Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Then there are a series of smaller steps that Rahul sees as possible: “the micro level.” Private companies could be convinced to invest in the beautification of the city they do business in. The municipality and its citizens could communicate better through instruments like the Citizen’s Charter, which specifies what people have a right to expect from their local government. What Rahul wants, above all, is a “holistic” plan. The current plans are far from holistic. Flyovers, for example: The Sena built fifty-five of them, to solve the traffic problems of the city. A flyover is just a little vehicular bridge over a traffic signal, but it sounds so grand: “Fly over!” It is debatable whether the bridges make traffic any better. Most of them are in the suburbs; the central city has no new roads. As far as I can see, the flyovers just get you to your traffic jam faster.

  The city cannot govern itself. It cannot change swiftly enough. The city was built on cloth; time moved on and it has to be rebuilt on something else: information. The city’s older folk had difficulty reconciling themselves to the idea of a whole city, 5 million jobs, built on top of something so abstract as information: not even pieces of paper you can hold but evanescent flashes of light on a screen. The representatives of the mill-workers stranded in the nineteenth century led protest marches against the new economy. The city could survive and flourish if its managers were able to convince the residents to move from things they can hold with their hands—cloth, leather, cars—to things that can be held only in the mind—cinematic images, the pyramids of ownership in unseen enterprises around the world. The city has to change. It can no longer manufacture product with its hands. It now has to sell brainpower: ideas, data, dreams. And to achieve the latter its physical structure has to change. The places where people work have to become offices instead of factories.

  When Rahul recently went back to Cambridge, where he’d studied at Harvard, he found that nothing had changed in the decade he’d been away. When he came back to Bombay after four weeks, he found he couldn’t recognize the pavement outside his house; they had dug it up and done new things to it. The physical landscape of the city is in perpetual motion.

  Rahul is trying to keep a measure of continuity. He is active in a number of initiatives for preservation of historic districts and their revival. “We are asking, What are the contemporary engines to revive each area? An art district around Kala Ghoda. A banking district around Fort; a tourist district around the Taj Hotel.” So he is partly responsible for one of the most beautiful evenings I experience in Bombay, a Hindustani vocal concert around the twelfth-century temple tank in Banganga, restored by Rahul’s institute with funding from an international bank. But as soon as I walk out of the concert the stench hits me, from the slums all outside Banganga. It had been a rich man’s beauty; two international banks have subsidized the beautification of Banganga and that concert. It was beautiful because the messy poor and their children had been kept out. I had seen this in Paris, which was also beautiful because the poor had been kept out of the city, shunted to the banlieu. Then there was New York, which, when I got there in 1977, was like any American city, an orphanage, an almshouse. Bombay is both, the beautiful parts and the ugly parts, fighting block by block, to the death, for victory.

  Every morning, out of the window of my study, I see men easing themselves on the rocks by the sea. Twice a day, when the tide washes out, an awful stench rises from these rocks and sweeps over the half-million-dollar flats to the east. Prahlad Kakkar, an ad filmmaker, has made a film called Bumbay, a film about shitting in the metropolis. He used hidden videocameras to film people shitting, in toilets all over the island city. But that was only half the story, he told me. “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit each and every day. The real story is what you don’t see in the film. There are no shots of women shitting. They have to shit between two and five each morning, because it’s the only time they get privacy.” Kakkar discovered this window into the bowel movements of Bombayites through his driver, who took a shit whenever and wherever Kakkar got out for an appointment. When Kakkar came back, he would invariably be kept waiting outside the car for the driver, who would run back, apologizing, “Saab, I had to shit.” The driver, Rasool Mian, knew where to go in any given place in the city; he had scoped out all the best places, a location scout of the digestive system.

  The World Bank recently flew in a group of experts to solve Bombay’s sanitation crisis. The beneficiaries of the bank’s projects are now referred to not as poor people but as “clients.” But in this case, it was not individual human beings but the state—the Government of Maharashtra—that was the client. The bank’s solution was to propose building 100,000 public toilets. It was an absurd idea. I have seen public latrines in the slums. None of them work. People defecate all around the toilets, because the pits have been clogged for months or years. To build 100,000 public toilets is to multiply this problem hundredfold. Indians do not have the same kind of civic sense as, say, Scandinavians. The boundary of the space you keep clean is marked at the end of the space you call your own. The flats in my building are spotlessly clean inside; they are swept and mopped every day, or twice every day. The public spaces—hallways, stairs, lobby, the building compound—are stained with betel spit; the ground is littered with congealed wet garbage, plastic bags, and dirt of human and animal origin. It is the same all over Bombay, in rich and poor areas alike.

  This absence of civic sense is something that everyone from the British to the Hindu nationalists of the RSS have drawn attention to, the national defect in the Indian character. It is seen in Panchratna, the citadel of the diamond trade. The offices inside are swank; the public spaces are gutters. The owners of the offices on the first through the sixth floors have stopped paying their bills for central AC, which run up to fifty lakhs. So the building cuts off the air-conditioning. The offices with windows install window air conditioners, and they are fine. But the windowless offices have to install split cooling units; the intake is from outside the building but the exhaust ducts let out into the corridor. So people walking along the corridors, waiting for the lifts, are subjected to powerful jets of hot used air in the airless spaces. You can sweat out half your body weight waiting for the lifts. And it is a fire hazard: all those hot duct pipes snaking their way through electrical wiring in the ceilings. My uncle, who has an office in Panchratna, has to threaten to file public interest litigation to get them to remove the pipes. Most buildings in Bombay have great difficulty raising funds for renovation, because it is a joint effort and the benefit is shared—and diluted—among many people.

  The government can’t make the physical city a better place, but it can call it by a different name. The city is in the grip of a mass renaming frenzy. Over 50 road-renaming proposals are put before the municipal corporation each month. Between April 1996 and August 1997, the civic administration approved 123 such proposals. The roads committee of the municipal corporation spends 90 percent of its time renaming, receiving money from influential local residents in return for naming a street or chowk after their relatives. It’s a perverse way to honor your ancestors, with bribery. There are only so many roads in the city that can be renamed. But there are still a host of fathers, leaders, and patrons who need their names attached to the roads. The city is running out of roads to rename. Then the politicians realized that every two roads make an intersection. A crossroads—a chowk—auspicious for temples and Irani restaurants, can have its own name. How should the city celebrate the fact that Shankar-Jaikishen, the music composers, used to drink coffee every morning at the Gaylord restaurant? Should the crossing nearest the Gaylord be renamed after them? No, it has already been given the name Ahilyabai Holkar Chowk. So an intersection two crossings away is given the name Shankar-Jaikishen Chowk.

  As a result, it becomes impossible to look to official maps and road signs for municipal directions. In yet
another manifestation of schizophrenia, there evolves, on road maps, in people’s memories, and on postcards, an official city and an unofficial city. The names of the real city are, like the sacred Vedas, orally transmitted. Many of the neighborhoods of Bombay are named after the trees and groves that flourished there. The kambal-grove gave its name to Cumballa Hill; an acacia—babul—grove to Babulnath; a plantation of bhendi, or umbrella trees, to Bhendi Bazaar; a tamarind tree to Tamarind Lane. Tad palms below the kambala trees gave the name to Tardeo; Vad trees to Worli. A tamarind (chinch) valley became Chinchpokli. The trees no longer exist, but their names still remain, pleasantly evocative until you realize what has been lost.

  A name is such that if you grow up with it you get attached to it, whatever its origins. I grew up on Nepean Sea Road, which is now Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg. I have no idea who Sir Ernest Nepean was nor do I know who Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas was, but I am attached to the original name and see no reason why it should change. The name has acquired a resonance, over time, distinct from its origin; as rue Pascal or West 4th Street or Maiden Lane might have for someone who has grown up in those cities. I got used to the sound of it. It is incorporated into my address, into my dream life. I can come back to Nepean Sea Road; if some municipal functionary bent on exacting revenge on history changes it to Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg, he is doing a disservice to my memory.

  Name-changing is in vogue all over India nowadays: Madras has been renamed Chennai; Calcutta, that British-made city, has changed its name to Kolkata. A BJP member of parliament has demanded that India’s name be changed to Bharat. This is a process not just of decolonization but of de-Islamicization. The idea is to go back not just to a past but to an idealized past, in all cases a Hindu past. But to change a name, for a person or a road or a city, there had better be a very good reason. And there was no good reason to change the name of Bombay. It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to choose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn’t afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy the road signs.

  Number Two After Scotland Yard

  AJAY LAL IS A COP with a dream. It is a dream of the last gesture he will make as a police officer. It is not about arresting the godfather Dawood Ibrahim, or accepting a medal, or setting his troops on fire with an inspiring speech. It is a dream of micturition. “I would go to police headquarters and stand in front of it and abuse all my corrupt seniors, reveal everything. Then I would pee in their direction and turn around and leave the force.”

  It would be a sensational ending to his career, a cathartic ending, a blockbuster ending: the celebrated detective, before quitting the force, walks up to headquarters on one bright morning. He unzips and waves his penis at the building. In his other hand is a bullhorn. He raises it to his lips. “Fuck you, Mhatre. One crore from Shakeel. Fuck you, Shaikh. Thirty lakhs from Abu Salem. Fuck you, Gonsalves. Ten lakhs and a flat from Rajan. Fuck you, Chaturvedi. Three whores from Dawood. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, gentlemen.” And then he pees; he has been drinking coffee all morning and he lets it out in a giant stream, right in the middle of the plaza, right in the middle of the by-now-large circle of his juniors and passersby and crime journalists and photographers, then zips up as his agitated seniors rush out of the building, picks his teeth, turns his back to them, and walks off into the sunrise.

  Ajay Lal: The Blasts and the Gangwar

  I meet Ajay, who is best known for rapidly solving the case of the 1993 bomb blasts, when he comes with his wife, Ritu, to my friend Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s house for dinner one evening. Vinod, a film director, has asked him over because he wants Ajay, his good friend, to read the script for Mission Kashmir and offer expert guidance, especially about a scene in which a police inspector interrogates a militant. Ajay Lal has the look of an intelligent boxer. His hair is cut short, more like an army man than a police officer. He has a cleft chin and is a star athlete on the force. Unlike other cops I’ve met, Ajay is sophisticated, well-spoken, well-dressed. He could be an executive or, with his towering good looks, a movie star. Smita Thackeray, the daughter-in-law and companion of Bal Thackeray, has been calling Ajay at home.

  “All women like Ajay,” his wife says, sighing.

  Sitting at ease in Vinod’s living room, Ajay instructs us in methods of police interrogation. First of all, he points out, it is not always done in the police station. During his investigation of the bomb blasts of 1993, the interrogation was carried out in the compound of the special reserve force. Sometimes, lacking a safe house, he has to conduct the interrogation in a moving car with darkened windows, barking questions from the front seat as his men slap the suspect around in the back.

  If Ajay has the time, the suspect is deprived of sleep for a whole week. Usually, neither party has such luxury. So another method is to take two ends of an old-style telephone wire and apply it to the arms or the genitals; a portable dynamo is whirled, and a powerful electric current is generated. Sometimes, he takes the suspect to a creek and ties a heavy stone to his legs. Then one of his men gets behind, puts his arms under the suspect’s, and takes him into the water, where the weight of the stone pulls him downward. All that’s keeping him up is the cop; the cop is his savior, his last hope. The suspect is dunked a few times in the water; gasping, screaming, he comes up out of the water and tells Ajay what he wants to know.

  “Fear of death is the most effective. During the bomb blasts I just took a few of the suspects to Borivali National Park and fired a few bullets past their ears.” But with many of these suspects, ordinary violence wouldn’t work. There had to be special methods. “Those who have no fear of death also have no fear of physical pain. For them we threaten their family. I tell them I’ll plant some evidence on their mother or their brother and arrest them. That usually works.”

  When Ajay’s boys make an arrest, they tell him, “Saab, we would like you to frighten him a little.” So as they are bringing the prisoner into Ajay’s imposing office, they say, “The Saab will finish you; it is not in our hands now. You are a dead duck.” It would be best, they suggest to the suspect, if they intercede on his behalf, make a good report to the Saab, so that he is spared the very worst of the torments ahead of him in the long night. In short, summarizes Ajay, “That very old technique: the hard and soft approach.”

  One last method: Give the suspect one kilo—more than two pounds—of jalebis. Then you don’t give him water. This sounds like an unusually enticing form of torture, I say.

  “Have you ever had sweets and not had water? If you have one kilo of sweets you must have water.” A man will do anything for water after so many sweets.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Ajay Lal pulls a thick leather-bound ledger from a drawer in his office. They are his notes of the bomb-blasts investigation, kept every day for years. It is also the story of the beginning of the gangwar.

  Organized crime in the city of Bombay is controlled by two exiles, or nonresident Indians (NRIs). One is in Karachi and one in Malaysia—or Bangkok, or Luxembourg, depending on which night you ask. The gangwar is the fallout from the bomb blasts of 1993, during which a series of bombs planted by the Muslim criminal syndicate headed by Dawood Ibrahim—the D-Company—killed 317 people in the city, in revenge for the anti-Muslim pogroms of a few months earlier. After the blasts, Dawood’s main lieutenant, a Hindu named Chotta Rajan, broke with him and formed his own gang, the Nana Company, so-called because Rajan is nana, elder brother, to his troops. He swore to eliminate all those involved in the bombings. The two dons—bhais, in Bombay—control their organizations from outside the country, a
nd they have been at war ever since.

  In Bombay, a gang war—gengwar, as it is pronounced with the Bambaiyya inflection—doesn’t just mean a fight between two gangs. Run together, the words are another term for the underworld in its entirety, in its complexity. People identify themselves by it—“We are the folk of the gangwar”—as opposed to petty criminals, robbers, rapists, pickpockets. It is a permanent state of being. Underworld is also an expansive term and has mystique, power. But it is the wrong word to use for organized crime in Bombay, since it implies something hidden, something beneath. In Bombay, the underworld is an overworld; it is somehow suspended above this world and can come down and strike any time it chooses. The hit men refer to the operational centers of the gangs—Karachi, Dubai, Malaysia—as upar, “above,” and Bombay as neeche, “below.” There can be nothing under “below.”

  Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was born in Ratnagiri, on the Konkan coast, in 1955, one of ten children of a police constable in the Crime Branch, Ibrahim Kaskar, who was known for his brutality. Once a group of boys robbed a bank, but they made a mistake of going to a Muslim saint’s tomb and garlanding it with 100-rupee notes, and giving away money to the fakirs. The police found out that four boys had been throwing money around at the tomb and caught them. The commissioner ordered the money to be recovered at any cost, and two boys were killed while being beaten by Ibrahim Kaskar’s squad.