electric wire around here, their legitimate neighbors, the railway workers, will get accused of stealing it, and there will be tension. So the shacks are lit by lanterns. The right of the slum dwellers to live here is protected by Sunil and his friends. “We are the bhais”—the dons—“of the area. So nobody will trouble them.” They pay nothing in rent, and when Sunil decides to build a permanent structure, they will be paid 5,000 rupees to vacate. We go back through the funereal dark. Shapes of people walk past us in the half-light. If someone from the Sena is elected to the legislative council, says Sunil, he will be able to convert the shack into a brick house and he won’t be bothered. Then the illegal slum will be made permanent and legal. But even if the land were to be sold now, he stands to make a profit of ten to twelve lakhs.

  The last of the demolitions happened after the 1998 general election. The railway police, under the jurisdiction of the local BJP member of parliament, demolished nine different hutments put up by Sunil on railway land, along with some fifty others. Sunil went to the house of the member of parliament and spoke to his daughter, to tell her father to get the police to stop demolishing the shacks. “You don’t know what I’ll do,” he told the daughter.

  “What can you do?” she asked, keeping him waiting in the anteroom.

  Did she know what would happen if, in the next election, the voting stopped in a station for three or four hours? The Jogeshwari station under Sunil’s domain voted i
n large numbers for the Sena—BJP alliance. He had several boys, he told the minister’s daughter, who would create a riot and stop the voting for four hours. His boys would go to jail for a few months, but did she know how many votes her father would lose in that one station during the time it was closed?

  “There was a silence,” Sunil recalls. “She said, ‘Come inside.’ I said, ‘From now on, the decision to demolish or not is yours.’” He is confident of the outcome. “Now they won’t demolish.”