by Suketu Mehta
Amol is thoughtful. He is eating his food with a fork and spoon. His head lowered, he says, “There are very dangerous days ahead.”
“Why?”
“People don’t have jobs. The boys have no work, nothing to do all day. And everything’s expensive. Now if a young man wants to go to a ladies’ bar and have a couple of drinks, he won’t have money to give to his people at home. You can get boys used to going to ladies’ bars, to the lifestyle, and then they’ll do anything for money.”
“What will be the effect of this?” I ask Amol.
“Murders will cost two hundred rupees.”
“How can a man kill?” I ask Amol. “How can he bring himself to do it?”
“You are a writer. After drinking you will say to yourself, now I must write a story. If you are a dancer, after drinking you will feel like dancing. If you are a killer, after drinking you will think, Now I must kill somebody.” Amol flexes his arms. It’s what you do; it’s in your nature.
TO KEEP FROM LOSING his boys to the underworld gangs, Bal Thackeray has constantly to channel their violent energy. He has to invent new enemies. The easiest to attack are people in the arts, ill understood by the Sena’s rabble. In 1998, the Sena storms onto the stage at a concert by Ghulam Ali, the Pakistani ghazal maestro. “We can also sing,” they proclaim. And they have their boys recite “Jai Maharashtra.” The Saheb’s diktat comes down: No Pakistani entertainers can stage a concert in their city, no Pakistani sportsmen can play. The gentry of Mumbai suffers the shutting down of the concert without a peep. The police commissioner tells the newspapers that no crime has been committed, as the organizers have not registered a complaint. After all, this is the city where murderers walk free in the streets and sit in the highest legislative chambers of the city. They have powertoni.
The Saheb also strongly objects to an art film made by a Canadian-Indian filmmaker, Fire, which shows a love affair between two sisters-in-law in New Delhi. “Has lesbianism spread like an epidemic that it should be portrayed as a guideline to unhappy wives not to depend on their hus bands?” he demands. Indian society could not tolerate the “so-called progressive culture of the West where they marry in the morning and take divorce in the evening.” Accordingly, his thugs destroy theaters showing the film, and it is taken off screens throughout the country. There are the usual editorials against Thackeray—in the English newspapers. Sunil and Amol and the boys in the Sena do not read the English newspapers.
But in January 1999, the Sena makes a big mistake: It takes on Sachin Tendulkar, the country’s most idolized cricketer. A mob of Sainiks storms into the offices of the Board of Cricket Control of India, angered by the board’s invitation to the Pakistani cricket team to tour India. They destroy the office, including the World Cup that had been brought home to India in 1983. Tendulkar is put under police protection, and the party’s leaders speedily distance themselves from the incident. By this point it has just become mob frenzy; the tiger Thackeray rides is now out of his control. This latest foray is not about a particular leader or even ideology; it is all about power and about feeding the imagination of Thackeray’s hordes. The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slum, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theaters, posh apartments, and the offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars. All the accumulated insults, rebukes, and disappointments of life in a decaying megalopolis come out in a cathartic release of anger. It’s okay to be angry in a crowd; the crowd feeds on your anger, digests it, nourishes your rage as your rage nourishes it. All of a sudden you feel powerful. You can take on anybody. It is not their city anymore, it is your city.
You own this city by right of your anger.
I GO TO A FRIEND’S apartment in a high-rise in Lokhandwala that he has given me a key for, with Sunil and Girish. It is still raining in November, and there is a spectacular lightning display in the sky over Bombay. We drink whiskey on the balcony. Sunil takes off his shirt and sits in the armchair in his undershirt. He keeps looking at his new watch, not so much to check the time as to admire the timepiece. I notice, not for the first time, his sense of well-being whenever I take him to a high floor of a building. Most people from his chawl never go above the second floor.
“There is a lot of struggle ahead in Bombay,” says Sunil. After ten years, Sunil plans to shift out of Bombay to Raigad, for the sake of his children. He has heard that children have been kidnapped for their kidneys. A barometer of the city’s fortunes is the alcoholic strength of the liquor it imbibes. “Prices are very high, so man will struggle a lot, and from that tension he will drink a lot. The boys from the share market are drinking sixers.” A sixer is just one step above country liquor. It costs 5 rupees a bottle.
It starts raining heavily, out of season. “Because of our sins,” reasons Sunil. “Even God doesn’t accept Bombay. God made the world, but he doesn’t accept Bombay.” And Sunil certainly knows about sin. On Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, Sunil will broadcast a pornographic film on his cable network. The requests for porn often come from his female subscribers. When he goes to I.C. College, the women tell him, “Sunil-bhai, you are not taking care of us.” That is the code. Early on the evening that he decides to “take care” of his subscribers, a little symbol, a star, for example, is displayed on a corner of the screen, or a message scrolls with a time across the bottom all evening—“BBC channel is changed”—and the initiates understand that a blue movie will show on a particular channel at a particular time. Such a film is shown on the nights that the people of Bombay drink: not on Tuesday, because that is the night for the worship of Ganapati; not on Thursday, for that is for Saibaba; not, usually, on Saturday, because many people observe it as Hanuman’s day; and not on Monday, “when people don’t drink so much because they’ve been drunk all weekend.” Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays are drinkers’ nights, blue-film nights, in Sunil’s Bombay. The latter is best enjoyed after an evening of the former.
Sunil has rich pickings among the housewives along his cable route. “Who is allowed to enter the house? The milkman brings his milk and goes away; the ironing man takes the clothes and goes away. But I am allowed to enter the house, even the bedroom, and stay and fix things.” He has fucked a total of thirteen women on his route “whom I have liked—I have chosen.” Among these, he has his preferences. “I must have Gujarati ladies. Their men only do it once a week.”
“I am playing the game of five women in my neighborhood,” boasts Sunil. Sex and death are very close in Bombay. “Playing the game” can mean killing a person or screwing a woman. “How often does a married man give it to his wife? Twice, thrice a week? Woman wants it. Woman must have it.” He never makes the first move; he never puts his hands anywhere. “I don’t want to ruin my business. The women call me up, saying there is a fault in my cable. They touch me, they sit next to me, but I will let a couple of days go by.” He will take any age; he has fucked a fifty-three-year-old housewife. One day, says Sunil, he will take us to the village of the Aghoris, outside Bombay. The Aghoris have a special, extremely athletic technique of fucking: The man makes the girl clasp a tree, then raises the girl’s leg and puts it on his shoulder. “I can’t do this kind of shot, but I have fucked an Aghori girl. Waheguru!”
Sunil and Girish speak with admiration and laughter about the exploits of a young man in their slum named Santosh. “He is a real madharchod. He’s a very bad man.” Santosh had declared that he considered the wife of his neighb
or Raj his sister; she ties a rakhi, a sacred thread, on his wrist every year. He was allowed complete access to Raj’s house and was fucking their daughter—“his niece,” Sunil points out. But one day he discovered that a doctor in the lane was fucking the mother. So he demanded sexual rights to the mother also, or he would blow the whistle about her relationship with the doctor. As a result, Santosh starts his morning by strolling into Raj’s house at eleven in the morning and fucking the woman he calls his sister. Then he goes with his own mother to the temple at two and prays for an hour. He comes back from the temple, goes to the gymnasium, hangs out with the boys, and then goes back to Raj’s house to wait for the daughter to come back from school, at five-thirty. When she shuts the window to change her clothes, he “gets in one shot” and leaves at five-forty-five.
Then there was the bhaiyyani next door, who Santosh started fucking two days after she got her first period and has been fucking steadily for five years, with the threat: “If you don’t allow me to fuck you I’ll kill you.” He climbs into her window when her drunk father is away, or passed out, and rapes her. There is nothing gentle about sexuality in the slum; it is furtive and feral. Once, a group of boys was spying on a couple asleep near the door of their room; the man had a hand on one of his wife’s breasts. Santosh reached in through the opening for the letterbox and started squeezing the wife’s other breast; she slept on, thinking that her husband was squeezing both. When she felt the extra pressure on one, she woke up and screamed but was too afraid to tell her husband what had happened. Much of what a woman in the slum puts up with she endures silently, because, as Sunil points out, “How can she tell the world what has been done to her?” They go after women who are vulnerable: the very young, the children or wives of drunkards, or women not right in the head. When their men discover what’s being done to them, they too most often keep it quiet. Who would want the world to know? What does it say about their manliness, that they were unable to protect their women?
I ask them if Santosh is good-looking, to be able to fuck so many women. No, they say, he walks with a limp, he’s “seventh-standard fail,” and he works as a watchman, but he has a way with words. His technique is to go to the woman’s house every day and sit for hours and talk: talk to the husband, talk to the woman, talk to the daughter, ingratiate himself with the household and then get what he wants. “When I see him relaxing at my house, I get worried,” admits Sunil.
In the end, all would be well for Sunil and his party. “The Sena’s future is good. This is Bombay,” Sunil says. Then he remembers and corrects himself. “This is Mumbai.” Suddenly, fireworks from some wedding go off in an explosion of color in the sky outside, followed by long white forks of lightning. All of a sudden his city is revealed anew to Sunil: He is looking down from a great height, maybe for the first time in his life, at the dazzling and sodden mess below. Slurring drunk, he observes, “This is a unique world.”
IT IS GETTING increasingly difficult for me to work at home, with two active little children, so my uncle helps me find a furnished flat in Bandra that I can use as an office. When I move in, I notice a familiar picture hung on a wall, of the great freedom fighter Tilak. It seems to be a charcoal etching, but there is something odd about it. I go closer.
“It’s embroidered in human hair,” the doctor who owns the flat says with pride. “He was my late husband’s ancestor. You can keep the picture here.”
I decline her offer, with thanks.
The apartment is in the commercial heart of Bandra: Elco Arcade on Hill Road. The scene downstairs is a gluttonous chaos; the best street food in the western suburbs is reputed to be sold here. Women shop in the arcade on the ground floor and emerge from their strenuous bargaining to refresh themselves with a pani-puri and a kulfi falooda. Thursday evenings, the Sai temple downstairs bursts into robust, tuneless song, for there is pav bhaji—fried bread and vegetables—for prasad afterward. The food stalls outside are demolished by the authorities just before the elections; afterward, they reappear in massed ranks, thicker than ever before. But when I turn the key in my door and step inside, I am in a serene world: two rooms and kitchen, and a balcony with a spreading old tree just outside.
Sunil and Amol both come to drink with me one night in my office at Elco Arcade. Amol is on the wagon. That means he won’t drink whiskey. I offer him a glass of wine, which doesn’t qualify as alcohol. He sips delicately from the wineglass, holding it daintily between his fingers. It is an incongruous sight, the big bearded man sipping wine as if he were at a gallery opening or a ladies’ tea.
They look around the office appreciatively. Amol owns a flat in Nala-sopara. Sunil owns a flat in Dahisar. Neither one of them is considering moving their families out from the slum to the flat. I ask them why.
“You can give me a house anywhere—Nepean Sea Road, Bandra—but I won’t leave Jogeshwari,” says Amol.
“Our minds are like children,” explains Sunil. “Our minds won’t accept living anywhere else, just like your children won’t accept living in a slum. My children can knock on the neighbor’s house at one a.m. and get food. If they don’t like their mother’s rice and dal they can go to the neighbors; a child come to your house to eat is like God come to eat. They can eat anywhere in the chawl. But if your children were to knock on the neighbor’s flat at one a.m. you would give them two slaps. ‘Not good!’ you would say to them. You don’t want your neighbor to think you can’t afford food for your children.”
“In chawls we get all facilities,” adds Amol. “All facilities” is a term used in the real estate advertisements to describe such things as indoor plumbing, a lift, a modern kitchen. But a different definition applies to what a facility is in the slum. “When you come back from work you can stand on the road with the boys and discuss. In the chawl, we can say to our neighbors that we have to go to hospital and they will come instantly.”
I ask them why there is more unity, more fellow feeling, in the chawl.
Common toilets, explains Sunil. “When you go to the toilet, you have to see everyone’s face. You say ‘Hi, hello, haven’t seen you for two days.’ Then there is water. The women fill buckets with water together at the tap, and they converse: ‘My grandfather is ill.’ ‘I have one son in the village; he is an alcoholic.’” In a block of flats, on the other hand, the toilets are all separate. “In a flat, the talk is about the neighbor’s AC; he has just installed a new one in the bedroom. Or the neighbor has installed marble. In the chawl, at the water tap, the talk is about that mother-in-law who is angry at her daughter-in-law for cooking food for six people when there are only five in the house. In a flat,” concludes Sunil, “the talk is on a high level.”
Why don’t they sell their houses and live comfortably in the village?
Sunil explains why. “In the village, the doors shut at nine.”
“At eight,” says Amol. “Seven.”
A little later, Amol comes back from using the toilet. “Isn’t there water to put in the toilet?” he asks me.
I look up at him, puzzled. “Just use the flush.” But Sunil understands. He gets up and goes with him and shows him what the flush is. He teaches him; he presses the lever and water comes out of the tank above the toilet. It doesn’t have to be poured in from a bucket.
Sunil, comfortable in his business and in his position in Bombay, now wants stability. He is now against more riots. “The ordinary man just wants to eat and then go to sleep at the end of the day. If he participates in a riot it is to make money.” During the Kargil conflict, the Indian government banned Pakistan TV from the country’s cable networks. For all his patriotism, Sunil opposed this decision. Why should he be prevented from broadcasting Pakistan TV, he asks, if the customer accepts it? “The thing that someone pays for, you should give them.” Here again, his business instincts are winning over his distaste for Muslims, over his political convictions. The color of someone’s money is becoming more important than that of the religious flag he carries in a procession. Bomba
y is seducing him away from hate, through the even more powerful attraction of greed.
But Amol is closer to the ground in Bombay. “Riots can happen any time,” he says. “They could happen tonight.”
The liquor has aroused a powerful hunger. We leave the office and take a rickshaw to a restaurant. Amol looks up from his butter chicken and suddenly asks me, “Do you have water twenty-four hours?” He must be still thinking about my flush.
I nod. He can’t figure out how. There must be a tank on top of the building, Sunil speculates.
After a while, he asks me again, “You will sleep alone tonight?”
At first I think he’s tactfully asking me if I’ve got a girl coming up after they leave. But when I emphasize that I am, indeed, sleeping all alone, he declares, “I’ve never slept alone in all my life. I need other people in the room.” The big tapori is wondering how I can sleep alone, without my mother, without my wife, without babies in the room. He wouldn’t be able to; the lord of lafda is scared of the dark.
THERE IS ANOTHER GENERAL ELECTION the very next year, 1999, and Jogeshwari is bustling again on Election Day. It’s been drizzling, but there are crowds at every corner, and campaign workers at the party booths are making out little voter slips for people. Bhikhu asks Sunil and Amol to do a get-out-the-vote round, and we go into the lanes of the slum. Sunil knows every resident by name. He and Amol greet the Gujaratis in Gujarati—“Kem cho!”—the bhaiyyas in Hindi, and their people in Marathi. People are urged to vote for a particular political party not by name but by the symbol—“Vote for the bow”—a necessity in a country where a third of the population is illiterate. There is a strange silence in all the slum rooms, and I realize it’s because none of the televisions are on, with the exception of one or two playing Doordarshan, the government broadcaster. Sunil has turned off his cable network for Election Day. “Sunil, put the cable back on!” an old man pleads. “After you vote,” he responds.
